IT’S GONNA GET HOTTER

New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast Of 6.3-Degree Temperature Increase
Juliet Eilperin, September 25, 2009 (Washington Post)

"Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to [Climate Change Science Compendium 2009, from the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP)]…

"The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007…[T]he significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change…"



"The group took the upper-range targets of nearly 200 nations' climate policies -- including U.S. cuts that would reduce domestic emissions 73 percent from 2005 levels by 2050, along with the European Union's pledge to reduce its emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 --and found that even under that optimistic scenario, the average global temperature is likely to warm by 6.3 degrees [even though]…World leaders at the July Group of 20 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, pledged in a joint statement that they would adopt policies to prevent global temperature from climbing more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit…

"…[The report reflects] both new physical evidence and a more sophisticated understanding of how Earth systems work…Other findings include the fact that sea level might rise by as much as six feet by 2100 instead of 1.5 feet…and the Arctic may experience a sea-ice summer by 2030, rather than by the end of the century…While the [Obama] administration is pressing this week for an end to fossil-fuel subsidies…[and] world leaders appear open to such a proposal…[activists] such as 350.org director Bill McKibben said politicians worldwide are not taking aggressive enough steps to…reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, well below the 450 ppm target that leaders of the Group of 20 major nations have embraced…"





[Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), co-sponsor of the House-passed climate bill referenced in the UNEP study:] "As sobering as this report is, it is not the worst-case scenario. That would be if the world does nothing and allows heat-trapping pollution to continue to spew unchecked into the atmosphere."

[Michael MacCracken, IPCC scientist and contributor to the UNEP report:] "We face a situation where basically everybody has to do everything they can…"