First, I want to insert my standard disclaimer about how I do not speak for my employer, and any errors are my own. That said, here are the links:
After reading dispute on the comment threads of this blog as to just how much credible scientific opinion supported anthropogenic climate change, I got curious about that frequently cited statistic that 98% of climate scientists agree that such climate change is happening. So I decided to track down the source. I think this is it:
Expert credibility in climate change, by William R. L. Anderegga, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in June, 2010.
Anderegga et al evaluated whether climate scientists (measured by criteria that you can read about in the article) agreed or disagreed with the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in their report Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, that, as Anderegga describes the report’s findings, “anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for “most” of the “unequivocal” warming of the Earth’s average global temperature over the second half of the 20th century.” Here’s the Summary for Policymakers in the report, indicating the various ways in which they expect the climate to change, the relative probability of each change, and the likelihood that humans contribute to each observed trend.
If I got the wrong source, feel free to correct me; likewise, if you have any better sources for just what scientific consensus is on climate change, feel free to supply them.
Here’s an example of a catastrophe that won’t happen in the near future due to greenhouse gases: What San Francisco would look like after a 200-foot sea-level rise. I include it, not because anyone thinks it will happen (though it makes an entertaining science fiction far future), but because it was here that I found a link on something of more immediate concern: Climate Adaptation and Sea-Level Rise in the San Francisco Bay Area, by Laura Tam. Besides having the actual, non-200 foot predictions of sea level rise, it gets into a question of broader application than the San Francisco Bay Area, the question of climate change mitigation versus climate change adaption:
We have known about the perils of climate change for more than two decades. But global efforts to slow it down by reducing greenhouse gas emissions have largely failed. Even where major efforts are moving forward, such as California’s Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), planned reductions will not even begin for 10 years, and they only represent a fraction of world emissions. In the meantime, the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases has continued to rise at an increasing rate.
Even if we are somehow able to stop producing greenhouse gases tomorrow, the high concentration of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere from historic emissions — since we began burning fossil fuels for energy in the 19th century — will cause the climate to continue to change (see Figure 1).
As a result we must not only intensify our efforts to reduce climate change both now and in the future, but we also must prepare for and adapt to its inevitable effects. These two planning efforts are referred to, respectively, as climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation.
Finally, an analysis of the effect of climate change on global fire risk.
Good! summary.