Climate Decade in Review - Post 26: "Earth Clearly Out of Balance"

December 2003 - The American Geophysical Union adopted its official position on climate change in which they stated that the world's climate is "clearly out of balance."

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) was established in 1919 by the National Research Council and for more than 50 years operated as an unincorporated affiliate of the National Academy of Sciences. It is now a nonprofit corporation dedicated to the furtherance of the geophysical sciences through the individual efforts of its members and in cooperation with other national and international scientific organizations.

Deecember 2007 - They reaffirmed and revised their position statement, which includes these quotes:

• "The Earth's climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming"
• "With climate change, the human footprint on Earth is apparent."
• "In the next 50 years, even the lower limit of impending climate change is far beyond the range of climate variability experienced during the past thousand years and poses global problems in planning for and adapting to it."
• "Given the uncertainty in climate projections, there can be surprises that may cause more dramatic disruptions than anticipated from the most probable model projections."

Virtually all of the credible scientific bodies in the world have established positions on climate change that are consistent with the scientific consensus: the world is warming, human emissions of greenhouse gases are a primary cause, the effects will be more negative than positive, and action needs to be taken to avoid passing significant tipping points in the climate system. AGU is just one of many of these.

====================
This is one in the series of "Decade in Review" posts on this blog that began in January 2010. These posts present climate-change-related events that occurred during the 00's, the warmest decade in recorded history.