Global Warming
'Will Redraw
Map Of World'
By Geoffrey Lean
07 November 2004
The Independent
Maps
of the world will have to be redrawn, as global warming melts the Greenland
ice cap, inundating coasts and major cities, the Government's chief
scientific adviser warned last week.
Sir David King told
ministers, senior officials and leaders of industry at a top-level conference
on climate change in Berlin that there was a "real risk" the
ice sheet would not survive and that "humanity had better be prepared
for a complete realignment of the coastal zones, where most of the world's
major cities are sited".
He added that parts
of the ice sheet had already retreated by up to 30 feet in the past
few years, compared to 10 feet between 1890 and 1950.
Other experts at
the conference, which was opened by the Queen to signal her concern
about climate change, confirmed that the ice cap, which contains a sixth
of the world's fresh water, was already beginning to melt.
If the entire ice
cap disappeared, sea levels around the world would rise by 20 feet,
drowning much of London, New York, Tokyo, Bombay, Calcutta and other
large cities.
Sir John Houghton,
a former head of the Meteorological Office and the Royal Commission
on Environmental Pollution, and one of the world's leading experts on
global warming, told The Independent on Sunday: "We are getting
almost to the point of irreversible meltdown, and will pass it soon
if we are not careful."
Professor Jacqueline McGlade, chief executive of the European Environment
Agency, who has just returned from Greenland, added: "You see it
happening before your very eyes. I stood by a chasm which, five years
ago, had been filled with ice."
Delegates to the
conference agreed that the threat from climate change was "real,
serious and urgent" and that it could have "a devastating
impact on human society and the natural environment".
And they called
on the world to take action that would "go much further than the
modest provisions of the Kyoto Protocol", which will come into
effect early next year now that Russia has finalised its ratification
process.
Dr Klaus Töpfer,
the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme,
who chaired the conference, said: "Climate change is happening
and it is increasing in speed. Leadership is urgently needed to take
the fight against its devastating impacts forward."