For those who haven't been keeping up, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been spending the last six years on the Fourth Assessment Report on climate change and just last week released the final report of the latest three-part assessment. The IPCC was established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988 to regularly assess the state of the science on the risk of anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change (i.e., global warming), its impacts, and what we can do about it. The first part of the Fourth Assessment on the state of the science on climate change, "The Physical Science Basis," was released in Paris on February 2, 2007. Part two, "Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability," was released in Brussels on April 6, 2007. And just last Friday on May 4, the third report "Mitigation of Climate Change" was released in Bangkok, Thailand. The announcements only marked the release of the summaries for policymakers. Editing remains to be done for the release of the full reports, except for part one, which is now available online. If you're not familiar with climate change science, or even if you are, these summaries are good starting points for understanding what we know about global warming and climate change at this time. Scientific literature references for further reading can be found at the end of each chapter of the full reports.

See also:

• IPCC Homepage
• Webcast of the Working Group III Report press conference
• Climate Panel Reaches Consensus on the Need to Reduce Harmful Emissions [NY Times]