[IP] Melting ice: the threat to London's future
Begin forwarded message:
From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 14, 2004 5:59:52 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Melting ice: the threat to London's future
Dave:
Here for IP if you wish is an account of the latest pronouncement on
the dangers of global warming, not by some ill-informed amateur, or
some environmental researcher hoping to scare up some more research
funding, but by the UK Government's Chief Scientific Advisor, no less.
From today's Guardian (UK)
Melting ice: the threat to London's future
Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Wednesday July 14, 2004
The Guardian
There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than for 55m years,
enough to melt all the ice on the planet and submerge cities like
London, New York and New Orleans, Sir David King, the 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.
An ice core 3km deep from the Antarctic had a record of the climate
for 800,000 years and showed the direct relationship between the
amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and warm and cold periods
for the planet.
Critical in climate records is the quantity of ice at the poles and in
glaciers. 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.
. . .
He said that 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."
He said the heatwave of last summer in which 25,000 Europeans died had
killed more people than terrorism, yet had not been given anything
like the same level of attention.
The prime minister had charged him with talking to governments ahead
of the G8 summit to convince them of the urgency of action on climate
change, of research and development of renewables.
. . .
Full story at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1260825,00.html
Cheers
Brian
--
School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon
Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxx PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/
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