Only new technologies can dampen the blow of increased greenhouse gas emissions, the United Nations has warned.
The UN believes the world is on its way to huge costs unless it caps greenhouse gasses by the year 2015. It says there must be action taken if we are to prevent a temperature rise of 2 degrees, according to Reuters.
The 2-degree threshold is widely considered to be dangerous in terms of climate change and the UN has warned that if that threshold is crossed, then the world moves into “a more expensive trajectory”.
Technological breakthroughs
The UN insists that technological breakthroughs could curb these costs, saying that the “benefit outweighs the costs” and an unexpected decline in costs of technologies could occur faster than expected.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, greenhouse gases concentrations in the atmosphere have increased by around .7C and recent data implies that the concentration in the atmosphere is increasing at a high rate – in the 1960s, the average annual increase was only 37pc of what it was in 2000 through 2007.
