New report by Jim Hansen & Co paints dire future under climate change

A New Study Led by Jim Hansen Makes Unambiguous Warning that the Earth is in 'Imminent Peril'. If ever we needed fresh reason to fight plans for new base coal-fired power stations, this is it!

By Steve Conor, The London Independent, June 19, 2007. http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2675747.ece

"Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in 'imminent peril'.

In a densely referenced scientific paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, some of the world's leading climate researchers describe in detail why they believe that humanity can no longer afford to ignore the 'gravest threat' of climate change.... Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate within or near the range of the past one million years, they add.

The researchers were led by James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

In their paper, "Climate Change and Trace Gases", the scientists frequently stray from the non-emotional language of science to emphasise the scale of the problems and dangers posed by climate change.

Dr Hansen says we have about 10 years to put into effect the draconian measures needed to curb CO2 emissions quickly enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperature.

Otherwise, the extra heat could trigger the rapid melting of polar ice sheets, made far worse by the 'albedo flip' - when the sunlight reflected by white ice is suddenly absorbed as ice melts to become the dark surface of open water."