Scientists: Planet to Warm by More Than 7 Degrees This Century

Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world’s leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a faster and broader scale of climate change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.

The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshalling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

Robert Correll, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative and reviewed the UNEP report’s scientific findings, said the significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they’ve proposed at this point. That’s two times higher than what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

“We don’t want to go there,” said Correll, who heads an international research consortium.

Washington Post