Abstract

This chapter assesses the observed changes in surface and atmospheric climate, placing new observations and new analyses made during the past six years (since the Third Assessment Report - TAR) in the context of the previous instrumental record. In previous IPCC reports, palaeo-observations from ... Show moreThis chapter assesses the observed changes in surface and atmospheric climate, placing new observations and new analyses made during the past six years (since the Third Assessment Report - TAR) in the context of the previous instrumental record. In previous IPCC reports, palaeo-observations from proxy data for the pre-instrumental past and observations from the ocean and ice domains were included within the same chapter. This helped the overall assessment of the consistency among the various variables and their synthesis into a coherent picture of change. However, the amount of information became unwieldy and is now spread over Chapters 3 to 6. Nevertheless, a short synthesis and scrutiny of the consistency of all the observations is included here (see Section 3.9). Show less