"Climate change is putting world at risk of irreversible changes, scientists warn"

Link to The Guardian

The world is at growing risk of 'abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes' because of a warming climate, America’s premier scientific society warned on Tuesday.

In a rare intervention into a policy debate, the American Association for the Advancement of Science urged Americans to act swiftly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – and lower the risks of leaving a climate catastrophe for future generations.

"In a new report, 'What we know', the AAAS said: "As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do,”

But we consider it our responsibility as professionals to ensure, to the best of our ability, that people understand what we know: human-caused climate change is happening, we face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes, and responding now will lower the risks and costs of taking action."

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"The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest non-government general science membership organization and the executive publisher of 'Science', a leading scientific journal.

Our mission is 'advance science for the benefit of all people.' Our goals include providing a voice for science on societal issues and promoting the responsible use of science in public policy. There may be no more pressing issue intersecting science and society than climate change and the What We Know initiative was born in response to that reality.

The What We Know initiative is dedicated to ensuring that three 'R’s' of climate change communicated to the public.

• The first is Reality — 97% of climate experts have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.
• The second is Risk — that the reality of climate change means that there are climate change impacts we can expect, but we also must consider what might happen, especially the small, but real, chance that we may face abrupt changes with massively disruptive impacts.
• The third R is Response — that there is much we can do and that the sooner we respond, the better off we will be.

The What We Know initiative will include outreach to scientists, economists, community leaders, policy makers and the public at large over the following months via meetings and media outreach.

To guide the What We Know initiative, AAAS convened a group of prominent experts in climate science to address the fact that many Americans still erroneously believe that the scientific community is divided on the issue and that Americans are largely unaware of the full spectrum of climate risks – both what is likely to happen and what might happen — that human-caused climate change presents to Americans now and in the future."

Link to The Guardian

"The climate change deniers have won"

"Scientists continue to warn us about global warming, but most of us have a vested interest in not wanting to think about it.

"The American Association for the Advancement of Science came as close as such a respectable institution can to screaming an alarm last week. ... In other words, the most distinguished scientists from the country with the world's pre-eminent educational institutions were trying to shake humanity out of its complacency. Why weren't their warnings leading the news?

"In one sense, the association's appeal was not new. The Royal Society, the Royal Institution, Nasa, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, the IPCC and the national science bodies of 30 or so other countries have said that man-made climate change is on the march. A survey of 2,000 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published in the last 20 years found that 97% said that humans were causing it.

"When the glib talk about the 'scientific debate on global warming', they either don't know or will not accept that there is no scientific debate. The suggestion first made by Eugene F Stoermer that the planet has moved from the Holocene, which began at the end of the last ice age, to the manmade Anthropocene, in which we now live, is everywhere gaining support. Man-made global warming and the man-made mass extinction of species define this hot, bloody and (let us hope) brief epoch in the world's history.

"If global warming is not new, it is urgent: a subject that should never be far from our thoughts. Yet within 24 hours of the American association's warning, the British government's budget confirmed that it no longer wanted to fight it."