The Water Information Program

The world will have to end growth of carbon emissions within seven years and become mostly free of carbon- emitting technologies in about four decades to avoid killing off as many as a quarter of the planet's species, according to top United Nations scientists. To avoid heating the globe by the minimum amount possible - an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit - the world's spiraling growth in greenhouse-gas emissions must end no later than 2015, the report said, and must start to drop quickly after that peak. "We may have already overshot that target," said David Karoly, one member of the core team that wrote the report. "Current emissions already are nearing the 2015 threshold." But if the world misses the 2015 target and does not stabilize carbon dioxide emissions until 2030, for example, the planet's temperature will increase by as much as 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit above 2000 temperatures, the report said. That level of warming would result in widespread extinctions of species, a slowing of the global currents, decreased food production, loss of 30 percent of global wetlands, flooding for millions of people and higher numbers of deaths from heat waves.

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