ABSTRACT
The prolonged economic slowdown after the financial crash of 2008 has diverted public attention from the long-term threat of climate change to more immediate economic problems, although predictions from climate science have become steadily more pessimistic in recent years. The 2013 climate conference in Warsaw managed to agree to meet in Lima in 2014 to prepare the ground for finally reaching a climate agreement in Paris in 2015, to be implemented in 2020, when the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol comes to an end. Climate models have generally underestimated the pace of Arctic warming and loss of ice, not to mention unstable West Antarctica, where some glacial melting is already considered to be irreversible. The latest climate models also show that the effect of solar activity was fairly small over the last 100 years, with most of the warming explained by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.
