Climate change impacts and mitigation strategies

Climate Change

Summary of the 2007 IPCC Status Report on Climate Change

According to the 2007 IPCC Status Report on Climate Change, there is no doubt that climate change is occurring. The summary is somewhat more nebulous when it comes to stating the definite causes and effects of this climate change, but a warming trend has definitely been noted by the various researchers and studies that contributed to this summary. In some sense, however, several of the effects of the warming trend are used as part of the evidence that such a trend is occurring. The change in population and/or migratory patterns of fish, algae, and plankton in high latitude oceans is cited in the summary, as well as many other biological changes linked to global warming and climate change. The conclusions that the warming trend is occurring is also based on direct measurements of surface temperatures on widespread points of the globe from 1970 to 2004, which are shown clearly on chart in the summary.

What is certain when it comes to climate change is that the average world temperature has increased by approximately one degree Celsius since 1970, and that sea levels have also shown a measurable rise over the same period. any of the effects of this trend can also be linked to global warming with certainty. Though the evidence in the summary is compelling, the causal relationship between human activity and climate change is still not entirely certain, nor are many of the projected effects of the current climate change or indeed the projections concerning the future of climate change. Though even the summary refrains from language that claims its conclusions as certain, the information it provides does contend that humans are most likely the source of climate change. Natural global temperature variation is also cited as a possible and even a likely contributor, though its effect is more powerful in skewing overall results.

The likelihood that climate change is related to human activity is not given a precise number in the summary; it is noted that eighty-nine percent of seventy-five different studies' more than twenty-nine thousand observational data series support global warming as a cause for observed effects, but this figure does not link the climate change to human activity taken on its own. The authors of the summary state that the connection can be stated with "high confidence," however, meaning that they approximate the likelihood as an eight-out-of-ten chance (80%). In order to come to this conclusion, the summary largely relied on data syntheses that seem to have predicted effects of anthropogenic warming it then confirmed without necessarily establishing a causal link. Modeling studies that actually separated warming causes are perhaps the most conclusive pieces of evidence supporting this conclusion.