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Global warming: The climate has changed
Prime Minister hails 'historic day' in the battle against climate change
By Andrew Grice, Political Editor
Published: 14 March 2007
The Government has become the first in the world to commit itself to legally binding reductions in carbon dioxide emissions but will come under strong pressure to agree to bigger cuts when its landmark Climate Change Bill goes though Parliament.
In a draft Bill published yesterday, ministers promised to enshrine into law their commitment to cut emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Opposition parties and Labour MPs joined forces in calling for an 80 per cent reduction.
But even the Government's critics gave the Bill a broad welcome. Hailing a "historic day", Tony Blair said: "This is a revolutionary step in confronting the threat of climate change. It sets an example to the rest of the world but, as important as anything else, it listens and responds to the strong desire on the part of the British people to take the lead and keep it."
The Bill also sets an interim target of reducing emissions by between 26 per cent and 32 per cent by 2020. Legally binding five-year "carbon budgets" will be fixed 15 years ahead to keep it on course.
More
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355957.ece
Published: 14 March 2007
The Government has become the first in the world to commit itself to legally binding reductions in carbon dioxide emissions but will come under strong pressure to agree to bigger cuts when its landmark Climate Change Bill goes though Parliament.
In a draft Bill published yesterday, ministers promised to enshrine into law their commitment to cut emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Opposition parties and Labour MPs joined forces in calling for an 80 per cent reduction.
But even the Government's critics gave the Bill a broad welcome. Hailing a "historic day", Tony Blair said: "This is a revolutionary step in confronting the threat of climate change. It sets an example to the rest of the world but, as important as anything else, it listens and responds to the strong desire on the part of the British people to take the lead and keep it."
The Bill also sets an interim target of reducing emissions by between 26 per cent and 32 per cent by 2020. Legally binding five-year "carbon budgets" will be fixed 15 years ahead to keep it on course.
More
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355957.ece
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Yesterday the Government unveiled the world's first delivery system for the targets involved in radically cutting back the gases that are causing global warming. It is based on two simple principles: make the targets legally binding, and map out the road towards them in detail.
The system is enshrined in the Climate Change Bill, unveiled by the Environment Secretary, David Miliband, which proposes to set into law the crucial aim of cutting the UK's CO2 emissions by 60 per cent, on 1990 levels, by 2050, and lays out a statutory path towards that from which it will be very hard, if not impossible, for any future government to stray.
The 60 per cent figure is one that might once have appeared very ambitious, but recent estimates of just how quickly climate change is now progressing the world's ice is melting everywhere before our very eyes have made it seem the very least that will have to be done, by Britain and other countries, if the earth is to escape the catastrophic consequences of runaway atmospheric warming, from mass agricultural failure to world-wide sea level rise.
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http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355960.ece
By Steve Connor
Published: 14 March 2007
A Channel 4 documentary that claimed global warming is a swindle was itself flawed with major errors which seriously undermine the programme's credibility, according to an investigation by The Independent.
The Great Global Warming Swindle, was based on graphs that were distorted, mislabelled or just plain wrong. The graphs were nevertheless used to attack the credibility and honesty of climate scientists.
A graph central to the programme's thesis, purporting to show variations in global temperatures over the past century, claimed to show that global warming was not linked with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide. Yet the graph was not what it seemed.
Other graphs used out-of-date information or data that was shown some years ago to be wrong. Yet the programme makers claimed the graphs demonstrated that orthodox climate science was a conspiratorial "lie" foisted on the public.
Channel 4 yesterday distanced itself from the programme, referring this newspaper's inquiries to a public relations consultant working on behalf of Wag TV, the production company behind the documentary.
Martin Durkin, who wrote and directed the film, admitted yesterday that one of the graphs contained serious errors but he said they were corrected in time for the second transmission of the programme following inquiries by The Independent.
Mr Durkin has already been criticised by one scientist who took part in the programme over alleged misrepresentation of his views on the climate.
The main arguments made in Mr Durkin's film were that climate change had little if anything to do with man-made carbon dioxide and that global warming can instead be linked directly with solar activity - sun spots.
One of the principal supports for his thesis came in the form of a graph labelled "World Temp - 120 years", which claimed to show rises and falls in average global temperatures between 1880 and 2000.
Mr Durkin's film argued that most global warming over the past century occurred between 1900 and 1940 and that there was a period of cooling between 1940 and 1975 when the post-war economic boom was under way. This showed, he said, that global warming had little to do with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide.
The programme-makers labelled the source of the world temperature data as "Nasa" but when we inquired about where we could find this information, we received an email through Wag TV's PR consultant saying that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate sceptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank.
However, there are no diagrams in the paper that accurately compare with the C4 graph. The nearest comparison is a diagram of "terrestrial northern hemisphere" temperatures - which refers only to data gathered by weather stations in the top one third of the globe.
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http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355956.ece