Tough climate goals may be easier than feared

OSLO (Reuters) - Tough targets for avoiding dangerous global warming may be easier to achieve than widely believed, according to a study that could ease fears of a prohibitive long-term surge in costs.

The report, by scientists in the Netherlands and Germany, indicated that initial investments needed to be high to have any impact in slowing temperature rises. Beyond a certain threshold, however, extra spending would have clear returns on warming.

Until now, most governments have worried that costs may start low and then soar -- suggesting that ambitious targets will become too expensive for tackling threats such as extinctions, droughts, floods and rising seas.

"It gets easier once the world gets going ... ," said Michiel Schaeffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study in Tuesday's edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

"In a sense ... our paper is bad news: doing a bit is hardly effective," he told Reuters. "On the other hand it's good news, because the return on the really 'painful' investments later on, of which the world is so afraid, gives you much better returns."

Tough climate goals may be easier than feared
Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:25:33 GMT

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