BRITAIN: There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than for 55 million years, enough to melt all the ice on the planet and submerge such cities as London, New York and New Orleans, Sir David King, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, has warned.
Speaking on his return from Moscow, where he has been acting as the prime minister's "unofficial envoy" to persuade the Russians to ratify the Kyoto protocol to fight climate change, Sir David said the most recent science bore out the worst predictions. Records show that at the peak of the ice age 12,000 years ago, the sea was 150 metres below where it is now.
"You might think it is not wise, since we are currently melting ice so fast, to have built our big cities on the edge of the sea where it is now obvious they cannot remain. On current trends, cities like London, New York and New Orleans will be among the first to go. Ice melting is a relatively slow process but is speeding up. When the Greenland ice cap goes, the sea level will rise six to seven metres, when Antarctica melts it will be another 110 metres," he said.
The Antarctic ice core showed that during ice ages, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 200 parts per million (ppm), and during warm periods reached around 270 ppm, before sinking back down again for another ice age.
That pattern had been repeated many times in that period but had now been broken because of human intervention.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 360 ppm in the 1990s and now was up to 379 ppm and increasing at the rate of 3 ppm a year, reaching a level not seen for 55 million years when there was no ice on the planet because the atmosphere was too warm.
"I am sure that climate change is the biggest problem that civilisation has had to face in 5,000 years," he concluded.
Sir David, who is also to visit China and Japan, was speaking at the launch of a scientific expedition to Cape Farewell in the Arctic, which aims to raise awareness of climate change in students. It will also study the oceans' currents with the help of Southampton University, particularly the fate of the Gulf Stream, which warms northern Europe but is slowing down because of excess fresh water in the north Atlantic caused by ice melt.
Sir David described how some ice caps, such as those on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, had been continuous for hundreds of thousands of years and survived through successive warm periods but were now expected to disappear in 30 to 40 years.
He said the realisation of the scale of the crisis was what prompted him to say in January that climate change was a bigger threat than global terrorism. "We are moving from a warm period into the first hot period that man has ever experienced since he walked on the planet," Sir David said. - (The Guardian)