Climate Change and Its Impacts (original) (raw)
2015, SpringerBriefs in Water Science and Technology
Front cover picture Cloud fractal image by Adrian Pope Human-made climate change poses threats to our world. Global temperatures are already some 0.6 °C higher than they were at the end of the last century, and observations so far this year indicate that 1997 will be one of the warmest years since records began. It is expected that global climate will continue to change throughout the next century, particularly if no additional action is taken to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. International action to abate greenhouse gas emissions is focused on the work of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. This Convention draws on the regular assessments of the science by the UNEP/WMO Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The last full assessment was completed in 1995, and the next is planned for 2000/1. As part of the UK's contribution to our understanding of the science, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) funds the climate model at the UK Meteorological Office's Hadley Centre, one of the most advanced in the world. The DETR also funds dissemination of the model's output to those scientists able to assess the implied impacts of the predictions. This booklet describes work being submitted to the IPCC assessment process, in particular the recent results from the Hadley Centre model. However, climate predictions themselves need interpretation to determine the consequential impacts. This brochure therefore goes further and reports the results of a number of impacts studies that have drawn directly on the output of the Hadley Centre using state-of-the-art impact prediction models. While climate science is still an evolving area of research, it is hoped that this summary will give a sense of our ability to predict possible future climate and to assess its impacts.
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