The U.N.'s top climate scientist has, for the first time, backed
ambitious goals for slashing greenhouse gas emissions that many climate
negotiators say are beyond reach.
"As chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, I cannot take a position because we do not make
recommendations," Pachauri told AFP when asked if he supported poorer
nations calling for atmospheric CO2 levels to be held below 350 parts
per million.
"But as a human being I am fully supportive of that goal.
What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the
world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a
350 target," he said by telephone from New Delhi.
In its benchmark 2007 report, the IPCC said that the key for
preventing dangerous global warming was to keep CO2 concentrations
below 450 ppm.
Above that level, average global temperatures are likely, by
2100, to increase by more than two degrees Celsius, a threshold Group
of Eight leaders agreed last month must not be crossed.
But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that even
these hard-to-reach goals may not be ambitious enough, prompting many
of the nations most threatened by global warming to set the bar even
higher.
More than 80 of the world's poorest and most
climate-vulnerable nations have now declared that CO2 concentrations
must be scaled back to below 350 ppm, and that temperatures can't rise
more than 1.5 C by century's end.
"I think this is a good development," Pachauri said.
"Now people -- including some scientists -- see the
seriousness of the impacts of climate change, and the fact that things
are going to get substantially worse than what we had anticipated."
Even at current CO2 levels of 385-390 ppm, severe impacts
from climate change - rising sea levels, drought, violent storms - have
started and are likely to get worse, experts say.