Live Earth's limits

No matter how much we do to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the world is pretty well committed to a temperature rise of 2C by 2100 thanks to all the emissions already in the atmosphere and the time-lags built into the climate system. This will involve some major impacts including substantial sea-level rise, glacial melting, widespread drought and frequent extremes of weather - and the countries set to suffer the most are the poor countries who have contributed least to the problem. So we need to raise the money to help those poor countries adapt - and the bill will amount to some hundreds of billions of dollars, every year. More: we need to bring tropical (and for that matter temperate) deforestation to a halt. And then reverse it.

Oliver Tickell

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