Chapter 3: Climate Change

In 1995 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledged that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on the global climate” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 1995). This landmark statement confirmed that climate change is now considered to be one of the most serious threats to the environment (Watson et al., 1996). In the third assessment report of the IPCC (IPCC, 2001a), the summarizing statements are stronger: “the warming over the last 100 years is very unlikely to be due to internal variability alone,” and “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”