The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate IPCC, 1995

Sea level will rise and ocean currents will alter, probably dramatically.

In 1995 the world's climate scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that climate change had arrived.

Since 1988, the IPCC scientists have conducted exhaustive research and debate on climate change. Their conclusion is that if economies continue to rely on fossil fuels as they do, the average temperature on earth is likely to rise higher and faster than it ever has in the last 10,000 years.

The most noticeable effects of climate change will not be a gradual warming. 'Extreme events'such as severe droughts, floods and storms will happen more often.

Sea level will rise and ocean currents will alter, possibly dramatically. In nature, ecosystems would have to adapt to survive. For example, some types of forests would have to 'migrate'up mountains, or towards the poles. But the changes will be too fast for many ecosystems to adapt. Massive species extinction and widescale ecosystem breakdown is expected.

Inhabitants of small island states in the Pacific could lose their homes forever because of sea-level rise. As the IPCC warns: 'Storm-surges and flooding could threaten entire cultures.'

The IPCC predicts impacts on human health and 'significant loss of life.'Diseases like malaria would spread, with a potential 50-80 million additional cases a year - and could even reach countries previously free of it, like Britain.

Alarming though the prospect of climate change is, there are signs that it is already underway.

Alarming though the prospect of climate change is,there are signs that it is already underway.

For instance, over the last 50 years, a rapid temperature rise of 2.5°C in the Antarctic Peninsula has resulted in the melting of vast areas of the ice shelf. Greenpeace's ship the Arctic Sunrise was the first vessel ever to circumnavigate James Ross Island, in February 1997. The passage was impossible two years previously because of a 200m-thick ice shelf which joined the island to the Antarctic continent. The shelf collapsed in January 1995.