Group items tagged

A new study from the Colorado-based Climate Accountability Institute suggests that 90 companies are responsible for almost two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The top 90 emitters include 50 investor-owned energy companies like BP, ExxonMobil and Shell, along with 31 state-owned companies and some nation-states themselves. 83 of the 90 are coal, oil and gas producers and the remaining seven are cement manufacturers.

Based on studies published during the past several years, the IPCC found that in order to have at least a 66 percent chance of limiting global warming to, or below, 3.6°F above pre-industrial levels, no more than 1 trillion tonnes of carbon can be released into the atmosphere from the beginning of the industrial era through the end of this century.

An international panel of scientists has found with near certainty that human activity is the cause of most of the temperature increases of recent decades, and warns that sea levels could conceivably rise by more than three feet by the end of the century if emissions continue at a runaway pace.

“It is extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010,” the draft report says. “There is high confidence that this has warmed the ocean, melted snow and ice, raised global mean sea level and changed some climate extremes in the second half of the 20th century.”

The draft comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of several hundred scientists that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with Al Gore. Its summaries, published every five or six years, are considered the definitive assessment of the risks of climate change, and they influence the actions of governments around the world. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions, for instance, largely on the basis of the group’s findings.