August 9 - By Matt McGrath
Environment correspondent -BBC

The UN report on the science of climate change is set to make a huge impact. Our environment correspondent Matt McGrath considers some of the key lessons from it.

Climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying - and it's down to us

For those who live in the West, the dangers of warming our planet are no longer something distant, impacting people in faraway places.

"Climate change is not a problem of the future, it's here and now and affecting every region in the world," said Dr Friederike Otto from the University of Oxford, and one of the many authors on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

It is the confidence of the assertions that the scientists are now making that is the real strength of this new publication.

The phrase "very likely" appears 42 times in the 40-odd pages of the Summary for Policymakers. In scientific terms, that's 90-100% certain that something is real.

"I think there's not one single kind of new surprise that comes out, it's the over-arching solidness that makes this the strongest IPCC report ever made," Prof Arthur Petersen, from University College London (UCL), told BBC News.

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