UK Climate Science Statement

From: The Guardian

Partial text of the joint statement from the Met Office, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Royal Society on the state of the science of climate change ahead of the Copenhagen climate conference. Please use the Guardian link above for the full text.

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 organizations involving most of the UK scientists working on climate change, we cannot emphasis 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 2000-09 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.

At GreenTerraFirma, we hope for the best results for the Copenhagen meeting. We’ll soon know the results.

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Filed under: Climate Change