Trapped!
It's Getting Hot in Herre

More dire warnings on global warming/climate change via the NYTimes:

If emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at the current rate, there may be many centuries of warming and a near total loss of Arctic tundra, according to a new climate study.

Over all, the world would experience profound transformations, some potentially beneficial but many disruptive, and all at a pace rarely seen in nature, said the authors of the new study, which was published yesterday in The Journal of Climate.

"The question is no longer whether we will need to address this problem, but when we will need to address the problem," said Kenneth Caldeira, an author of the study and a climate expert at the Department of Global Ecology of the Carneige Institution, based at Stanford University.
[...]
The paper's lead author, Bala Govindasamy of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said it might be 20 or 30 years before the scope of the human-caused changes became evident. The researchers ran a computer model that simulates the climate system and the flow of heat-trapping carbon into the air in the form of carbon dioxide, then back into soils and the ocean.

Most simulations of the potential human impact on climate have been confined to studying the next 100 years or so, but in this case the scientists started the calculations with the year 1870 and let the computers churn away through 2300. The authors emphasized that uncertainties were high over such a time span and said the study was intended to illustrate broad consequences rather than project specific ones.

Here's a bit more from the news release:

“We took a very holistic view,” Bala said. “What if we burn everything? It will be a wake-up call in climate change.”

As for global warming skeptics, Bala said the proof is already evident.

“Even if people don’t believe in it today, the evidence will be there in 20 years,” he said. “These are long-term problems.”

He pointed to the 2003 European heat wave and the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season as examples of extreme climate change.

“We definitely know we are going to warm over the next 300 years,” he said. “In reality, we may be worse off than we predict.”

But here's the key (and final) graf from the NYTimes:

"It's a cautionary tale," said Gerald A. Meehl, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who has conducted similar studies. "The message is not to give up because the changes appear overwhelming, but instead the message should be the longer we wait to do something, the worse the consequences."

It's time to become proactive, not stuck-in-the-mud reactive.