A WORLDWIDE programme to capture greenhouse gases from power stations and factories could be humanity’s best chance of saving itself from climate change, a report will say this week.

The study, from the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will also say that nuclear electricity generation could prove a powerful means of cutting carbon emissions.

The findings are included in the latest of three reports from the IPCC on climate change. The first collated the science confirming that climate change is happening and the second discussed how temperature increases might affect humanity.

The third, to be released in Thailand on Friday, will set out what can be done to minimise the impact of global warming. It is expected to set out stark choices.

“Humanity must face up to climate change in the next few years or it will be too late,” said an IPCC member.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are around 382 parts per million, compared with their preindustrial norm of 273ppm. They are rising by about 2ppm a year and that rate is accelerating.

The report will say that fossil fuels such as gas, oil and coal are still so plentiful and cheap that consumption and emissions are likely to increase for years to come.

It means that the best way of reducing emissions is to capture CO2 and dispose of it permanently, either by pumping it underground or by bubbling it into the deep ocean so that it can dissolve in seawater. A linked IPCC report estimates that around 40% of the world’s CO2 emissions could be captured in this way.

The problem is that capturing and storing CO2 emissions is an infant technology. There are only three industrial-scale storage projects in operation worldwide, off Norway and Algeria, and in Canada. All inject CO2 into underground rocks but all are on a relatively small scale.

Nuclear power, by contrast, is a relatively mature technology which, the report will say, is already being widely adopted around the world. However, its potential to cut CO2 is unclear because, rather than replacing fossil fuel generation, it normally only augments it to meet growing demand for power.

The report will say the greatest challenge is stabilising energy use so that nuclear and renewable technologies can start replacing fossil fuel generation.

The IPCC’s first report warned that the world faced potentially devastating rises in average global temperatures if society maintained its rapid economic growth and its burning of fossil fuels The second report warned that rising temperatures could leave billions of people facing hunger and water shortages. It said that even a rise of just 2-4C would make agriculture almost impossible over much of the Earth, potentially leading to billions of deaths and the extinction of wildlife.

Mars is warming up too...

Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.

Fenton’s team unearthed heat maps of the Martian surface from Nasa’s Viking mission in the 1970s and compared them with maps gathered more than two decades later by Mars Global Surveyor. They found there had been widespread changes, with some areas becoming darker.

When a surface darkens it absorbs more heat, eventually radiating that heat back to warm the thin Martian atmosphere: lighter surfaces have the opposite effect. The temperature differences between the two are thought to be stirring up more winds, and dust, creating a cycle that is warming the planet.

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