Global warming

References

Cite

Share

Abstract

as popular perception is concerned, considerable efforts continue to be made both by governments and by science into, respectively, negotiating responses to, and improving predictions of, future climate change. By the time this review is published it is likely that the fiftieth national ratification of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will have been lodged (this is out of the original 160 signatory nations). This means that the first Conference of the Parties to the convention will be held during the first half of 1995. This process of national ratification is being accompanied by a diversity of activities at governmental and intergovernmental level which indicate that concern about future climate change is already shaping environmental and industrial policy in many countries. Thus national strategies to stabilize emissions of greenhouse gases, inventories of national sources and sinks of greenhouse gases and the undertaking of country impact studies have all been completed in various countries over the last 12 months. The extent to which these strategies, or indeed full adherence to the framework convention as currently formulated, can actually contribute towards a slowing of the rate of future global warming remains severely limited (Figure 1; Warrick, 1993). The parallel scientific process of developing and refining the