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• WARNING BY TOP SCIENTIST OF UK’S DANGEROUSLY OPTIMISTIC CLIMATE CHANGE POLICIES

  
  25 June 2009
  

  Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, has said that the government’s existing planned carbon cuts, if followed internationally, would only have a 50-50 chance of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2C.  This is the threshold that the EU defines as leading to dangerous climate change.
  Anderson was speaking to MP’s  of the environmental audit committee as part of an inquiry into the UK’s carbon budgets. ( These are legally binding caps on emissions set over 5 years by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC).
  Anderson said that the two government departments involved with climate change policy “were like small dogs yapping at the heels” of more powerful departments. He said that the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), should be given more power, and also that the UK should show leadership before the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December, by raising the target for reductions in emissions to 40% immediately. At present the proposed cut is of 34% by 2020.