Techniques for sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, such as artificial trees, must be urgently developed to prevent catastrophic global warming, according to the Government’s chief scientific adviser on climate change.Professor David MacKay was speaking in response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) conclusion that it was “extremely likely” that man-made emissions caused most of the warming in the past 60 years.
The panel scrapped its previous most extreme scenario, which said the temperature could rise by more than 6C (43F) by 2100. The upper limit of its “very high emissions” scenario is now 4.8C, with the reduction partly owing to the 15-year “pause” in the warming trend since 1998.
However, it warned that sea levels could rise higher than it had previously