Looks like the all electric transportation system is on the way…which wouldn’t be such a bad idea, but could my 1987 Cadillac be electrified? I love my car. :)
State urged to plan for life in a warmer world
Change is occurring, EPA official says, so it's time to prepare.
By Edie Lau - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PST Monday, February 5, 2007
Although California is at the forefront of the effort to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, a top climate change policymaker says the state now needs a blueprint for how to cope with the reality of a warmer world.
Reacting to a new international report concluding that human-caused global warming is under way, Eileen Wenger Tutt, California Environmental Protection Agency assistant secretary for climate change activities, said the state must plan how it will adapt.
"We've been focused on how to reduce (emissions)," Tutt said. "We can and must mitigate to prevent even worse consequences, but we are now facing a world where climate change is going to be a reality."
The latest analysis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states in unequivocal terms that the Earth's atmosphere and oceans are heating up because of human activities, chiefly burning of fossil fuels and land development.
The panel reviews and synthesizes the work of thousands of researchers worldwide. It's considered an authority on climate science.
The assessment is the fourth by the panel since 1990. Among the findings:
• Atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, or CO2, have increased from about 280 parts per million in preindustrial times to 379 ppm in 2005.
(Measurements by the University of California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography show the concentration at 382 ppm as of January 2007.)
• Eleven of the last 12 years rank among the warmest years since 1850, when global surface temperatures began to be systematically recorded.
• The ocean is absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat added to the climate system, causing seawater to expand, raising sea levels.
The report also draws a sobering picture about the level of warming to which the planet is irreversibly committed.
"There's nothing we can do to prevent some of the adverse consequences because CO2 is in the atmosphere ... and we have no technology that can pull it out," Tutt said.
Stabilizing the proportion of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would require a massive decrease in emissions, Richard Somerville, an atmospheric and environmental scientist at Scripps and a lead coordinating author of the report, said in a teleconference.
"It's hard to put a super-precise number on it, but something like 70 to 80 percent of current emissions (would need to be cut)," Somerville said. "You have to reduce it to the level that natural processes can remove it."
