2009-12-02 14:16:01 - Predictions on the damage to the environment from climate change were hugely conservative compared to today’s reality.

1997 saw the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the UN driven global pact aimed at combating global warming. However, research is increasingly indicating that in the last dozen years since Kyoto, the situation has drastically worsened.

Shipping channels through the previously frozen summer Arctic seas have recently become navigable, whilst in Greenland and Antarctica millions of tons of ice have been lost from ice sheets and mountain glaciers in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America are disappearing faster than at any other time. Added to this, the globe has seen its oceans level rise about 1.5 inches, droughts and wildfires have become more severe throughout the world and the number of species facing extinction has risen rapidly.

A climate advisor to

the UN was quoted as saying "The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," FinSoul believes.

Between 1997 and 2008 global CO2 emissions generated from fossil fuel combustion have risen 31%, with the U.S. seeing an increase of 3.7% and China, the globes largest greenhouse gas emitter more than doubling its emission levels over the same time.

It is hoped that the upcoming Copenhagen climate conference will yield the basis for a legally binding global climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol due to expire in 2012, this time including the globes 3 biggest greenhouse gas emitters, China, the U.S. and India, all of whom chose not to be Kyoto signatories.