Global warming -- its too late

From Common Dreams comes this definitely uncheery report that there is no way to reverse the climactic changes we're seeing now due to global warming. Seems that about 120 scientists from 11 countries have been working on a study for 20 years investigating the changes and the findings are not pretty. According to their findings, we can't stop our bad behaviours fast enough.

Here's a short quote from the article first printed in the Canadian Press:


One of the most surprising for David Barber, a sea ice specialist at the University of Manitoba, was the fact polar ice is melting at a rate of about 74,000 square kilometres each year - an area about the size of Lake Superior - and has been for the last 30 years.

"This is a very significant result, and it's not some sort of trend that's going to shift back the other way," Barber said Tuesday.

Barber added there is increasing concern in the scientific community that there are factors actually speeding up the melt, but he cautions it's too late to reverse the trend.
"The time to act actually was a few decades ago," he said.

"We're not going to be able to shift the economies of the planet to get off this fossil fuel addiction in a week, a year or a decade. But we have to start the process now to have some stability for future generations."

So much for the Bush administration's assertions that global warming can be dealt with by new technologies. File this one under the, "we should have noticed when the armadillos started moving north" category. Too bad. It was such a nice planet...