Overview of Climate Change 2007: IPCC WG1 Key Findings

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was jointly established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988. The purpose of IPCC is to assess available information on the science of climate change and to provide policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive assessments of interest to policymakers, scientists, and the public. IPCC will release its fourth comprehensive Working Group 1 (WG1) assessment report on the state of understanding of the physical science basis of climate change in early 2007. This talk will summarize the key scientific findings of that report, including the understanding of observations of changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and ice, forcing agents such as carbon dioxide and aerosol, feedbacks in the climate system, paleoclimatic observations and theory, and projections of future changes in coming decades and centuries.