Climate Modeling - Beyond Smoke and Mirrors - page 33

greenhouse gases, a change that would signi cantly

change the Earth ' s energy balance should it go on long

enough. Revelle s work had predicted that the detailed

chemistry of the real ocean greatly slowed the rate at
which CO could be taken up by salt water compared
with previous estimates. His calculation that the old rate
was

'

s
demonstration of a much more rapid increase than
expected in atmospheric CO .
Keeling

times too fast was proved correct by Keeling '

s work triggered renewed inter-
est from the science community. Both theoretical and
experimental research on greenhouse gases and their
effects increased greatly, and the

' s and Revelle '

first formal world con-
ference on possible climate change was organized by the
World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in .

From then until WMO and the International Coun-

cil for Science (ICSU) played a coordinating role in a
growing international research effort. The United
Nations Environmental Program became involved in

, and the WMO/ICSU program was absorbed by
the UN and became the foundation of the Intergovern-
mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), formally estab-
lished as a United Nations sponsored organization in

. The rst IPCC Assessment Report was produced

in and formed the basis for discussions at the rst

World Climate Summit in . The IPCC has recently

produced its Fifth Assessment Report (AR ).

A history of the IPCC can be found at http://www.ipcc.ch/about/
anniversarybrochure.pdf and IPCC reports can be found at http://www.
ipcc.ch/ . The reports themselves tend to be technical, but each has a
summary for policymakers that is readable by the non-specialist. The
summary for AR will be out in the fall of .