Predictability of Climate Change

Even if there has been talk of global warming and global climate change for at least a couple of decades (NATO, for instance, has been dealing with GCC since 1996; Palmer 1996), in industrialised countries public opinion did not become aware of such phenomenon until very late. Al Gore's "An inconvenient truth" and the Nobel Prize he ad IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) won certainly helped, but it was climate change itself, with a rise in extreme weather conditions, that attracted public attention. The apparent upward trend in the number of hurricanes class 4 and 5 in the period 1970-2004 is a clear example of this (Hoyos et al, Science 2006). The reasons behind such fast climate change are mainly human; according to a 2007 report by IPCC, use of fossil fuels and deforestation are the main reasons behind the rise in CO2 concentration, while levels of most of the other main greenhouse gases (methane and nitrogen oxide) have been raised by agriculture. The future scenarios and the projections of climate models predict a warming of 2-4 degrees by the end of this century and a rise in sea level which is estimated at between 0.5 and 4 metres by 2100 (Kerr 2006, Raper et al. 2006).