This year has had its fair share of international political and scientific meetings on climate change and President Obama will meet other G8 leaders in Italy to discuss the crisis again this week.

This year has had its fair share of international political and scientific meetings on climate change and President Obama will meet other G8 leaders in Italy to discuss the crisis again this week.

Are the politicians really listening to what the science is telling them?

Many remain unmoved by increasingly urgent calls for action from the scientific community whereas others are taking action but not at the scale needed to reduce the risks.

The Waxman-Markey Bill, which has just passed a vote in the US House of Representatives, is an example. It is a historic action in the fight against climate change - but it is still a long way off what the scientific community recommends.

It also fails to adequately address the needs of millions of poor people around the world struggling to cope with a changing climate.

In the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, we agreed the climate system was warming unequivocally and that, if current rates of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity continue, the world would see further warming, accompanied by more extreme weather and sea level rise, and risks of abrupt and irreversible change.

The International Scientific Congress on Climate Change highlighted new findings which suggest we may have underestimated the damages from climate change. Major collaborative projects on carbon, food, water and human security suggest worrying shifts in the ability of oceans and land to take up greenhouse gases, an urgent need to adapt the world's food and water systems to climate change, and a complex set of vulnerabilities of the poor to the combined effects of climate change and other stresses.

Many politicians are using both uncertainty and cost as reasons not to act. Meanwhile the human face of climate change provides a powerful moral reminder of the effects of inaction.

Suffering the Science, a new report launched by Oxfam today, reveals the human tragedy unfolding in the world's poorest countries. It is harder to ignore or misinterpret the human stories of how climate change and vulnerability is affecting people across the world now.

People such as Florence Madamu from Uganda who has lost crop after crop because seasons are shifting. We often hear these human stories as we collect field data in places such as the Andes and the Arctic - where the disappearance of ice and snow threaten indigenous communities - or in the regions that are warming and drying and crops are failing such as in southern Africa and northern Mexico.

We rarely include them in research reports because they do not fit the study design or we lack statistics to confidently attribute the harm to climate change.

But living, breathing accounts of a changing climate and its impacts on the poor might provide the impetus for urgent climate action, which the huge weight of scientific evidence has not.

• Diana Liverman holds professorships at Oxford University, where she directed the Environmental Change Institute, and the University of Arizona.