Top climate scientist blasts G8 climate pledge

One of the world's most respected climate scientists on Tuesday slammed the G8 summit's goal of halving global warming emissions by 2050 as "worse than worthless."
Leaders of the world's richest nations, meeting in Japan, "are taking actions that guarantee that we deliver to our children climate catastrophes that are out of our control," US expert James Hansen said in an e-mail to Agence France-Presse.
Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, was one of the first climate scientists to sound an alarm about the threat of global warming.
In a landmark study published in 1981, Hansen predicted that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from human activity would accelerate climate change far more quickly than previously thought.
At their summit in the resort town of Toyako, the leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) nations -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- agreed Tuesday to "consider and adopt" the goal of achieving the 50-percent cut in worldwide emissions by mid-century.
But they made no targeted pledge for action next decade, nor did they mention specific action against coal, which Hansen characterized as the greatest peril.
"A statement of any goal for percent reduction is worthless. Indeed, it is worse than that: it is a pretence that they understand the problem and plan to take needed actions," said Hansen.
The only way to avoid climate catastrophe, argued Hansen, was to halt the emissions of coal, the most abundant and highly polluting of all fossil fuels.
He reiterated a call for a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants and for existing ones to be fitted with technology to capture the CO2 and store it deep underground.
"Otherwise we are sending a death sentence to uncountable species and are leaving our children with an ungodly mess," he said.
Sky-rocketing oil prices have spurred energy-efficiency plans in many countries but at the same time have intensified the use of coal around the world, especially in developing juggernauts China and India.
Testimony by Hansen on June 23, 1988 -- a day of record-breaking heat -- before a US Congressional committee made headlines around the world when he said "the Earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements."
His intervention helped spur the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Nobel-winning committee of climate scientists.
His now-famous "hockey-stick" graphic predicting a sharp rise in world temperatures provoked a backlash among climate skeptics.

Link AFP