The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just issued its Fifth Assessment Report summarizing the best scientific information about global warming that is available in 2014.
Key findings are:

• It is extremely likely that humans are the dominant cause of warming since the mid-20^th century.
• Each of the past three decades has been successively warmer than the preceding decades since 1850.
• Oceans absorb more than 90% of the heat.
• Land temperatures remain at historic highs while ocean temperatures continue to climb.
• Oceans will continue to warm during the 21^st century.
• Global mean sea level will continue to rise during the 21^st century.
• It is very likely that the Artic sea ice cover will continue to shrink and thin as global mean surface temperature rises.
• Some of the changes in extreme weather and climate events observed since about 1950 have been linked to human influence.
• The globally averaged temperature shows a warming of .85 degrees centigrade over the period 1880 – 2012. And 65% of the carbon budget compatible with limiting future temperature to an overall 2 degrees C increase has already been used.
• Energy production remains the primary driver of greenhouse gas emissions.
• Measures exist to achieve the substantial emissions reductions required to limit likely warming to 2 degrees C.
• Delaying mitigation will substantially increase the challenges associated with limiting warming to 2 degrees C.

I consider the above information from the IPCC report to be noncontroversial and providing overwhelmingly strong evidence that global warming is taking place. Next question:  What do we do about it?  This will be the subject of my next post!