Sam Seder: When Climate Change Becomes "Real," It Will Be Too Late

[tclambert]

4. It's already too late.

It takes decades for the atmosphere to reach a new equilibrium. The CO2 already in the air won't make its presence completely felt for twenty or thirty years. Yet it will stay in the atmosphere for a thousand years. Meanwhile, we have passed a number of tipping points, thereby activating feedback loops that will continue to make warming worse, even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels this instant.

But what is inevitable in thirty years is invisible today. And people manage to ignore what is visible. They can stand ankle-deep in seawater in Miami Beach and say, "I don't see any evidence of sea level rise."