30/11/2007 Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
Strasbourg, 30.11.2007 - Britain’s Hadley Centre Met Office predicts that 2007 will go down as the hottest year on record, thanks to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, which are responsible for rising temperatures. The ten hottest years in the last 150 are concentrated between 1995 and today.
According to the experts who spoke at the hearing organized in Paris on 29 November by the PACE’s Committee on Environment, Agriculture and Local and Regional Affairs, "climatic warming is beyond doubt for the scientific community".
Alan Meale (United Kingdom, SOC), the Committee’s rapporteur on the question, declared: "We’ve got scientific consensus; what we need now is political consensus, especially post-Kyoto measures". He also stressed that, as WWF sees it, the world has just five years to do something – which means that the main energy changes must be made by 2012.
In his report, which will be presented to the PACE at its January session (Strasbourg, 25 January 2008), he intends to detail practical approaches to action at European level. Mikhail Gorbachev, President of Green Cross International, will be in Strasbourg for this debate.