The Kelley Blue Book on Climate Change

Whenever anyone buys or sells a car in America, they are likely to settle on a price as listed in the Kelly Blue Book, the authoritative final word on automobile value since 1926.

When you go to the doctor with an illness, your physician is likely to have the Merck Manual on her bookshelf. The Merck Manual was first published in 1899 as an important medical authoritative reference guide and aid to physicians and pharmacists. "By the 1980s, the book had become the world's largest selling medical text and was translated into more than a dozen languages."

And if your physician prescribes you a medication, chances are she has read about it in her Physicians' Desk Reference (PDR), "designed to provide physicians with the full legally mandated information relevant to writing prescriptions" and "a commercially published compilation of manufacturers' prescribing information on prescription drugs, updated annually" for 63 years.

If an article appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), it is treated with great respect by the media and the world at large as an important statement related to health or medical care. It carries with it the weight and import of serious authority in its field, as it should. When it comes to cars, refrigerators, solar panels, guns, sports statistics, farm tractors, or almost anything else, there is a gold standard. There is an ultimate final word, a publication or an organization that is trusted by those within and outside the field as representing what is known or accepted as substantially true.

So it is with any scientific issue, including global warming or climate change, For example, there is Nature, "the world's most highly cited interdisciplinary science journal, according to the 2008 Journal Citation Report." A British publication which began in 1869, Nature is one of two of the most important science journals published in the world.

The other is Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Founded in 1880 on $10,000 of seed money from the American inventor Thomas Edison, Science has grown to become the world's leading outlet for scientific news, commentary, and cutting-edge research, with the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general-science journal. Through its print and online incarnations, Science reaches an estimated worldwide readership of more than one million."

What do Nature and Science say about global warming or climate change?

Back in February of 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published their fourth report in 17 years which again definitively stated that humans are causing global warming, an editorial from Nature stated:

Until quite recently (perhaps even until last week), the general global narrative of the great climate-change debate has been deceptively straightforward. The climate-science community, together with the entire environmental movement and a broad alliance of opinion leaders ranging from Greenpeace and Ralph Nader to Senator John McCain and many US evangelical Christians, has been advocating meaningful action to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions. This requirement has been disputed by a collection of money-men and some isolated scientists, in alliance with the current president of the United States and a handful of like-minded ideologues such as Australia's prime minister John Howard."

The IPCC report, released in Paris, has served a useful purpose in removing the last ground from under the climate-change sceptics' feet, leaving them looking marooned and ridiculous."

However, this predicament was already clear enough. Opinion in business circles, in particular, has moved on. A report released on 19 January by Citigroup, Climatic Consequences -- the sort of eloquently written, big-picture stuff that the well-informed chief executive reads on a Sunday afternoon -- states even more firmly than the IPCC that anthropogenic climate change is a fact that world governments are moving to confront. It leaves no question at all that large businesses need to get to grips with this situation -- something that many of them are already doing."

That same month the AAAS Board released their "New Statement on Climate Change."

The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society. Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array of effects: rapidly melting glaciers, destabilization of major ice sheets, increases in extreme weather, rising sea level, shifts in species ranges, and more. The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now."

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a critical greenhouse gas, is higher than it has been for at least 650,000 years. The average temperature of the Earth is heading for levels not experienced for millions of years. Scientific predictions of the impacts of increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and deforestation match observed changes."

As expected, intensification of droughts, heat waves, floods, wildfires, and severe storms is occurring, with a mounting toll on vulnerable ecosystems and societies. These events are early warning signs of even more devastating damage to come, some of which will be irreversible."

Delaying action to address climate change will increase the environmental and societal consequences as well as the costs. The longer we wait to tackle climate change, the harder and more expensive the task will be."

History provides many examples of society confronting grave threats by mobilizing knowledge and promoting innovation. We need an aggressive research, development and deployment effort to transform the existing and future energy systems of the world away from technologies that emit greenhouse gases."

Developing clean energy technologies will provide economic opportunities and ensure future energy supplies. In addition to rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it is essential that we develop strategies to adapt to ongoing changes and make communities more resilient to future changes."

The growing torrent of information presents a clear message: we are already experiencing global climate change. It is time to muster the political will for concerted action. Stronger leadership at all levels is needed. The time is now. We must rise to the challenge. We owe this to future generations