UN group issues emission warnings

Major polluters must immediately begin to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if the rise in global temperatures is to be held in check without paying a higher price later, The New York Times reported, citing finding by the United Nations Environment Program.

While a failure to act swiftly will not necessarily doom the effort to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit,, above preindustrial levels, it will make it much harder and more expensive to do so, the agency noted in its latest Emissions Gap Report. The authors said that delay today would require more drastic measures and gambles on currently unproven technologies in the future.

Speaking at a news conference in Berlin to introduce the report,Achim Steiner, the executive director of the UN environment agency, said the window of opportunity for meeting the target was “becoming ever more elusive.” But he added that eeting the emissions target by 2020 could still be possible “by strengthening current pledges and by further action.” 

Scientists believe that any increase in global average temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius could create conditions for potentially catastrophic climate change. Negotiators at a UN climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, agreed in 2010 to try to hold temperatures below that level by aggressive measures.

The UNEP. report has come less than a week before international negotiators begin arriving in Warsaw for the UN's annual climate change conference, at which delegates will try to plot a path toward a new global climate agreement to replace the frayed 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Its findings also come just two months after top climate scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, formally endorsed a “carbon budget,” or maximum allowable amount of greenhouse gas emissions that can be released without irreversible damage to the climate. The IPCC scientists set the figure at no more than one trillion metric tons of carbon emissions.

In the UN study released Tuesday, which was funded by the German government, 44 groups of scientists in 17 countries laid out a road map for meeting the IPCC target, saying annual emissions should be held to the equivalent of a maximum of 44 gigatons, or billion metric tons, of carbon dioxide by 2020, creating conditions for a further cut to 40 gigatons by 2025, 35 gigatons by 2030 and 22 gigatons by 2050.