Threats of rising temperatures taken too lightly

Chicago, February 15: The planet is heating up a lot faster than previously thought, leading climate scientists warned on Saturday.

The emission of greenhouse gases from developing nations is further punching holes in our already leaking protection envelop and has significantly increased the danger of irreversible climate change by the end of the century. Aggressive measures to curb the emission of harmful gases is the most urgent need of the hour.

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously," said Chris Field, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), during a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Chicago.

Field, who authored a 2007 landmark report on climate change, said "the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious" than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth report, published about an year ago.

At the five-day annual meeting, the Nobel Prize-winning organization presented its most recent assessment on global climate change and sea rise. The 2007 report, with all its warnings, was still too optimistic.

Emissions of greenhouse gases surged swiftly, increasing 3.5 percent annually, between 2000 and 2007. The high rate of environmental-damage may have a wide-ranging disastrous impact, leading to floods, forest fires and desertification.

Melting of permafrost in the Arctic tundra and destructive wildfires in tropical rain forests do not only threaten the many exquisite species living in those regions, but also release huge quantities of greenhouse gases, which again raise the global temperatures.

"There is a real risk that human-caused climate change will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide from forest and tundra ecosystems, which have been storing a lot of carbon for thousands of years," said Field.

Insisting that the problem of global warming has been taken way too lightly, experts suggest its time we give a serious thought to the problem.