It's Here!!!!!

I have been saying for months here at MEJ and for years anywhere I could find someone who would listen that it's too late to stop global warming so we had better start trying to figure out how to live with it. Well here is some proof; Ocean heat store makes climate change inevitable.

No matter how well the world controls emissions of greenhouse gases, global climate change is inevitable, warn two new studies which take into account the oceans' slow response to warming.

Even if greenhouse gases never rise beyond their present level, temperatures and sea levels will continue rising for another century or more because of a time lag in the oceans' response to atmospheric temperatures, say researchers.

This time lag means policymakers cannot afford to wait to tackle climate change until its consequences become painful, because by then they will already be committed to further change, they urge. "The feeling is that if things are getting bad, you hit the stop button. But even if you do, the climate continues to change," says Gerald Meehl, a climatologist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.

By the time we realized that CO2 was a contributing factor it was too late. The impact of warmer ocean waters will be two fold:

• Rising Sea Levels

and


• More Powerful Storms

These two factors working together will make vast areas along the sea coasts uninhabitable. The Gulf Coast of the United States will be one of the first areas impacted. The Army Corps of Engineers has already said that it will do nothing more to protect New Orleans. The city barely missed a direct hit from a powerful hurricane last season and it is only a matter of time before it's luck runs out. Rising sea level combined with more powerful storms mean it's only a matter of time before the Florida panhandle is simply wiped clean. These scenarios are both likely in the next few years and will result in death and property losses in the billions of dollars. The correct political decision would be to halt all new construction on the Florida panhandle and the lowlands along the Gulf Coast, including New Orleans. Of course this is not going to happen. If you think reducing CO2 emissions was a political "no sale" imagine how that would go over. So once again denial will result in death and destruction not unlike the alcoholics denial frequently results in an early death.

Update
Mary over at The Left Coaster also chimes in.