The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to be released in Paris next week.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wa established by WMO and UNEP to assess scientific, technical and socio- economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. It is currently finalizing its Fourth Assessment Report "Climate Change 2007". The reports by the three Working Groups provide a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the current state of knowledge on climate change. The Synthesis Report integrates the information around six topic areas.

A 12-page summary is to be released to the public on Feb. 2.

Read more

http://www.ipcc.ch/18ipcc.swf

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

They have to wait until Ground Hog day?

__________________
PW -- Plant Whisperer

Are they going to explain how THIS is our fault???

Mars Emerging from Ice Age Due to Global Warming:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...ge_031208.html
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search

Global Warming on Pluto Puzzles Scientists:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...ng_021009.html
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...to&btnG=Search

Global Warming on Jupiter:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/05/gl...n-jupiter.html

The only legitimate "global warming" on the list is Mars. Pluto is warming because it's near perihelion. Jupiter is not experiencing global warming. There are signs of some warming around the equator, but the poles are cooling, as the USA Today article notes.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

obviously, all those probes we sent out have polluted the solar system, thus causing the radiation from the center of the galaxy to get trapped in our solar system ,which raises the average temperature a few degrees.

of course, this argument can be countered with the argument that the solar system is coming out of a colder part of it's galactic orbit, and the warming is just part of a cycle.

__________________
"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Read More

[Ed ~ They may have held the event on groundhog day to highlight that their conclusion is what our commonsense already told us, (i of course, am speaking from a European perspective...). ]

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

i share your european perspective

i liked novaderrics remark very much

but it's serious boys......

So, if it's inevitable, why not just adapt to it? For example, what kinds of crops could be grown on hot dry land, and what kinds of crops could be grown on muddy, temperate land (up north)?

- Maha Vailo

__________________
When you get down to it, Science answers how. Religion answers why. - hippietrekx

If you can come up with a good conspiracy theory about the paper, you can make 10,000 US$

http://www.guardian.co.uk/internatio...rc=rss&feed=11

Because we can still make a difference in how big an effect there is. A couple of paragraphs from page 10 of the report.
See also Figure SPM-7 on the last page.

Link to the report

But I also think that a lot of work going forward will be on how to adapt to the changing climate.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

I want to tell a little story.

My son was experimenting with a glass thermometer on the kitchen table, the other day when my wife started to make dinner.

It was a cold evening and the furnace was running and the house was a comfortable 70 degrees. My wife turned on the stove and the oven to make dinner.

My son was playing with his little thermometer and he rushed over to tell me the thermometer looked like it was going up.

It only registered each degree, but he thought it went up a bit to 70+ degrees maybe a quarter or half a degree. I wanted to encourage his scientific curiosity, so I said, "Please keep watching the thermometer and I'll give you a advance on your allowance later."

So off he went and triumphantly returned a half hour later to report. "Yes, I am sure that the temperature is going up", he said breathlessly. "How much?" He said "Well its still not up a degree but my thermometer shows the red line is for sure up maybe, even to almost 71 degrees". Encouraging him I said " Here is your allowance advance, keep it up."

He soon came back and said, "It still hasn't gone up a whole degree yet. but I'm even more sure and certain its almost, almost, to 71 degrees".

"Can I have another advance on my allowance?" he asked. I rewarded him as encouragement, and said to him, "See if it it goes up some more". I said to him "What will happen if this keeps up. How hot will the house get?" He went off and came back to say "It will get too hot in the house if this keeps up". I said "You are right son. I can't argue with the truth of your scientific evidence."

I then told him , "What you said is called scientific extrapolation. You took some observational measurements and then predicted what would happen".
"No one could criticize what you said. Thats how real scientists work", trying to make sure he understood the little lesson.

"But what happens if the temperature gets to 72 or 73 degrees?", I asked. He thought for a while and answered, "Nothing; it will just keep getting hotter and hotter, My thermometer says so".

I told him very good but maybe that's not the whole story.

"What can we do about it?", I asked. "Nothing, we'll cook just like the Pot Roast mom's making", he said becoming alarmed.

Then he thought for a second and said, "The only thing we could do is open the doors and windows and let the cold in". "But then we would freeze because its so cold outside!"

Then I told him about what the thermostat on the furnace does. It is there to makes sure when the temperature in the house goes up a couple of degrees, it turns off the furnace, until the house cools off, then it turns on again.

He said "Oh", and I gave him another advance on his allowance.

I'm sure he will grow up to be a Scientist or an Engineer; he certainly learned some valid scientific principles tonight. He also learned what research grants are all about, very quickly too.

