lightblueline

This Japan Times (conservative) Editorial outlines the results of the Stern Report. It notes that rather immediate human inputs to the climate will have extreme longer term impacts:

"Another report has highlighted evidence of the serious, long-term consequences of global warming. Yet governments continue to pay only lip service to the threat. As the new study makes clear, the cost of environmental destruction will be severe -- but there is still time to avoid the worst impacts, if the world takes immediate and cooperative action.

The latest warning is from former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, who was tasked by Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer with providing an independent assessment of the economics of climate change. His conclusions are striking and simple. First, "the scientific evidence points to increasing risks of serious, irreversible impacts from climate change associated with business-as-usual paths for emissions."

Today the British Government release a report on the economic consequences of global warming. The Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change offers a stark picture of how the changing climate will cost the world's nations trillions of Euros, a cost borne disproportionately by lesser developed nations. On the topic of the science of climate change and sea level rise, the Report offers the following: "As global temperatures continue to rise, so do the risks of additional sea level contributions from large-scale melting or collapse of ice sheets. If the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets began to melt irreversibly, the world would be committed to substantial increases in sea level in the range 5 – 12 m over a timescale of centuries to millennia" (p. 16).