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FIRM signs that greenhouse warming is under way are listed in a draft
report on climatic variation prepared for the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. The report, which the IPCC is due to receive in November,
identifies ‘unprecedented and rapid’ changes in global climate since the
early 1980s.

Glaciers around the world continue to melt at a ‘remarkable’ rate, says
the report, and there has been a significant decrease in snow cover since
1980. Sea temperatures in the tropical Atlantic have been ‘anomalously high’
for several decades, and ‘very large regional temperature changes’ in the
North Pacific Ocean since 1977 have caused Alaska to warm 1.5 Degree C faster
in the past decade than it did in the previous two.

But the authors of the report, an international committee of scientists,
warned that 30 years’ worth of observations would be needed to confirm that
greenhouse warming had begun.