Climate Links

These are just a few links to get you started. There's a lot of stuff out there...

Overviews and general sites

• RealClimate: this is a good starting point for all climate change-related questions. The discussion is sometimes a bit technical, but a recent entry (called Start Here) aims to be a beginner's guide a reference to other information sources out there.
• The Assessment Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are available directly from the IPCC. They're free to download. They're a little hard to read without some familiarity with the literature, so I'd recommend starting with the Summary For Policymakers, which is slightly easier (and shorter!). Then you can download other chapters if you're interested. Most of the issues we covered in our Sustainable Redland session on May 23 are covered to some extent or other in the Fourth Assessment Report (usually called AR4), mostly in the Working Group 1 part (which is the science bit).
• New Scientist recently published a “guide for the perplexed”, covering some of the myths about climate change, as well as addressing some of the more common lines of attack of the climate change denialist movement. It's all available online.

Aviation and climate change

The Aviation Environment Federation (AEF — website here) has a publication called “Fly Now, Grieve Later” that lays out some of the issues surrounding aviation and the environment. It's available online.

In 1999, the IPCC published its first (and so far only) investigation into the impacts of a specific industry on the climate. That industry was the aviation industry, and although the full report is only available to buy, there is a summary document available online.

UK issues

The best source I've found for questions relating to the UK is the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP — website here). They do a lot of interesting work and most of their reports are available from their website via a quick and simple free registration.

Water

The Human Development Reports from the United Nations Development Programme are available from their website. You can get the 2006 report there (the one about water), but the 2007 report, which is about climate change, won't be available until November.

The other (rather long) United Nations report about water is available here.

All of the UN reports can be downloaded from their websites for free.