Warming will ‘wipe out billions’

By Jenny Fyall

29 November 2009

MOST of the world’s population will be wiped out if political leaders fail to agree a method
of stopping current rates of global warming, one of the UK’s most senior climate scientists
has warned.

Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, believes only
around 10 per cent of the planet’s population – around half a billion people – will survive if
global temperatures rise by 4C.

Anderson’s warning comes just eight days before global leaders meet in Copenhagen for
the most crucial talks on climate change reversal since the Rio summit in 1992. Current Met
Office projections reveal that the lack of action in the intervening 17 years – in which
emissions of climate changing gases such as carbon dioxide have soared – has set the
world on a path towards potential 4C rises as early as 2060, and 6C rises by the end of the
century.

Anderson, who advises the government on climate change, said the consequences were
"terrifying".

"For humanity it’s a matter of life or death," he said. "We will not make all human beings
extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right
parts of the world and survive.

"But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4C. If you have got
a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4C, 5C or 6C, you might have half a billion
people surviving."

Efforts at the Copenhagen summit, which starts on 7 December, will focus on action to instead keep
temperature rises to no more than 2C – generally accepted as the threshold for dangerous climate
change. However, with growing pessimism that a binding agreement on emissions reduction targets
will be reached, Anderson warned time was running out.

If ambitious global targets for reductions have not been set by the end of next year, he believes it will
be too late to stop emissions rising beyond 2C.

Last week, Britain and France urged the wealthiest nations to set aside $10 billion annually
over the next three years to help poorer countries reduce the output of greenhouse gases​​.
Scotland has set a 42 per cent emissions reduction target for 2020 but Anderson pointed
out that even if this was achieved by rich nations throughout the world, it would only give a
60 per cent chance of avoiding a 2C global temperature increase​​.

Despite pessimism over the past few weeks he was optimistic a legal agreement can still be reached
at Copenhagen. He believes leaders are deliberately trying to lower expectations to increase the
impact of any success at the summit.

"The worst possible result at Copenhagen is a bad deal where the world leaders have to come home
and say it’s a good deal when it’s rubbish," he added.

"That’s the real danger – that they will feel under pressure to sign up to anything. That could lock us
into something bad for the next ten years."

Stewart Stevenson, Scotland’s climate change minister, who will also be attending the summit, said:
"​Even quite moderate predictions do suggest that we will have vast movements of people
around the world particularly on the borders of desert regions and that associated with that
will be loss of life​​."

From The Scotsman