Royal Society's climate change guide cuts confusion out of the hard science

[n2doc]

Duncan Clark

The Royal Society, the UK's leading scientific establishment, today publishes its own layman's guide to the science of climate change, in the hope of countering the confusion and inaccurate claims that continue to surround the topic.

The new guide – Climate Change: A Summary of the Science – seeks to cut through the confusion by summarising the degree of consensus and depth of understanding surrounding different aspects of the science of global warming caused by human activity.

The report, written by a panel of prominent scientists and chaired by Professor John Pethica, Royal Society vice president, breaks down the subject into three sections: aspects on which there is "wide agreement", "a wide consensus but continuing debate and discussion" and those which are "not well understood".

The document entirely supports the mainstream scientific view of man-made climate change as summarised by the UN's climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In previous years, the Royal Society has lent its weight to joint communiqués on climate change issued by leading science academies around the world, and these have even extended to making policy suggestions, such as calling on world leaders to agree emission reductions at the climate change summit held in Copenhagen in December.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/30/royal-society-climate-change-guide

[DavidDvorkin]

1. Certain US politicians will either refuse to read it or

will dismiss it as shoddy science ahead of time.

Because they know better than those eggheads.