A statement from the Met Office, Natural Environment Research Council and the Royal Society.
The UK is at the forefront of tackling dangerous climate change, underpinned by world-class scientific expertise and advice. Crucial decisions will be taken soon in Copenhagen about limiting and reducing the impacts of climate change, now and in the future. Climate scientists from the UK and across the world are in overwhelming agreement about the evidence of climate change, driven by the human input of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
As three of the UK’s leading scientific organisations, involving most of the UK scientists working on climate change, we cannot emphasise enough the body of scientific evidence that underpins the call for action now, and we reinforce our commitment to ensuring that world leaders continue to have access to the best possible science. We believe this will be essential to inform sound decision-making on policies to mitigate and adapt to climate change up to Copenhagen and beyond.
The 2007 Assessment Report of the UN’s climate change panel (the IPCC) — made up of the world’s foremost climate scientists — provided unequivocal evidence for a warming climate, and a high degree of certainty that human activities are largely responsible for global warming since the middle of the 20th century. However, the IPCC process is based only on information already published and even since the last Assessment Report the scientific evidence for dangerous, long-term and potentially irreversible climate change has strengthened significantly.
* Global carbon dioxide concentrations continue to rise, and methane concentrations have started to increase again after a decade of near stability;
* The decade 2000–2009 has been warmer, on average, than any other decade in the previous 150 years;
* Observed changes in precipitation (decreases in the subtropics and increases in high latitudes) have been at the upper limit of model projections;
* Arctic summer sea-ice cover declined suddenly in 2007 and 2008, prompting the realisation that this environment may be far more vulnerable to change than previously thought;
* There is increasing evidence of continued and accelerating sea-level rises around the world.
We expect some of the most significant impacts of climate change to occur when natural variability is exacerbated by long-term global warming, so that even small changes in global temperatures can produce damaging local and regional effects. Year-on-year the evidence is growing that damaging climate and weather events — potentially intensified by global warming — are already happening and beginning to affect society and ecosystems. This includes:
* In the UK, heavier daily rainfall leading to local flooding such as in the summer of 2007;
* Increased risk of summer heatwaves such as the summer of 2003 across the UK and Europe;
* Around the world, increasing incidence of extreme weather events with unprecedented levels of damage to society and infrastructure. This year’s unusually destructive typhoon season in South-East Asia, while not easy to attribute directly to climate change, illustrates the vulnerabilities to such events;
* Sea-level rises leading to dangerous exposure of populations in, for example, Bangladesh, the Maldives and other island states;
* Persistent droughts, leading to pressures on water and food resources, and the increasing incidence of forest fires in regions where future projections indicate long-term reductions in rainfall, such as south-west Australia and the Mediterranean.
These emerging signals are consistent with what we expect from our projections, giving us confidence in the science and models that underpin them. In the absence of action to mitigate climate change, we can expect much larger changes in the coming decades than have been seen so far.
Some countries and regions are already vulnerable to climate variability and change, but in the coming decades all countries will be affected, regardless of their affluence or individual emissions. Climate change will have major consequences for food production, water availability, ecosystems and human health, migration pressures, and regional instability. In the UK, we will be affected both directly and indirectly, through the effects of climate change on, for example, global markets (notably in food), health, extent of flooding, and sea levels.
The accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lead to long-term changes in the climate system that will persist for millennia. Our growing understanding of the balance of carbon between the atmosphere, oceans and terrestrial systems tells us that the greater the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the greater the risk of long-term damage to Earth’s life-support systems. Known or probable damage includes ocean acidification, loss of rain forests, degradation of ecosystems, and desertification. These effects will lead to loss of biodiversity and reduced agricultural productivity. Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases can substantially limit the extent and severity of long-term climate change.
Summary
The 2007 IPCC Assessment, the most comprehensive and respected analysis of climate change to date, states clearly that without substantial global reductions of greenhouse gas emissions we can likely expect a world of increasing droughts, floods and species loss, of rising seas and displaced human populations. However, even since the 2007 IPCC Assessment the evidence for dangerous, long-term and potentially irreversible climate change has strengthened. The scientific evidence which underpins calls for action at Copenhagen is very strong. Without co-ordinated international action on greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts on climate and civilisation could be severe.
Prof. Julia Slingo, Chief Scientist, Met Office
Prof. Alan Thorpe, Chief Executive, Natural Environment Research Council
Lord Rees, President, the Royal Society
#1 They figure they need 3 years for this to blow over.
And
#2 They might get lucky, since sunspots might be more active in 3 years, creating ACTUAL warming. Then, they could say “SEE?? We told you the world is warming.”
After all, since we’re cooling right now, eventually temps MUST go back up toward the rolling average. Temps cannot “keep going down forever.”
We’re in a cooling cycle, so the Communist UN just needs to WAIT until temps come back up toward the baseline in a few years. They’ve just hit the “snooze” button for 3 years - that’s all.
good. maybe now they’ll be honest. the earth goes through cataclysms every few thousands of yrs. global impact events every few million years. all you have to do is watch the Earth series. The earth is as ever changing as the waves of the sea.
Prince Charles only gave us about three years before the world ended in a fireball didn’t he?
I wonder why we haven’t heard anything from him lately...
The Collective wants a “do-over”?
Since the existing data was cooked to support GW, and since there is no way of determine what data was cooked, what data is legitimate, what data is missing/destroyed, there is only one course of action if they want to do real science - go back to square one and start collecting raw data.
At Penn State it’s Mann-made Global Warming...
So is Obummer still going to Copenhagen?
Given that the initial examination was controlled by climate change zealots, and fraud has been uncovered, I don't see why a healthy dose skepticism isn't fully deserved.
Conveniently, that puts us right after the next US presidential election. Wonder if there’s a connection?
Of course it will be seized upon by sceptics as well it should, sheez these warmers think they should be able to say and do whatever they want without any scrutiny. Eff em!
Yo Algore.. not so "settled" now, is it? Now step forward to the witness chair and raise your right hand.
This is what makes sense, but unfortunately, it is being done by the same people who helped make the current problem.
However, once the data is made public, it can at least be checked. Hats off to them.
This isn’t going to stop Global Warming nuts.
This is going to be a very difficult task. The LEAKED file,
“HarryReadMe” is believed to have been created by a scientist/ programmer who was attempting to clean up and justify the code. He was completely thwarted in his attempting to do that because so much of what he was seeing was impossibly obtuse, or even CLEARLY was creating biasing errors.
EAU CRU could NOT respond properly to the FOI requests, as a result, without CLEARLY exposing this data manipulation.
ALL of the data from HADCRUT is affected by this.
The ONLY hope of their “new graphs” showing temperature rising in line with the “old” will be IF they can manage to include Urban Heat Island affected stations in such a way that can be unquestioned, and that they will be able to be forgiven about doing that since it “doesn’t matter much” for some reason.
3 years, my butt. Two weeks, Just read the emials you morons.