Global Warming Will Worsen In Next Century

Global warming will become worse over the next century than previously calculated, said Professor Chris Field of the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC), at a meeting in Chicago of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, author of a major report in 2007, said that temperatures in the future will be significantly higher than levels previously forecasted by the IPCC, resulting in greater harm to the environment.

Field further commented that harmful emissions from 2000 to 2007 were dramatically higher than anticipated.

The 2007 report, which estimated increases in temperature of 1.1C and 6.4C over the next century, critically missed the degree of the challenge.

We can now see a climate ahead of us that is outside anything we have genuinely contemplated, he said.

A leading scientist on climate said Saturday that the faster heating has been worsened by emissions from developing countries, such as India and China, which are still increasing the burning of coal to produce energy.

He said that this tendency will probably persist if additional countries derive their energy by using high carbon fuels such as coal, amongst others.

In this case, he said, there would be a worse and more varied effect on the climate than previously forecast by the IPCC.

Professor Field said that planetary warming will dry tropical forests, increasing the risk of widespread, harmful fires which, together with the melting of the Arctic tundra’s permafrost, would discharge billions of tons of carbon dioxide which may increase the world’s temperatures even further.

Professor Field warned that in the absence of successful action, change in the world’s climate will be greater and more complex to handle than previously believed.