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Bush aides say mankind responsible for global warming mongabay.com September 14, 2007 In comments shortly before talks on climate change at the UN and the Washington White House, Marburger added that Earth may become "unlivable" without cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, reports the BBC. "I think there is widespread agreement on certain basics, and one of the most important is that we are producing far more CO2 from fossil fuels than we ought to be," BBC News quoted Marburger as saying. "And it's going to lead to trouble unless we can begin to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we are burning and using in our economies." "CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and there's no end point, it just gets hotter and hotter, and so at some point it becomes unlivable,"
Marburger added that limiting global average temperature increase to the 2-degree C target advocated by the IPCC is arbitrary. "It's not clear that we'll be in a position to predict the future accurately enough to make policy confidently for a long time," he told BBC News. "I think 2C is rather arbitrary, and it's not clear to me that the answer shouldn't be 3C or more or less. It's a hunch, a guess." While Marburger's sentiments may be shared by the Bush Administration, many scientists believe it is smarter to err on the side of caution when it comes to CO2 levels since Earth's climate system is driven by poorly understood, non-linear processes. In the September 13th issue of the journal Nature, Cambridge University economist Partha Dasgupta writes that significantly higher carbon dioxide concentrations "would involve crossing an unknown number of tipping points... in the global climate system. We have no data on the consequences if Earth were to cross those tipping points. They could be good, or they could be disastrous."
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Melting of the Greenland ice Sheet in 1992 and 2005. Graphic by Konrad Steffen and Russell Huff of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado at Boulder
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