Climate doom

last updated 8 January 2015

London

If global emissions don’t fall drastically, climate change will soon reach an unstoppable “tipping point,” a British government report warned this week. The report, Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, said the disruption to the planet’s climate will become irreversible if global temperatures rise by just 4 degrees Fahrenheit, as is expected this century. Melting ice sheets would cause sea levels to rise dramatically, and weather patterns would change wildly. Such a disaster could be averted, the report said, if global emissions of greenhouse gases are cut in half over the next 50 years. “It is now plain,” said Prime Minister Tony Blair in the report’s foreword, “that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialization and economic growth from a world population that has increased sixfold in 200 years, is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable.”