NRC Report On Global Warming

The National Research Council has issued three separate reports recently on global warming.

Advancing the Science of Climate Change
Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change
Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change

The strongest conclusion out of these reports is: Climate change is occurring, the Earth is warming, and these are largely caused by human activities.

Lest people think that these reports are simply a rehash and done by the same people who did the IPCC, the report from this week's Science (Science 28 May 2010 p. 1085) indicated otherwise.

But this was no rehashing of the IPCC report, which has taken considerable flak of late. The new NRC reports draw on the past 5 years of peer-reviewed literature, which was published too late for inclusion in the IPCC analysis, Matson emphasized. They also reflect findings from more than a score of reports from the U.S. Global Change Research Program and earlier efforts from NAS. The membership of the three NRC panels also had little overlap with that of the IPCC's working groups, says economist Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, an IPCC veteran who was on the NRC panel on adapting to climate change. Yohe says he was surprised to find at the panel's inaugural meeting that three-quarters of his fellow members were unfamiliar to him.

Zz.