Though the pre-Copenhagen agreement that everyone had hoped for in New York last week did not materialize, a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) did. The Climate Change Compendium publishes over 400 peer-reviewed scientific papers on the latest finding in climate research.

 

If you want some apocalyptic bedtime reading, I encourage you to download the full report (PDF) which is divided into five sections -- Earth Systems, Earth Ice, Earth Oceans, Earth Ecosystems and Systems Management.

 

As Jerry Cope pointed out today on Huffington Post, the numbers are sobering ... far, far worse than the most dire of Al Gore's inconvenient predictions back in 2007.

 

A full 6.3 degree global temperature is now forecasted. That might sound pleasant if you live in Vermont where summer temperatures are a modest 85 degrees, but if you are one of the nearly one billion people who could be displaced by the resulting global sea rise of 10 meters (or more) you should be very, very worried.

 

Cope puts it this way, "COP15 may very well be the last chance for the world to reach a consensus on measures to reduce GHG emissions and avoid climate chaos for the next millennium."

 

See the impact of climate change on Google Earth's new climate layer.