Global warming: new figures MUCH worse than feared

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

“We should be worried – really worried.”

And you thought Wall Street was underwater now . . .

Want a safe place to put your money? How ’bout, higher ground, away from the coastline?

An analysis of new figures shows that even the worst-case scenario predicted last year by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already been exceeded.

The world pumped up emissions of the chief human-produced global warming gas last year, setting a course that . . . exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.

Many scientists had predicted that a global economic slowdown would be reflected in a decrease in total carbon dioxide emissions for 2007. Instead, worldwide output increase to 9.34 billion tons, the highest figure in history.

Although several countries reduced their carbon dioxide emissions in 2007 (Denmark by 8%, the U.K. and Germany by 3%, France and Australia by 2%), the United States increased its output by 2% (after a decrease in 2006), while China led all countries in CO2 emissions.

The net result is that scientists are at a loss for words. And not in a good way.

“Things are happening very, very fast,” [Corinne] Le Quere, [professor of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey], told the Associated Press. “It’s scary.”

[snip]

Richard Moss, vice president and managing director for climate change at the World Wildlife Fund, said the new carbon figures and research showed that “we’re already locked into more warming than we thought.”

“We should be worried — really worried,” Moss told the Washington Post. “This is happening in the context of trying to reduce emissions.”

A year-and-a-half ago, when the IPCC released its figures, even then they were “much worse than previously thought.”

These new data are worse than that.

Have a nice weekend.

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