The international community set a final date to agree on a plan to reduce greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, but there was no assurance that an agreement will be forged. In the hope of averting a potential failure of the planet, nearly 2,000 scientists, including the most eminent climate scientists worldwide, met from March 10 to 12 in Copenhagen.

Since the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published in 2007, it has been made certain at 90 percent that man is responsible for climate change that threatens worldwide balance.

In Copenhagen, the scientific community wanted to show once again that doubt was no longer allowed. “We have accumulated a lot of data since the last IPCC report in 2007. We want governments to decide knowingly,” said Katherine Richardson of the University of Copenhagen, one of the nine universities behind the initiative.

The conclusions of the IPCC are based on data dating back to 2005. Given the cumbersome nature of the organization that brings together 2,500 researchers from 130 countries, the next report will not appear until 2014. But the recent observations confirm that the worst scenarios alerted by the IPCC are becoming a reality. Emissions have continued to grow strongly and the climate is changing steadily. Sea levels could rise in the range of 75 cm to 190 cm by 2100, far beyond the IPCC forecast of 18 cm to 59 cm.

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri noted that there is a political crisis that is more felt than the economic crisis, as far as combating climate change is concerned. James Hansen, renowned climatologist at NASA who gave one of the first alerts in 1988 about the dangers of global warming, spoke more directly by saying that scientists have done their job and it is time for governments to do theirs.

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Via treehugger