Climate Change Made Simple

Joseph F.C. DiMento and Pamela Doughman, editors of Climate Change: What it Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren, have produced a book that makes the science of climate change easy to understand. The chart above is reproduced from the second essay in the book, "A Primer on Global Climate Change and Its Likely Impacts." Here's a quote from the fourth essay, "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know That We're Not Wrong:"

"As early as 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had concluded there was strong scientific evidence that human activities were affecting global climate. By 2007, the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report noted it is "extremely unlikely that the global climate changes of the past fifty years can be explained without invoking human activities" (Alley et al. 2007) Prominent scientists and major scientific organizations have all ratified the IPCC conclusion. Today, all but a handful of climate scientists are convinced that earth's climate is heating up and that human activities are a significant cause."