Climate change in our lifetime

My first blog. (I've been writing webpages for ages, but I thought a blog might be useful for my soon to be finished book.)

1998 was a record hot year (the hottest in the last few decades). Today I heard in a talk by Vicky Pope that the climate models of the Hadley Centre predict that from 2010 onwards, every year has a 50% chance of being hotter than 1998.

Vicky Pope also showed a graph by Eleanor Burke showing predicted droughts. The graph showed the percentage of the world predicted to have "severe drought". In the past this percentage has bobbled around 2 or 3%. By 2060 it was projected that the percentage would be up to 20%.

I hadn't seen climate change expressed by climate scientists in such strikingly 'soon' terms.