28. Because everything happens somewhere A white paper entitled “Tackling climate change: local planning for a global crisis” is a available from www.citiesrevealed.com or by writing to Dr Alun Jones, alunj@citiesrevealed.com
Notas del editor
Climate change is any long-term significant change in the “average weather” that a given region experiences. Average weather may include average temperature, precipitation and wind patterns. It involves changes in the variability or average state of the atmosphere over durations ranging from decades to millions of years. These changes can be caused by dynamic process on Earth, external forces including variations in sunlight intensity, and more recently by human activities. The dominant mechanisms to which recent climate change has been attributed all result from human activity. They are: [1] increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases global changes to land surface, such as deforestation increasing atmospheric concentrations of aerosols . Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report have concluded that: "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." [2] "From new estimates of the combined anthropogenic forcing due to greenhouse gases, aerosols , and land surface changes , it is extremely likely that human activities have exerted a substantial net warming influence on climate since 1750." [1] "It is virtually certain that anthropogenic aerosols produce a net negative radiative forcing (cooling influence) with a greater magnitude in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere . [1] The panel, which represents consensus in the scientific community , defines "very likely," "extremely likely," and "virtually certain" as indicating probabilities greater than 90%, 95%, and 99%, respectively. [1]