A new government body is about to publish a number of scenarios hypothesising how our climate might change by the year 2100. The information provided will be used to help decide how to start adapting our society to changes resulting from global warming which will be particularly important when considering large infrastructure projects with a long lifespan. Whilst all agree that there is some degree of global warming, some scientists argue that we are overemphasising this long-term approach and should instead be focusing on shorter range natural variability which is not well understood and often difficult to predict. They claim that there is no way of knowing how accurate these long range hypotheses will be, and also question how useful the hypotheses will be for predicting the climate for the next 10 years. All existing long-term predictions suggest that within fifty years our summer will be drier and heat waves will be the norm, but what, if anything, does that tell us about the next

Existing targets for reducing carbon emissions worldwide acknowledge that the current high levels of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere are an accumulation over many decades that can be directly attributed to today’s developed economies. This situation has led to developing economies like India, China and Mexico having less aggressive targets for emissions reduction than the developed countries. There is concern though that unless these large emerging economies are fully committed to reducing carbon emissions, their desire for rapid economic growth coupled with less stringent emission targets will encourage them to continue to use traditional production methods rather than introduce cleaner and more sustainable technologies. If the reduction of carbon emissions worldwide has any hope of success, the emerging economies must be able to contribute on an equal basis to the decision making processes which will determine how this is to be achieved.