The scientific consensus on climate change: Where do we go from here?

In 2004, I published an article documenting the widespread agreement among scientific researchers that anthropogenic climate change was underway. This agreement was made evident by statements of leading scientific societies and national and Royal Academies, and by the content of papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Yet, despite broad expert agreement, action on slowing, much less preventing further, climate change has been sluggish. Does this mean that our science has failed us? In this talk I discuss the implications of our collective inaction on anthropogenic climate change in the light of our current scientific knowledge.