Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report: Hearing Before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, One Hundred Seventh Congress, First Session, May 1, 2001, Volume 4

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Page 27 - I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind...
Page 12 - the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate' [5], and was sufficiently confident by the time of the Third Assessment Report to conclude that 'there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities...
Page 30 - The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue.
Page 12 - Hemisphere indicate that the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1000 years. It is also likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year.
Page 12 - ... likely to have been a reduction of about two weeks in the annual duration of lake and river ice cover in the mid- and high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, over the 20th century.
Page 51 - Public-health impact of outdoor and traffic-related air pollution: a European assessment.
Page 11 - US scientific agencies and international scientific agencies such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The scientific assessments have been conducted and written by the best scientists in the world.
Page 12 - Era (since 1 750), compared to the relatively constant abundance that it had over the preceding 750 years of the past millennium. The predominant cause of this increase in carbon dioxide is the combustion of fossil fuels and the burning of forests. Further, methane abundance has doubled over the Industrial Era, but its increase has slowed over the recent decade for reasons not clearly understood.
Page 11 - greenhouse" effect is real, and is an essential component of the planet's climate process. A small percentage (roughly 2%) of the atmosphere is, and long has been, composed of greenhouse gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, ozone and methane). These effectively prevent part of the heat radiated by the Earth's surface from otherwise escaping to space. The global system responds to this trapped heat with a climate that is warmer, on the average, than it would be otherwise without the presence of these...
Page 12 - Emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols due to human activities continue to alter the atmosphere in ways that are expected to affect the climate.

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