EU likely to miss global warming goal: U.N. expert

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - The European Union is unlikely to meet the goal of a maximum 2 degree Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) rise in temperatures which it views as a threshold for dangerous climate change, a leading U.N. climate official said on Friday.

"It clearly seems very, very difficult to limit it to below 2 degrees," Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"But who knows? It's not beyond the capabilities of the human race to come up with actions," he said.

The EU, outsiders such as Norway and many environmentalists see a 2C rise in temperatures over pre-industrial times as a trigger for dangerous changes such as rising sea levels, droughts, heat waves and floods.

An IPCC report last month, based on the work of 2,500 climate scientists, blamed human activities more clearly than ever for global warming. It said greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels were mainly responsible.

It projected a "best estimate" that temperatures would rise by between 1.8C and 4.0C (3.2F and 7.8F) this century alone.

Pachauri said temperatures had already risen by 0.74C (1.3F) since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century and would keep rising by 0.1C (0.2F) per decade for coming decades even if emissions were kept at current levels.

An EU Commission proposal on January 10, entitled "Limiting Global Climate Change to 2C", called for a 20-percent cut in EU emissions by 2020 or a 30-percent cut if other industrialized countries were willing to go further.

ALMOST OUT OF REACH

Former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, who issued a report last year concluding that it was far cheaper to act to combat climate change rather than suffer the consequences, said this week that the 2C goal was "almost out of reach."

Pachauri, an Indian, said he would like the world to agree what dangerous climate change meant. A 1992 U.N. Climate Convention set an overriding goal of averting dangerous human interference with the climate system but gave no definition.

"The question is 'dangerous for whom?'," Pachauri said.

"If you look at the most vulnerable regions of the world and ask them what dangerous is, they will say they have reached that threshold already -- the small island states, regions severely affected by droughts and floods," he said.

He quoted independence leader Mahatma Gandhi as saying: "You must always look at the effect of our actions on the most dispossessed, the last man, the one who is the least fortunate."

By that yardstick, he said, dangerous had already been reached.