World Bank - Global Temperatures Rising Faster Than Anticipated - Reuters

[hatrack]

COLOGNE, Germany - Global temperatures may be increasing more quickly than first thought, and evidence is stronger that humans are causing the rise, the World Bank's Chief Scientist Robert Watson told Reuters on Thursday.

Scientists widely accept that climate change is happening and could cause more extreme weather, global warming and rising sea levels.
But the scale of change and its cause are hotly contested, as blocs of countries including Europe and the United States are split on how quickly the world should act.

The UN-founded group, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has prepared its fourth report, at draft stage and due for publication in 2007, on the case for climate change, and finds that evidence has hardened, Watson said. The IPCC's research work is split into working groups, with scientific evidence delegated to Working Group 1. "Everybody I've talked to in Working Group 1 says the evidence (for climate change) is getting stronger, that this is more and more solid ... and (evidence) that most observed warming is due to human activities," said Watson, who is former chairman of the IPCC.

The third report in 2001 spoke of "new and stronger evidence" that human activities were warming the globe, in turn stronger than the previous report in 1995, which described a balance of evidence suggesting discernible human influence. Citing most recent, and not necessarily IPCC research, Watson also found a consensus emerging that an expected rise in world temperatures by 2100 compared to 1990 was at the upper end of previous estimates.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/36319/story.htm

[eppur_se_muova]

1. This is starting to sound like a reciprocal "Hofstadter's Law".

Hofstadter's law states that "it will always take longer than expected, even when Hofstadter's law is taken into account". The Global Warming Law (GWL) seems to be that "the earth is heating up faster than expected, even when the GWL is taken into account".

[hunter]

2. We don't know when it all went wrong.

Maybe it's taking longer than expected for us to notice.

[ladjf]

3. Nah, just a rumor being spread by liberal meteorologists.