I stayed up late last night (UK time) to watch Barack Obama deliver his 2015 State of the Union address to the United States Congress. I was particularly interested to hear what he had to say about climate change. In the event he said the word "climate" four times. Apparently that's a new record.

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I've recently become engaged in a conversation over at Andy Extance's "Simple Climate" blog on the subject of "IPCC: Millions of words on climate change are not enough", which is rather clogging up the conversation over there. Here are some edited highlights (with the odd typo fixed, and the odd link added):

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The videos from the Transformational Climate Science conference at Exeter University are still not yet available, but on Monday May 19th the Met Office hosted another climate change conference, this time in London. This one was held in conjunction with the Walker Institute at the University of Reading and the Grantham Institute for Climate change at Imperial College London, and was entitled "Climate change – the latest evidence and implications for business". As the title suggests, the audience this time around consisted of businesspeople instead of climate scientists. Some of the speakers from Exeter had headed up to London to speak about all things IPCC for the second time in a week, and those proceedings are already available on video at the Climasphere web site.

More on Climate Change – The Latest Evidence and Implications

Last week the United Kingdom's Committee on Climate Change "launched a call for evidence in order to identify relevant published information of the risks and opportunities to the UK from climate change". Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, last night I attended a talk organised by Transition Exeter entitled "Climate Change Update – The Pathway to Two Degrees Warming" and subtitled "Can Global Warming be Limited to Two Degrees?"  The evidence was presented on the night by Dr. Jeff Ridley from the Met Office's Hadley Centre here in Exeter and consisted of an overview of the results of the UK Government funded AVOID research programme, followed by a question and answer session with the members of Transition Exeter. The brief executive summary of the answer to today's headline question is :

More on Can Global Warming be Limited to Two Degrees?

After all the hullabaloo in the "popular press" recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC for short) have now started issuing information following the meeting in Stockholm this week discussing the contribution of their Working Group I to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5 for short). According to the initial press release:

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