Climate change is upon us but what will the future hold? How will it affect the world and what will happen in Europe and Ireland?
Much will be revealed tomorrow when the latest international climate change predictions are released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Based on information already leaked to the media, it looks as though they may deliver the most pessimistic view yet of where climate change is going on a global basis.
A warming climate is causing the retreat of mountain glaciers and sea ice. The massive ice sheets covering Greenland and parts of Antarctica are shrinking. Sea-level rise can be expected in the coming decades, along with more frequent and more powerful storms.
"Climate change is the most important issue facing the world today," states Met Éireann's assistant director for scientific and technical support, Tom Sheridan. "For some countries it is literally a matter of life and death."
The IPCC report is a highly important document, and Ireland has played its part in informing its contents, Sheridan suggests. The IPCC doesn't do its own research or advise governments. Rather, it looks at research being done by scientists around the world and brings it all together in a single assessment.
The latest IPCC Assessment Report, its fourth, involved 2,500 reviewers looking at the scientific work of 800 authors from 130 countries. When released it will provide the latest distillation of how global climate has changed since the last assessment and where climate change is taking us in the future.
Prediction studies from bodies such as the Met Éireann-based Community Climate Change Consortium for Ireland (C4I) and the Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units (Icarus) based at NUI Maynooth form part of the international pool of climate prediction data, says Sheridan.
"The IPCC people look at all the published literature," he says, and all of it was probably considered during the long assessment period for the IPCC report.
Efforts such as C4I and Icarus are important for informing policy-makers here about what the future holds. "The primary purpose is to look at the impacts of climate change on Ireland," Sheridan says.
Modelling done here has provided indications of likely changes that mirror changes expected in other part of the world. Globally the 12 warmest years on record have all occurred since the mid-1990s.
Our own local climate has followed closely the patterns seen elsewhere, with an abrupt increase in average annual temperatures recorded since 1990.
The 1990s now rank as the warmest decade on record here, states Met Éireann's head of the Climatology and Observation Division, Liam Keegan. And if the warming trend persists then this record looks likely to be broken by the first decade of the 21st century.
"Things have certainly changed," he says. And 2006 was yet another record-setting year. "In some locations it was the warmest year on record. It all points to the same threat, that temperature has been increasing since the 1990s at a rate we have not seen before."
Our understanding of past and current climatic conditions in Ireland comes from meteorological measurements taken across the State since the 1940s by Met Éireann and before then by weather stations in Valentia Island in Co Kerry, the Armagh Observatory in Co Armagh and Markree Castle in Co Sligo. Some of these data sets reach back 150 years, Keegan says.
And while Greenland can study its ancient climate using ice core samples, we haven't this option and can't reliably reproduce what climate was like here before the 19th century, he adds.
Yet the current data that will be released by the IPCC tomorrow will have a tremendous impact, he believes. "The IPCC is a very respected body. When it comes from the IPCC it is global and comes with a stamp of approval. It is a big event."
It all points towards the same conclusion, says Keegan. "A few years ago some people would have argued with you, but it is accepted today: we are in climate change and it is as a result of man's influence in relation to carbon dioxide emissions."