The report describes the activities and plans of the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), which incorporates the U.S. Global Change Research Program established under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, and the Climate Change Research Initiative that was established by the President in 2001. CCSP coordinates and integrates scientific research on climate and global change supported by 13 participating departments and agencies of the U.S. Government. The document highlights recent advances and progress supported by CCSP-participating agencies in each of the program's research and observational elements, as called for in the Strategic Plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program released in July 2003, and later modified in the 2008 CCSP Revised Research Plan. The document also describes how observational and predictive capabilities are being improved and used to create tools to support decisionmaking at local, regional, and national scales to cope with environmental variability and change.

This report, prepared under the auspices of the President's National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), highlights the Program's recent research and describes future plans and goals. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was established in 1989 and authorized by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990. The first edition of Our Changing Planet was transmitted to the Congress as a supplement to the FY1990 budget. In just over a decade, the USGCRPhas generated remarkable improvements to our knowledge of Earth's global-scale environmental processes and helped identify and explain the causes and consequences of a series of global environmental changes, including ozone depletion and climate change.

This document, which is produced annually, describes the activities and plans of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), which was established in 1989 and authorized by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990. Strong bipartisan support for this inter-agency program has resulted in more than a decade's worth of scientific accomplishment. "Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward). Reducing the wide range of uncertainty inherent in current model predictions of global climate change will require major advances in understanding and modeling of both (1) the factors that determine atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and (2) the so-called 'feedbacks' that determine the sensitivity of the climate system to a prescribed increase in greenhouse gases. There is also a pressing need for a global system designed for monitoring climate. Climate projections will always be far from perfect. Confidence limits and probabilistic information, with their basis, should always be considered as an integral part of the information that climate …