Greenhouse Earth Annika Nilsson Climate change has become one of the major issues on the international environmental agenda. Predictions of a rising sea and devastating droughts have alerted politicians worldwide to the risks of continued increases in the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But to change the direction of development is not an easy process. A myriad of political decisions has to be made on a national as well as international level. Those decisions need to be based on facts. The questions are: How big a problem is climate change really? How much do the scientists know about what is in store? Since the greenhouse effect and global warming were first brought up on the international agenda of environmental problems, many efforts have been made to evaluate critically the scientific base for any predictions about climate change. This book is an attempt to capture the messages in those reports to give the non-scientific reader a picture of the different factors that scientists consider in their scenarios of the future. The decisions called for in a global climate convention have to be made by policy makers worldwide, but the basis for those decisions is the picture painted by scientists.