Global Warming News

We commend U.S. Senator Bingaman for working to build support for action on global warming.  Unfortunately, his new bill fails to deliver the pollution reductions science shows are needed in the next 10 years to stave off the most dangerous impacts of global warming for future generations.  

Senator Bingaman’s weak pollution-reduction targets fly in the face of the sobering conclusions reached by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and leading U.S. scientists about how to prevent the worst impacts of global warming from becoming unstoppable. (See below for resources on the science.)  

To prevent dangerous global warming, the United States must halt increases in global warming emissions now, cut emissions by at least 15 to 20 percent by 2020, and slash emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050.  The rest of the world must act as well.

The science demands ambitious goals, and meeting these goals won’t be easy.  But they are the minimum acceptable response to the threat posed by global warming.  To protect our environment, our economy, and future generations, we can’t settle for less.

Science Resources
-To limit the rise in global average temperatures to about another 2 degrees F – the rough threshold beyond which dangerous impacts from global warming become unstoppable – the IPCC concluded earlier this year that global emissions must peak no later than 2015 and decline by 50 to 85 percent below 2000 levels by 2050 (emphasis added). (IPCC, 2007).

-NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who first warned Congress of the potential impacts of global warming in the 1980s, has argued that the earth’s climate is nearing a crucial “tipping point” that, if passed, would lead to “practically a different planet.”  “We have at most ten years – not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.” (Hansen, 2006)