(task) Scientists point to narrowing climate gap | News24

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> http://www.news24.com/Green/News/Scientists-point-to-narrowing-climate-gap-20150707 <http://www.news24.com/Green/News/Scientists-point-to-narrowing-climate-gap-20150707>
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> Scientists point to narrowing climate gap
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> Paris - Climate scientists gathered on Tuesday in Paris, five months before the deadline for a historic carbon-curbing pact, to show that a radical shift to sustainable energy can still limit disastrous planet warming.
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> On current trends, humanity would spend the estimated safe budget of Earth-warming greenhouse gases within 20-25 years, the experts said, and urged a quick and dramatic transformation of the energy sector.
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> "The world is at a critical crossroads," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message read to the gathering of nearly 2 000 academics from around the world.
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> Nations have committed to limiting average global warming to two degrees Celsius over pre-Industrial Revolution levels, but research suggested the world could be heading for double that or more, he said.
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> Analysis of emissions curbs pledged by nations to date to underpin the new climate rescue pact, showed the combined effort will "not be sufficient to meet the 2 degree target," said Ban.
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> "Clearly strong action still needs to be taken."
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> The four-day international science huddle opened on Tuesday in the French capital, which will also host a November 30-December 11 UN climate conference for 195 nations to thrash out the long-awaited agreement.
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> The gathering of academics from nearly 100 countries will review the most up-to-date science on risks and solutions, including technological advances, to feed into the Paris pact.
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> Scientists stressed the task was a difficult one, but not impossible.
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> "At current emissions, we have a time window of about 20 to 25 years until that budget [of emissions consistent with 2°C] is exhausted," said Thomas Stocker, a professor of climate physics at Bern University.
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> "There's only a third of the emission budget that is remaining, and... we are using it up at an unprecedented velocity. What we see today are the highest emissions in history."
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> The science gathering comes eight months after the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) brought out a report, widely considered the bible of climate science, which warned that the 2°C window was fast closing.
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> Window is 'tight'
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> Emissions will have to drop 40-70% between 2010 and 2050, and to zero by 2100.
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> The 2°C target "has become extremely ambitious," said Stocker, who helped compile the IPCC report, but "substantial reductions over the next few decades can reduce climate risks.
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> "That necessitates a transformation in the energy sector" - from emissions intensive coal, gas and oil to more sustainable sources like solar and wind.
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> World Meteorological Organization (WMO) head Michel Jarraud painted a picture of rising seas and more extreme storms and drought in a warmer world.
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> "It is still possible to change course and limit climate change to a reasonable level," he told the conference. "But time is short."
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> Even at 2°C warmer, the world will be a more hostile place.
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> Though it is difficult to attribute specific weather events to climate change, scientists say the world is already 0.8°C warmer and the global mean sea level 19cm higher than in 1901.
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> "Overall about half of all [plant and animal] species have changed where they live, changing their distribution to track the shifting climate," Camille Parmesan, from the marine institute at Plymouth University, told the conference.
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> But there was some good news too.
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> The International Energy Agency said in March that global emissions, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, stalled for the first time in 40 years in 2014.
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> The 2°C window, "is very tight", said Michael Grubb, a climate policy expert with the University College London, "but had last year's data been different, it would have been even tighter."
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