BRUSSELS, 27 March 2008 — The head of the UN intergovernment climate change body yesterday voiced strong concern at the accelerated melting of the polar ice caps, calling for international tariffs on carbon emissions.
“Now there’s enough evidence to show that there is accelerated melting of some of these large bodies of ice; west Antarctic ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet,” Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told reporters at the European Parliament in Brussels.
“It’s an issue of great concern,” added Pachauri, who was addressing the Parliament’s environmental committee. His comments came after satellite images by the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center showed Antarctica’s massive Wilkins Ice Shelf has begun disintegrating under the effects of global warming.
A chunk of Antarctic ice, nine times the size of New York’s Manhattan Island, has collapsed suddenly and put an even larger glacial area at risk.
The rest of the ice shelf, the size of the US state of Connecticut, is holding on by a narrow beam of thin ice. Scientists worry that it, too, may collapse.
Pachauri spoke of the possibility of “irreversible and abrupt changes... that would result in several meters of increase in sea levels,” as a result of global warming, blamed in part on carbon dioxide emissions. He refused to speculate on how soon such catastrophic changes could take place but insisted on the urgent need to introduce an international system for charging polluters for carbon emissions.
“I think we need some coordinated actions that would put a price on carbon,” he said, adding that such a system would avert the need to introduce tariffs and other punitive measures on imports from countries with lax emissions rules.
