An abandoned housing project in North Las Vegas, Nevada. Scientists caution that 2 C (3.6 F) is no guarantee of a safe haven against climate change and consider 3.5 C (6.3 F) to be an extremely dangerous scenario. (AFP, Jewel Samad)
Let it not be said that we haven't been warned.....
"Current pledges for curbing carbon emissions will doom the world to global warming of 3.5 C, massively overshooting the UN target of 2 C, researchers reported at the climate talks here on Tuesday.
Output of heat-trapping carbon gases is rising so fast that governments have only four years left to avert a massive extra bill for meeting the two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) target, they said.
"The current pledges are heading towards a global emissions pathway that will take warming to 3.5 C goal (6.3 F)," according to an estimate issued by a consortium of German researchers.
The world is on a "high-warming, high-cost, high-risk pathway," they said.
The report, compiled by Climate Analytics and Ecofys, which are German firms that specialise in carbon data, was issued on the sidelines of the 194-nation UN talks in Durban. The 12-day conference runs until Friday.
The 2 C (3.6 F) goal, initiated at the stormy Copenhagen Summit of 2009, was enshrined at last year's conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) along with a less feasible target of 1.5 C (2.7 F)."
Meanwhile, at that Climate Change Conference presently underway in Durban, Inter Press Service reports that the US has become a stumbling block in the negotiations.
"The United States has become the major stumbling block to progress at the mid point of negotiations over a new international climate regime say civil society and many of the 193 nations attending the United Nations climate change conference here in Durban.
"The U.S. position leads us to three or four degrees Celsius of warming, which will be devastating for the poor of the world," said Celine Charveriat of Oxfam International.
"They are proposing a 10-year time out with no new targets to lower emissions until after 2020," Charveriat said."
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