Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability - Present
and Future A second report from the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) shares the current scientific
understanding of how people and natural ecosystems are affected
by climate change, and how they will be affected by future
warming (in February, the IPCC released their first summary
report on the physical science basis for climate change). The
report, Climate Change 2007: Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation
and Vulnerability, was released on Friday April 6, 2007 by the
IPCC, a large group of scientists from around the world brought
together by the United Nations to assess our understanding of
the Earth’s climate, global warming, and the impacts of climate
change. Here are a few of the report’s main conclusions. Many
natural environments on all continents and in most of the oceans
are already affected by the changing climate. The snow and ice
of Earth’s cryosphere is melting causing unstable ground and
changes in Arctic and Antarctic e