Climate change 'significantly worse' than feared: Al Gore

Times of India , Friday, January 25, 2008
Correspondent : Staff Reporter
DAVOS/PARIS: Climate change is occurring far faster than even the worst predictions of the UN's Nobel Prize-winning scientific panel on climate change foresaw, Al Gore warned on Thursday. New evidence shows "the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC projections had warned us," the former US vice-president and climate campaigner told delegates at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos. There are now forecasts that the North Pole ice cap may disappear entirely during summer months in as little as five years, Gore said. "This is a planetary emergency. There has never been anything remotely like it in the entire history of human civilisation. We are putting at risk all of human civilisation," he added. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report the size of three phone books on the reality and risks of climate change, its fourth assessment in 18 years. In October both Gore and the IPCC, comprising around 3,000 experts, jointly won a Nobel Prize for there roles in highlighting climate change. Gore said a "little bit of progress" had been made at December's climate conference in Bali, Indonesia. He added though that there was a "big, large blank spot" in the road map agreed in Bali, reserved for the United States' environmental policy once a new president is elected in November and inaugurated in January. Meanwhile, a new research by Paris-based National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) has found that the Arctic ice cap has shrunk by an area twice the size of France's land mass over the last two years. "The year 2008 promises to be a critical year on every level," said Jean-Claude Gascard, the body's research director and coordinator of European scientific mission Damocles, which is monitoring the effects of climate change across the Arctic. September 2007 measurements show ice covering 4.13 million square kilometres, down from 5.3 million square kilometres in 2005. "Melting could result in the loss of another million in one (2008) summer," he added. "Summer 2007 was marked by a major retreat in the ice-cap, one we were not anticipating," Gascard said.
 
SOURCE : Times of India, Friday, 25 January 2008
 


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