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The tropics on fire: scientist's grim vision of global
warming
Forget not that we are per capita, by far, the bigger
contributors to
global warming than any Chinese or Indian
person...
The Guardian (London) February 16, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/16/chris-field-wildfires-tropical-forests
The
tropics on fire: scientist's grim vision of global warming
By Ian Sample,
science correspondent
Tropical forests may dry out and become vulnerable
to devastating
wildfires as global warming accelerates over the coming
decades, a
senior scientist has warned.
Soaring greenhouse gas
emissions, driven by a surge in coal use in
countries such as China and
India, are threatening temperature rises
that will turn damp and humid
forests into parched tinderboxes, said
Dr Chris Field, co-chair of the UN's
Nobel prize-winning
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC).
Higher temperatures could see wildfires raging through the
tropics
and a large scale melting of the Arctic tundra, releasing billions
of
tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere that will accelerate warming
even further, he said.
Field, director of global ecology at the
Carnegie Institute, told the
American Association for the Advancement of
Science meeting in
Chicago at the weekend that the IPCC's last report on
climate change
in 2007 had substantially underestimated the severity of
global
warming over the rest of the century.
The report concluded
that the Earth's temperature is likely to rise
between 1.1C and 6.4C by
2100, depending on future global carbon
emissions. "We now have data showing
that from 2000 to 2007,
greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly
than we expected,
primarily because developing countries, like China and
India, saw a
huge upsurge in electric power generation, almost all of it
based on
coal," Field said. The next report, which Field will oversee, is
due
in 2014 and will now include future scenarios where global warming is
far more serious than previous reports have suggested, he said.
Field
said that if the tropics became dry enough for fires to break
out, tropical
forests would pass a "tipping point" from absorbing
carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere to releasing it.
"Tropical forests are essentially
inflammable. You couldn't get a
fire to burn there if you tried. But if they
dry out just a little,
the result can be very large and destructive
wildfires. It is
increasingly clear that as you produce a warmer world, lots
of
forested areas that had been acting as carbon sinks could be
converted to carbon sources," he said. The result could lead to
runaway
warming.
Field's warning was echoed by French scientists, who said the
IPCC's
estimate that sea levels would rise around 40cm by 2100 was likely to
be a best case scenario.
Former US vice-president Al Gore, who spoke
at the meeting on Friday
night, called for a globally coordinated stimulus
to tackle climate
change. "We've now reached the stage where continuing on
our present
course will threaten the entirety of human civilisation," he
said.
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