Potential impacts of climate change on the marine environment need to be established to improve our understanding and management of marine systems. Possible future changes due to the modulating role that the oceans play in global warming and its regional impact on terrestrial climate also needs to be determined as a key output of global climate change models. Some direct changes in marine systems have already been observed that are considered to be linked to global warming; at present the impacts that these will cause are uncertain and difficult to predict. As future emissions of greenhouse gases and the global and local consequences of these emissions are uncertain due to imperfect knowledge of future changes in energy use and other emission sources, predicting future change is complex. To overcome these difficulties the IPCC has determined a number of scenarios of possible changes in the climate of the world depending on different states of regional and global development.

Scenarios of how the UK climate may change over the next 100 years have been produced by UKCIP to enable an integrated assessment of climate change impacts and are presented in the report "Climate Change Scenarios for the United Kingdom".
Useful additional information on climate issues is available in the web based Encyclopaedia of the Atmospheric Environment http://www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/eae/. Up to the present (January 2006) marine climate change scenarios at regional and global scales have not been produced, but are expected as one of the products of a next generation Hadley model in 2006. However, map products covering UK marine and coastal environments have been produced for mean sea surface temperature and daily mean wind speed http://www.ukcip.org.uk/scenarios/ukcip02/maps/marine.asp using UKCIP02 and the 50km HadRM3 regional climate model.