How certain are the IPCC that human action is causing climate change?
The IPCC has over the past 20 years gradually increased its confidence that climate change is human induced. Now it is 95 per cent confident. The visible evidence of climate change, including the 0.7 degree centigrade average global temperature change observed since the turn of the century all point to human action. The sad part is that temperature rise varies across the globe and the worst affected is the polar region where the rise is one degree. The warming is going to cause massive melting of Antarctica and the Arctic ice sheets. This is mirrored in the Himalayas where glacier melt as a problem is very real. The other side of the coin is a sea level rise of 17 centimeters since the beginning of the century. In March this year, a meeting of 2,700 scientists in Copenhagen showed, and I prepared the synthesis report based on that meeting, that recent results were more severe than even those predicted in the IPCC report of 2007. There are climate scientists who say the so-called human
