THE earth’s atmosphere is warming faster than expected and evidence is mounting that human activity is responsible, says the United Nations Environment Programme.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now projects the earth’s average surface temperature will rise 1.4 to 5.8 deg C between 1990 and 2100, higher than its 1995 estimate of a one to 3.5 deg rise.
”There’s no doubt the earth’s climate is changing,” IPCC chairman Robert Watson told a news conference in Shanghai. ”The decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the last century and the warming in this century is warmer than anything in the last 1_000 years in the Northern Hemisphere.
”We see changes in climate, we believe we humans are involved and we’re projecting future climate changes much more significant over the next 100 years than the last 100 years,” he added.
Watson said the IPCC’s latest report on climate change showed the main reason behind the faster than expected temperature rise was a fall in sulphur dioxide emissions. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide tend to warm the earth’s atmosphere whereas sulphur dioxide tends to cool it.
Watson said the implications of global warming on human health include increases in heat stress mortality in the summer and diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. It could also hit agriculture and water resources.
Sea levels are projected to rise between nine and 88 cm from 1990 to 2100, potentially displacing tens of millions of people, especially in low lying areas such as the Pearl River Delta, Bangladesh and Egypt, Watson said.
He said the earth’s temperature had already risen 0.6 deg C over the last 100 years and it has seen more floods and droughts around the world in the last decade. – Reuters