Scary Reports on Climate Change...

I know people may be getting tired of hearing dramatic reports about climate change, especially global warming which seems a bit out far from our daily lives in the midst of one the coldest winters of the last few years in the Western atmosphere.

But personally, this sort of reports scare me more than anything else because unlike, say the economic crisis, there may be no going back, or at least not for generations....

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel's 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.

(.../...)

"It's a vicious cycle of feedback where warming causes the release of carbon from permafrost, which causes more warming, which causes more release from permafrost," Field said.

(Washington Post)