Britain Warns of High Costs

of Global Warming

By HEATHER TIMMONS

Britain warned Monday that failure to act swiftly on global warming would have a cataclysmic effect on the global economy and said it was stepping up efforts to get other nations involved. A report commissioned by the government predicted apocalyptic effects from climate change, including droughts, flooding, famine, skyrocketing malaria rates and the extinction of many animal species during the current generation if changes are not made soon.

It said the costs related to climate change, if it is allowed to continue unmitigated, could devour as much as 20 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. “The consequences for our planet are literally disastrous,” Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a speech on the report, one of the most comprehensive attempts to predict the economic impact of global warming.

“This disaster is not set to happen in some science-fiction future, many years ahead, but in our lifetime,” he said. “What is more, unless we act now, not some time distant but now, these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible.” On the other hand, success in slowing carbon emissions could bring great savings to the world economy, possibly in the range of $2.5 trillion a year, the report estimated. This emphasis seems aimed at the few industrial nations, including the United States, that have refused to join initiatives like the Kyoto Protocol, citing economic reasons.

President Bush has called Kyoto “unrealistic” and its emissions targets arbitrary, saying it would cause layoffs and price increases.

The presence at the news conference on Monday of Mr. Blair and the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, who hopes to succeed him, reinforced the impression that the governing Labor Party was committed to acting on the challenge. Britain intends that “the report should be discussed as widely as possible throughout the world, not just among governments but among international institutions, business leaders, NGOs and civil society,” Mr. Brown said. He also said he had made former Vice President Al Gore an adviser on environmental issues.

The 700-page report was compiled by Sir Nicholas Stern, chief of the government economic service and former chief economist of the World Bank. It evaluated a body of scientific studies of global warming from an economic perspective. If the sources of greenhouse gases continue unchecked, average temperatures could rise by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius in the next 50 years, the report says. That could leave one-sixth of the world’s population facing floods or droughts and reduce crop production in Africa enough to put several hundred million people at risk of starvation.

Britain produces 2 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, but it has been one of the loudest voices on global warming and has established some of the world’s most punitive taxes on carbon emissions. It already has met its Kyoto emissions-reductions targets, but most European nations are trying to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases by 8 percent by 2012. A United Nations report released Monday said that greenhouse gas emissions of industrial nations that are part of the United Nations panel on climate change increased 11 percent between 1990 and 2004.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 19 February 2008, 10.32 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.nytimes.com)