The Advertiser
By: Charles Miranda, London Correspondent
The world is spinning toward a catastrophic worst-case climate-change scenario with temperatures now certain to rise by 6C by the end of the century.
That's the view of a leading team of international scientists, who yesterday predicted the change would render large parts of the world uninhabitable.
The scenario was first made public by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 butonly as a worst-case scenario.
But according to Professor Corinne Le Quere, from the British Antarctic Survey and East Anglia University, that worst case was now all but inevitable.
"We're at the top of the IPCC scenario," she told Nature Geoscience.
Her study - backed by 31 top researchers from seven countries, including Australia, involved in the Global Carbon Project - found there had been a 29 per cent rise in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels between 2000 and 2008, with an annual increase of 3 per cent, compared with 1 per cent the previous eight years.
She said carbon dioxide emissions from transport, industry and deforestation were to blame for warming the atmosphere, which would be 6 per cent higher around the world.
The EU had hoped to keep the rise to 2 per cent.
Prof Le Quere said next month's UN climate conference in Copenhagen had to come out with a clear and decisive global policy to stabilise temperatures.
"If the agreement is too weak or the commitments not respected, it is not 2.5 degrees or three degrees we will get, it's five degrees or six degrees, that is the path we're on," she said. Both the US and China have pledged to strike an accord for emission-reduction targets for rich nations.