By Paul Eccleston,
The Telegraph
Climate change is happening much faster than the world's best scientists predicted and will wreak havoc unless action is
taken on a global scale, a new report warns.
Extreme weather events such as the hot summer of 2003, which caused an extra 35,000 deaths across southern Europe from
heat stress and poor air quality, will happen more frequently.
Britain and the North Sea area will be hit more often by violent cyclones and sea level rise predictions will double to
more than a metre putting vast coastal areas at risk from flooding.
The bleak report from WWF - formerly the World Wildlife Fund - also predicts crops failures and the collapse of eco
systems on both land and sea.
And it calls on the EU to set an example to the rest of the world by agreeing a package of challenging targets for
cutting greenhouse gas emissions to tackle the consequences of climate change and to keep any increase in global
temperatures below 2ºC.
The report says that the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - a study of global
warming by 4,000 scientists from more than 150 countries which alerted the world to the possible consequences of global
warming - is now out of date.
The full article can be found here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3353590/Climate-change-accelerating-far-beyond-the-IPCC-forecast,-WWF-says.html
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