*Brought to you by the people who assured you that situations like last summer were impossible.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/14/1009121/science-of-global-warming-impacts-guide/
"In this post, I will summarize what the recent scientific literature says are the key impacts we face in the coming decades if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path. These include:
"Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 10°F over much of the United States
"Permanent Dust Bowl conditions over the U.S. Southwest and many other regions around the globe that are heavily populated and/or heavily farmed.
"Sea level rise of some 1 foot by 2050, then 4 to 6 feet (or more) by 2100, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
"Massive species loss on land and sea — perhaps 50% or more of all biodiversity.
"Unexpected impacts — the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
"Much more extreme weather
"Food insecurity — the increasing difficulty of feeding 7 billion, then 8 billion, and then 9 billion people in a world with an ever-worsening climate.
"Myriad direct health impacts
"Remember, these will all be happening simultaneously and getting worse decade after decade. Equally tragic, a 2009 NOAA-led study found the worst impacts would be “largely irreversible for 1000 years.”
"The single biggest failure of messaging by climate scientists (until very recently) has been the failure to explain to the public, opinion makers, and the media that business-as-usual warming results in simultaneous, ever-worsening impacts that, individually, are each beyond catastrophic, but combined are unimaginablly horrific. For these impacts, terms like “global warming” and “climate change” are essentially euphemisms. That is why I have preferred the term “Hell and High Water.”..."
