5 Years Until Climate Disaster, Warns WWF

Checking global warming requires 'green revolution'

By Jason Farago, Newser Staff

Posted Oct 19, 2009 5:46 AM CDT

(Newser) – Disastrous climate change is inevitable unless the world begins cutting carbon emissions within the next five years, the World Wildlife Fund warns in a new report. Ahead of December's clutch Copenhagen summit, meant to forge a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the fund repeats that global temperature rises could stay below 2°C if greenhouse gas emissions are halved by 2050. But to do that, the world must invest in a "green industrial revolution," focused on low-carbon fuels like wind and solar, between now and 2014.

Today officials from the world's leading powers are meeting in London for the Major Economies Forum, reports the Telegraph, which President Obama called for to work out snags ahead of Copenhagen. The Europeans are pressuring the US, China, and India to agree to legally binding carbon emissions targets, with Gordon Brown telling delegates that only 50 days remained to save the world from "catastrophe."

[Images (2)]

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Gordon Brown, at the Major Economies Forum at Lancaster House today, warned that failure to strike a new global deal on reducing greenhouse emissions would be catastrophic. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, Pool)

A flock of geese fly past a smokestack at the Jeffery Energy Center coal power plant near Emmitt, Kan. Saturday, Jan. 10, 2009. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

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If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice. - Gordon Brown, British prime minister

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5 Years Until Climate Disaster, Warns WWF