Climate Change Atlas

Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have been increasing since the Industrial Revolution, prompting concern that these increases could result in global and regional climate change. The impacts of this enhanced greenhouse effect are not yet fully understood and may depend on both the degree and the speed of climate change. Impact and policy assessments are demanding more information from climate modellers and specific case studies use the most up-to-date, model results available. But one model "snapshot" will not represent the whole scene, nor the full complexity and uncertainty of future climate prediction. This text puts such individual model scenarios into context and is a means of visually representing, comparing and communicating climate variables as derived from global climate models: temperature, precipitation, snow and ice. The displays are comprehensible to a broad community, motivated by the need to provide and utilize climate change assessments and to understand their reliability in the development of policy initiatives.