By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News

A review from the UK Met Office says it is becoming clearer that human activities are causing climate change.

It says the evidence is stronger now than when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change carried out its last assessment in 2007.

The analysis, published in the Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change Journal, has assessed 110 research papers on the subject.

It says the Earth is changing rapidly, probably because of greenhouse gases.

In 2007 the IPCC’s report concluded that there was “unequivocal” evidence that the Earth was warming and it was likely that it was due to burning of fossil fuels.

Since then the evidence that human activities are responsible for a rise in temperatures has increased, according to this new assessment by Dr Peter Stott and colleagues at the UK Met Office.

The Met Office study comes at a time when some have questioned the entire basis of climate science following recent controversies over the handling of research findings by the IPCC and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Dr Stott denies that the study has been published as part of a fight back by the climate research community.

“We started writing this paper a year ago. I think it’s important to communicate to people what the science is showing and that’s why I’m talking about this paper.”

The study, which looks at research published since the IPCC’s report, has found that changes in Arctic sea ice, atmospheric moisture, saltiness of parts of the Atlantic Ocean and temperature changes in the Antarctic are consistent with human influence on our climate.

“What this study shows is that the evidence has strengthened for human influence on climate and we know that because we’ve looked at evidence across the climate system and what this shows very clearly is a consistent picture of a warming world,” said Dr Stott.

Previous studies had identified the trend of spring arriving earlier, but had focused on single species or a small grouping, generally plants.

“We have shown that the acceleration is an average pattern across the terrestrial, marine and freshwater environments,” Dr Thackeray told BBC News.

He explained that the data, covering the period between 1976 and 2005, showed the change was “most pronounced” among organisms at the bottom of the food chains.”

1. Lobby your political representatives. Individual action will never be enough to deal with this problem.
2. Do what you can to debunk misleading arguments repeated by climate change deniers.
3. Eat less meat (ideally none).
4. Fly less (ideally not at all).
5. Read some good books – like George Monbiot’s Heat or David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air and take actions that seem like appropriate responses for you.

Oh, and please keep contributing to discussions here.

The world’s top climate scientists agree that human activities are forcing climate change at an extraordinary rate — with disastrous consequences if we fail to change course.

In July 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper signed on to a G8 summit declaration recognizing the broad scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2°C.

The question is no longer whether the climate is changing, but how long we have to act before those changes become irreversible. The following resources summarize the most up-to-date and authoritative climate research.

-Michael McCarthy

“The e-mails do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus . . . that tells us the Earth is warming, that warming is largely a result of human activity,” Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told a House committee. She said that the e-mails don’t cover data from NOAA and NASA, whose independent climate records show dramatic warming.

1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas,
2. Greenhouse gases can possibly act as a forcing,
3. Forcings can trigger tipping points, and
4. Our climate has tipping points.

Collectively, this is one way to argue that humanity’s big experiment with boosting the concentration of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) in the atmosphere is dangerous. The records we have on the history of the climate suggest it can be changed quickly and dramatically. As we continue to emit GHGs, we are pushing towards whichever of those tipping points are closest.