An abstract of this report in Spanish is available on the UAI Sustentabilidad blog. Note:  this abstract has not been reviewed by WRI, and WRI has no affiliation with UAI Sustentabilidad.

This report reviews some of the major climate change science research and innovations of 2006. The 2006 research confirms a trend that has become increasingly clear: climate change not only has significant ramifications for the physical climate, hydrological cycle, and ecosystems, but many significant impacts are already being witnessed today. Climate change has begun—much more rapidly and more fundamentally than heretofore anticipated—to transform the world. The rate and magnitude of these changes have implications not only for global efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, but also for efforts to adapt to both the already observed impacts and to the anticipated additional consequences that will emerge as global warming trends continue.

This review is an update to a similar report prepared in 2006 that reviewed new findings from 2005. As with that note, in preparing this review, WRI consulted a number of journals (Nature, Science, Geophysical Research Letters, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Climatic Change, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Heredity, Conservation Biology, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Biodiversity and Conservation) and information from organizations and climate/energy websites (Department of Energy, World Meteorological Organization, Renewable Energy Access, United Nations Development Programme, and U.S. Geological Survey).

Similar to last year’s Climate Science Stories, the review is presented in four sections., which categorize the stories into:

1. Physical climate (temperature increases, ocean behavior, abrupt change, and greenhouse gas concentrations)
2. Hydrological cycle (hurricanes, glacial/snow melt, and water supply)
3. Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services
4. Climate Change Mitigation Technologies and Economics (excluding those that are proprietary to private companies or not open to peer review)

Every story contains a short summary, as well as a section on implications.

While this report has been prepared looking only at new scientific findings from 2006, a wider and considerably more comprehensive review and assessment has been released in the first half of 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Prepared by scientists from more than 130 countries, that report will offer not only a more thorough examination of the scientific and technology literature, but provide a much more in-depth analysis of how the literature’s results should be interpreted. Broadly, however, this short review corroborates the IPCC findings.

While the IPCC’s report is more authoritative, it has one significant difference: the IPCC rules set a deadline for the inclusion of material in order to assure that all literature cited has been fully reviewed and responses have been incorporated. The IPCC thus does not include all of the results from analyses completed during 2006. In contrast, Climate Science 2006 while significantly less comprehensive, includes new scientific material from as recently as December 2006. Some of this material, particularly that related to ice cover (including in Greenland, Antarctica, and mountain glaciers), suggests the IPCC’s findings are generally cautious. However, as with any new literature, it will take some time to assess the validity and robustness of the new results cited here.

Perhaps the strongest message to emerge from this report is that the scientific community is ever more emphatic about the scale of change, the human cause of change, and the rapidity with which change is becoming manifest. Altogether, the individual results described below suggest that the window of opportunity to act to avoid the worst of the prospective impacts and damage is rapidly closing. Furthermore, these results suggest that we may already be seeing signs that abrupt, nonlinear climate change is materializing, and that tipping points in natural systems may be in close reach, if not already exceeded.