Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 26, 1990 TAG: 9005260211
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Medium
While much of the substance of the report has already been disclosed, the report had immediate political consequences.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, breaking with the Bush administration's skepticism over the need for immediate action, said Friday if other countries did their part, Britain would reduce the projected growth of its carbon dioxide emissions enough to stabilize them at 1990 levels by the year 2005.
West Germany's Environment Minister, Klaus Toepfer, has proposed Europe should go further and cut present emissions by 25 percent by that time, but the United States has said until now the scientific case for the greenhouse effect has not been made and no action needs to be taken.
Thatcher's action is a blow to the Bush administration, which was counting on her as its major ally in slowing any internationally coordinated action to reduce the industrial pollution that causes global warming.
The report by a working group of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was approved by all but a handful of the 90 delegates from 39 countries, according to Dr. John Houghton, chairman.
The report said if nothing at all was done, the global mean temperature could rise 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the 21st century.
It said in that case, ocean water would expand and ice stored at the poles could melt, raising the level of the sea by 25.6 inches.
This is enough to submerge the Maldives and inundate the coastal plains of Bangladesh and the Netherlands, oceanographers say.
Houghton, Britain's chief meteorologist, said only a handful of the scientists in the panel disagreed with the findings, which he said were dramatic confirmation of how rapidly the "greenhouse effect" of carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons and other gases released into the air by industrial processes, the burning of tropical forests and other factors had been changing the Earth's atmosphere since the end of the 18th century.
Britain, with 1 percent of the world's population, is responsible for about 3 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions, Thatcher said.
The United States, with 5 percent of the population, is responsible for about 25 percent of the emissions, according to American scientists.
If all countries did as Britain suggested, Houghton said, it would still not be enough to stop the enhanced greenhouse effect.
"If you want to stop it, you have to cut by 60 percent immediately," he said at a news conference in Englefield Green, where the working group discussed its findings this week.
Global mean surface air temperature has already increased by 0.3 degrees centigrade (0.54 Fahrenheit) to 0.6 degrees centigrade (1.08 degrees Fahrenheit) over the last 100 years, it said, with the five average warmest years all occurring in the 1980s.
Scientists who study global climate trends concede, however, that computer models on which they base their predictions are flawed.
by CNB