Emissions Already Affecting Climate, Report Finds NYTIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/science/earth/06cnd-climate.html?hp
For the first time in nearly two decades of reviewing research on global warming, the main international group studying climate change has found that heat-trapping emissions from industry and other activities are already influencing weather patterns and ecology in ways both harmful and beneficial. In its fourth assessment of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used its strongest language yet in drawing a link between human activity and recent warming. But the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the long-term outlook, should temperatures rise 3 to 5 more degrees fahrenheit, was mainly for damaging and costly effects, ranging from the likely extinction of perhaps a fourth of the world's species to eventual inundation of coasts and islands inhabited by hundreds of millions of people. ... Some authors said the report removed any doubt about the urgency of acting to curb emissions of greenhouse gases. "The warnings are clear about the scale of the projected changes to the planet," said Bill Hare, an author of the impacts report and visiting scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany. "Essentially there's going to be a mass extinction within the next 100 years unless climate change is limited," added Dr. Hare, who previously worked for the environmental group Greenpeace. "These impacts have been known for many years, and are now seen with greater clarity in this report," he said. "That clarity is perhaps the last warning we're going to get before we actually have to report in the next IPCC review that we're seeing the disaster unfolding."
