Killer heat waves and retreating icesheets raise climate alarm

The growing climate change risk for business is once again under the spotlight, after environmental experts this week warned of new evidence that global warming is contributing directly to extreme weather events and rising sea levels.

The House of Representatives committee on energy independence and global warming was today warned by a panel of scientists that the entire ice mass of Greenland will disappear from the world map if temperatures rise by as little as 2C, with severe consequences in terms of sea level increases.

The giant Greenland icesheet made headlines last week when the Petermann Glacier, one of Greenland's largest, shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century, sending a 100 sq mile chunk of ice drifting into the North Strait between Greenland and Canada.

Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University, warned that Greenland faces an even grimmer future, with yet more icebergs predicted to fall into the sea because of rising temperatures.

The fall-out would be felt thousands of miles away from the Arctic, unleashing a global sea level rise of up to 23ft (7 metres), warned Alley.

"What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done," he told the briefing in Congress.

Robert Bindschadler, a research scientist at the University of Maryland, added: "While we don't believe it is possible to lose an ice sheet within a decade, we do believe it is possible to reach a tipping point in a few decades in which we would lose the ice sheet in a century."

The loss of the ice sheet would result in hundreds of coastal cities around the world being inundated and would pose an unprecedented threat to the global economy.

Meanwhile, researchers also warned this week that global climate change is at least partly responsible for the abnormally hot and dry weather in Moscow.

Experts from the environmental group WWF Russia have linked climate change with the record high temperatures that have afflicted Moscow over past few weeks, leading to raging wildfires around the Russian capital that have driven airborne pollutants levels to the worst ever recorded in the region.

Jeff Knight, a climate variability scientist at the UK Met Office, attributed the situation in Moscow to a number of factors, among them steadily rising greenhouse gas concentrations.

The Moscow health department said that the number of people dying daily in the city had reached about 700 - twice the usual number.

Experts are now warning that deadly heatwaves are likely to become more frequent as a result of climate change.

"In a few decades, fires may affect the main forest regions of Russia," head of the climate and energy programme at WWF Russia Dr Alexei Kokorin said. "Of course, there are a lot less people living there, but we could lose a lot more forests. We can now say that the wave of abnormal phenomena that the rest of the world has been experiencing has finally reached central Russia."

The warnings come just days after environment secretary Caroline Spelman called on UK companies to urgently improve their resilience to climate change, warning that too many were not prepared for the changes to weather patterns that climate change will inevitably bring.

The results of a survey released by Defra last week found that while three-quarters of businesses were concerned about the potential impact of climate change, less than a quarter had actually started to do something about the risks and opportunities that it presents.