By Sid Perkins
Global warming is real and will continue, and there’s strong evidence that people are to blame, an international panel of scientists has concluded. Other scientists suggest ways that people might reduce future atmosphere-warming greenhouse-gas emissions and argue that societies will have to adapt to the climate change that’s yet to occur.
“The evidence for warming having happened on the planet is unequivocal,” says Susan Solomon, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo. “We can see that in rising air temperatures, we can see it in changes in snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere, we can see it in global sea rise,” she says. Solomon and her colleagues on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their latest assessment of recent warming trends at a press conference in Paris on Feb. 2.