Topic Archive: IPCC

UN Report: Climate change crisis ‘catastrophic’

Friday, May 29th, 2009

The first comprehensive report into the human cost of climate change warns the world is in the throes of a “silent crisis” that is killing 300,000 people each year.

More than 300 million people are already seriously affected by the gradual warming of the earth and that number is set to double by 2030, the report from the Global Humanitarian Forum warns.

“For the first time we are trying to get the world’s attention to the fact that climate change is not something waiting to happen. It is impacting seriously the lives of many people around the world,” the forum’s president, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, told CNN.

Speaking to CNN’s Becky Anderson in London on Friday, Annan said the migration of people from newly uninhabitable areas presents a security issue that needs to be addressed by the United Nations Security Council.

Read this rest of this important story here.

North America Warming Unevenly

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

Climate change caused by greenhouse gases is warming the United States, though unevenly, government researchers said Thursday.

“The continent as a whole is warming, mostly as a result of the energy sources we are using,” William J. Brennan, acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said at a briefing on the nation’s climate since 1951.

But there is a “warming hole” where no change occurred in the center of the country, roughly between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, added Martin Hoerling of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory.

Last year the International Panel on Climate Change, studying the planet as a whole, concluded that global warming is “unequivocal, is already happening, and is caused by human activity.”

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