Climate warming gases rising faster than expected
The Associated Press is reporting Climate warming gases rising faster than expected.
Despite widespread concern over global warming, humans are adding carbon to the atmosphere even faster than in the 1990s, researchers warned Saturday.
Carbon dioxide and other gases added to the air by industrial and other activities have been blamed for rising temperatures, increasing worries about possible major changes in weather and climate.
Carbon emissions have been growing at 3.5 percent per year since 2000, up sharply from the 0.9 percent per year in the 1990s, Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“It is now outside the entire envelope of possibilities” considered in the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change, he said. The IPCC and former vice president Al Gore received the Nobel Prize for drawing attention to the dangers of climate change.
The largest factor in this increase is the widespread adoption of coal as an energy source, Field said, “and without aggressive attention societies will continue to focus on the energy sources that are cheapest, and that means coal.”
This is scary. We are truly entering uncharted waters with respect to human existence on Earth. Pretty soon atmospheric CO2 concentrations will hit levels never encountered by our species. The only solution is a radical reform of the way we generate power, and the very fundamentals of our economy. We need to value the ecosystem services provided by forests via mechanisms such as REDD. We’ve started to recognise this now, which is cause for optimism, and we understand the solutions. Implementation is now just a matter of political will. Um, hooray. — DS
February 17th, 2009 at 10:43 am
I really like the blog and the articles that are published. But the last sentence of this article makes me think. Leaving the implementation of a change in the energy matrix to the political will is a mistake; just an example would be the very very poor greenhouse gas reduction goals set for the future years.
The only way to enforce energy sources change is more information to the public and more cost efficient technology, sadly politicians this days only show reactive measures whenever tan environmental issue is raised.