By Timothy Gardner
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The explosion in interest about the threat of global warming should unleash innovations over the next 10 years that begin to cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate change, experts told a Reuters summit.
"Ten years from now we will see the beginning of a flowering of all sorts of new technologies that's very hard to envision today," Fred Krupp, president of New York-based Environmental Defense, told the Reuters Environment Summit this week.
"The picture is not just going to be black, because it's also maybe a chance to reinvent a new type of relation in the world," said Monique Barbut, CEO of the Global Environment Facility, a leading environmental funding agency.
She said, for example, that climate concerns have led Paris commuters to bicycle more, a change that not only saves greenhouse emissions from automobiles but also brings them in closer touch with the city.
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist also was optimistic. "It's almost stunning to me how much this issue is being talked about, how much is being done in this area," he said. "That gives me tremendous encouragement that this is all going to work out."
Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist," said he thought there had been too much hand-wringing already.
"In 10 years time, there is a real risk that we will have over-worried so much about climate that by then we will be sick and tired of over-worrying and perhaps end up under-worrying," he said.
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