'We
Face Climate Disaster'
By Ben Leapman
11 March 2004
Evening Standard
Professor
Sir David King told a House of Lords committee that urgent action was
needed "within the next few years" to avert the threat of
sudden and severe climate change.
He claimed that
last summer's heatwave was a man-made event and a warning sign of worse
to come.
And he defied Downing
Street by repeating his charges that global warming is a bigger threat
than terrorism, and that Washington is failing to tackle the problem.
On a recent trip
to America to talk about the threat of global warming, Sir David was
warned by Downing Street to limit his contact with the media.
A memo from a No10
aide was leaked to a journalist in Seattle, where the scientist was
delivering a lecture.
Today, Sir David
told the peers that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was
probably the highest it had been for 65 million years, since the Palaeocene
epoch when most dinosaurs became extinct.
He said the era
saw a "massive reduction" in life on earth and added: "The
Antarctic was the best place to be at that time. The rest of the world
was virtually uninhabitable."
He also delivered
a thinly-veiled attack on President George Bush by praising the effort
which individual American states were making to curb their carbon dioxide
emissions, in the absence of a ruling from Washington.
And he accused American
oil giant Exxon of funding lobbyists who are trying to undermine the
consensus on global warming by suggesting that scientists are divided
on the nature of the problem.
Sir David said:
"This is the biggest issue for us to face this century.
"It's man-made.
The science is done. It's complete. It's a matter of political understanding.
I personally have little doubt that unfortunately, as time moves on,
the global warming events such as the very high temperatures in Europe
over the past summer and the flooding two years before will occur more
frequently, and the understanding of what's driving these will become
more apparent.
"And I think
nations across the world will understand... that action has to be taken."
In the past few
centuries, carbon dioxide in the air has risen from 270 to 370 parts
per million and is still on the increase, Sir David said.
He predicted that
if the level reached 550 parts per million, the polar ice caps would
melt and the Gulf Stream current would be reversed, plunging Europe
into a new ice age while the rest of the globe overheated.
To avoid that threat,
he said, the level needed to be stabilised at 450 parts per million.