Climate change and global warming are well up on the current political agenda. There are urgent questions everyone is asking: are human activities altering the climate? Is global warming a reality? How big are the changes likely to be? Will there be more serious disasters; will they be more frequent? Can we adapt to climate change, or can we change the way we do things so that we can slow down the change or even prevent it occurring?
Because the Earth’s climate system is highly complex, and because human behavior and reaction to change is even more complex, providing answers to these questions is an enormous challenge to the world’s scientists. As with many scientific problems only partial answers are available, but our knowledge is evolving rapidly, and the world’s scientists have been addressing the problems with much energy and determination.
Three major pollution issues are often put together in people’s minds: global warming, ozone depletion (the ozone hole) and acid rain. Although there are links between the science of these three issues (the chemicals which deplete ozone and the particles which are involved in the formation of acid rain also contribute to global warming), they are essentially three distinct problems.
Their most important common feature is their large scale. In the case of acid rain, the emissions of Sulphur dioxide from one nation’s territory can seriously affect the forests and the lakes of countries which may be downwind of the pollution.
Global warming and ozone depletion are examples of global pollution – pollution in which the activities of one person or one nation can affect all people and all nations. It is only during the last thirty years or so that human activities have been of such a kind or on a sufficiently large scale that their effects can be significant globally. And because the problems are global, all nations have to be involved in their solution.
The key intergovernmental body which has been set up to assess the problem of global warming is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), formed in 1988.
At its first meeting in November of that year in Geneva, the Panel’s first action was to ask for a scientific report so that, so far as they were known, the scientific facts about global warming could be established.
It was imperative that politicians were
given a solid scientific base from which to develop the requirements for
action.
