By Joe Ware writing in The Church Times

The world's leading atmospheric scientists publish today the mostcomprehensive report on the state of the planet's climate, and it makes for grim reading.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up in 1988 by the UN to study the world's climate, has released its fifth Assessment Report; its first in six years. The document, which runs to thousands of pages, and has received contributions from more than 800 scientists in 85 countries, is the clearest warning yet of the risk humans face from self-inflicted climate change.

Such is the scale of the undertaking that keeping the report's findings a secret has been impossible. Leaks have flowed like melt-water from Arctic sea ice. The primary finding is that scientists are now 95 per cent certain that climate change is being driven by human activity, up from 90 per cent in 2007, and 66 per cent in 2001. This is now at the level of confidence usually accepted as the criterion for scientific certainty.

Today's report, the first of three parts to be released over the next six months, is expected to reveal that global surface temperatures, which have risen by nearly one degree in the last century, could rise by up to 4.80 Celsius by 2100, if we do not take urgent action now.

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