Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science by Solomon et. al. The paper warns that we have already started to see accelerating impacts, and that even if we were to stop emitting all greenhouse gasses today, changes would continue for 1,000 years. The authors made certain to make it clear that we can still reduce the impacts. Their important message however was that if we do not take the most aggressive means possible, impacts will become progressively worse. The way our climate works, the longer the delay and the greater the forcing, the higher the chance of the most extreme impacts to occur.
Note from Bruce: Scientist today are beginning to get the real answers to the questions that they think they have known the answers to for some time now. They now have the data to allow the statistics to tell the story. What they can’t publish yet follows: If we are not as aggressive as we can possibly get in our treatment of climate change, if we don’t immediately stop to emitting all CO2 and start removing some of the CO2 that we have already placed in the atmosphere, we lose the planet.