lightblueline

Prof. Steve Schneider at Stanford has a website that provides an excellent overview of climate change, science, policy, and other topics and links: Climate Change
Here is an excerpt:
"Regardless of the different levels of vulnerability and adaptive capacity that future societies are expected to have and the need for regional-level assessments, all people, governments, and countries should realize that "we're in this together". In all regions, people's actions today will have long-term consequences. Even if humanity completely abandons fossil fuel emissions in the 22nd century, essentially irreversible long-term concentration increases in CO2 are projected to remain for centuries or more. Thus, the surface climate will continue to warm from this greenhouse gas elevation, with a transient response of centuries before an equilibrium warmer climate is established. How large that equilibrium temperature increase is depends on both the final stabilization level of the CO2 and the climate sensitivity. One threat of a warmer climate would be an ongoing rise in sea level. Warmer atmospheric temperatures would lead to warmer ocean water (and corresponding volumetric expansion) as the heat becomes well-mixed throughout the oceans — a time known to be on the order of 1,000 years. Instead of only up to a meter of sea level rise over the next century or two from thermal expansion — and perhaps a meter or two more over the five or so centuries after that as the warming penetrates all depths of the ocean — significant global warming could very well trigger nonlinear events like a deglaciation of major ice sheets near the poles. That would cause many additional meters of rising seas for many millennia, and once started might not be reversible on the time scale of thousands of years (see figure - CO2 concentration, temperature and sea level). Thus, the behavior of only a few generations can affect the sustainability of coastal and island regions for a hundred generations to come."