My wife than said that dinner is ready and turned off the stove, and oven and served dinner. I then said, "Maybe the house was getting warmer because mom had the stove on to make dinner."

But then I told Junior, "Ill bet you never thought about that, and that the stove and oven wouldn't always be on, forever?". He said, "Gee, I never thought of that."

As we walked in to sit down to eat, I noticed that the furnace blower stopped.

Ah, the benefits of feedback and natural regulation, I thought.

But that's a story for another day when my junior scientist has grown up enough to understand, negative feedback and natural regulation. Its probably too complex for him right now.

Isn't it nice to know that the "House Warming catastrophe" has been averted?

Then why aren't you Europeans doing something about it? America has a much better record in actually changing CO2 emissions than Europe does.

Y'all signed Kyoto and then promptly forgot about it. Typical .. All talk ... No Action...

You are allowed to your own judgments.

I understood Blob's observance as meaning, that the European public seems to generally be more alarmed about global warming than the American. That seemes to me a quite objective description. From the European perspective, America is just beginning to awake from a state of denial concerning the reality and severity of the problem.

Your agressive style of replience is totaly unwarrented.
This is a place for cassual conversation and I have no intention to go into a polemic with you.

Hum,
while it can be argued that the Kyoto agreement did not go far enough or was not enforced by the countries, it still placed the groundwork on how to combat climate change.
It is easy to forget that the effects of climate change are over, maybe several, or hundreds of, decades, and that current political policies or governments are only (relatively) short term.
Now that this report is out there is even more pressure for countries to think on the long term economic savings.

http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/...ange/index.htm

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

I'm in the American Southwest,it's noon & it's 21F/-7C,the sun is glaring off the snow that's drifted 3 feet deep in spots,as a result of the 4th or 5th snowfall in the last 2 months,one of which broke previous records for a single day.
I tend toward skepticism on the global warming issue.

__________________
"An armed man is a citizen
An unarmed man is a subject"

Robert A. Heinlein

Natural-Philosopher,
A touching story, whether or not it is true. What's your point? I assume it is summed up in "Ah, the benefits of feedback and natural regulation, I thought.". Any evidence of that, on the global scale, not in your house.

Frantic Freddie,
That is the difference between climate and weather. If you look, for example, at FIGURE SPM-5 in the report, you will note that the warming is not uniform geographically. I recall that some models predict that some areas (the American midwest was one) might actually get more extreme seasons, colder winters and hotter summers, even though the average temperature is higher.

To all with comments about Kyoto,
Personally I think it was a very bad treaty, but I also think the US was wrong to completely walk away from it. For one thing, I think the developing countries should not be relieved of any responsibility. But we need to seperate problems with the treaty with the science of global warming. One can hate the treaty and still understand the threat that climate change will have.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Hum,
yes, it is good to be sceptical, but in this case, i think that the possible threat of long term climate change (extreme weather) and all that it entails outweighs the short term economic growth.

Source

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

Sometimes, the only thing worse than doing nothing is doing the wrong thing while patting yourself on the back for having done something. Too often accepting a solution that doesn't work can be misconstrued as having done all one can. Especially in the political arena.

If there's going to be effective global legislation on warming and pollution control, get it right.

__________________
I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

The Planet has been warmer and colder than it is now, but there are lots of built-in natural regulators at work to help keep it approximately constant with in a relatively narrow range of temperatures.

If the world grows warmer in the eccentricities of its orbit, coming closer to the Sun, as happens periodically, more water is evaporated. This rises and forms clouds. Clouds are very good at re-radiating solar energy back into space, so it cools the world. When the evaporated water vapor condenses and falls to earth, it cools the air and land.
Feedback and natural regulation.

The flux of CO2 between the atmosphere and the Oceans is not precisely known but about 40% of the total atmospheric CO2, every year. Until recently we were warned the oceans couldn't keep this up for more than several hundred years more, because there was little to consume CO2, as it reached the depths. Now we know that one third of the life on Earth sits there in the deeps and below it for several miles into the Earth, just happily munching on dissolved CO2.
Feedback and natural regulation.

As the tropic oceans warmed in the excess of Solar energy a natural response occurred following the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Heat equalizes. Hot things grow cooler and cool things grow warmer. Ocean currents formed which took warm tropic water toward the cold arctic and circulated cold water back to the warm tropics. More heat, more circulation.
Feedback and natural regulation.

CO2 as a GHG can only absorb energy at certain frequencies. It only works to absorb energy in the CO2 frequency bands if they are not saturated. Those bands are almost wholly saturated. The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere from 50 parts of almost nothi