Klimaatverandering 31

Common Dreams bericht: 'Is It Too Late to Stop Global Warming? WASHINGTON - A man stands on a railroad track as a train rumbles closer. "Global warming?" he says. "Some say irreversible consequences are 30 years away. Thirty years. That won't affect me." He steps off the tracks -- just in time. But behind him is a little girl, left in front of the roaring train. The screen goes black. A message appears: "There's still time." It's just an ad, part of a campaign from the advocacy group Environmental Defense, which hopes to convince Americans they can do something about global warming, that there's still time. But many scientists are not so sure that the oncoming train of global warming can be avoided. Temperatures are going to rise for decades to come because the chief gas that causes global warming lingers in the atmosphere for about a century. "In the short term, I'm not sure that anyone can stop it," said John Walsh, director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. There are limits, experts say, to how much individuals can do. The best we can hope for is to prevent the worst -- world-altering disasters such as catastrophic climate change and a drastic rise in sea levels, say 10 leading climate scientists interviewed by The Associated Press. They pull out ominous phrases such as "point of no return." The big disasters are thought to be just decades away. Stopping or delaying them would require bold changes by people and government. "The big payoff is going to be for our children," said Tim Barnett, a senior scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. "Together, if we take a concentrated action as a people, we might be able to slow it down enough to avoid these surprises."
But he and other scientists say it's too late to stop people from feeling the heat. Nearly two dozen computer models agree that by 2100, the average global temperature will be 3 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than now, according to Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.' Lees verder:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0403-01.htm