Is Global Warming Irreversible?

Climate change is essentially irreversible, according to a  study recently published.
As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the world will experience more and more problems of a climatic nature.
The damage will persist even when, and if, pollution emissions are brought under control, says study author Susan Solomon.
“We’re used to thinking about pollution problems as things that we can fix,” Solomon says. “Smog, we just cut back and everything will be better later. Or haze, you know, it’ll go away pretty quickly.”
A leading climatologist Solomon is an authority on the subject.
It is true for gases like methane and nitrous oxide, but as Solomon and colleagues suggest in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is not true for the most abundant greenhouse gas: carbon dioxide. Turning off the carbon dioxide emissions won’t stop global warming.
“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years,” Solomon says.
The oceans are now acting like a big heat sink, soaking up all that excess heat, and a lot of the toxins too.
The carbon dioxide and heat will eventually start coming out of the ocean.
Solomon is a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“If we continue with business as usual for even a few more decades, she says, those emissions could be enough to create permanent dust-bowl conditions in the U.S. Southwest and around the Mediterranean.”
“The sea level rise is a much slower thing, so it will take a long time to happen, but we will lock into it, based on the peak level of  co2 we reach in this century,” Solomon says.
This new idea that climate change is irreversible and global warming cannot be easily stopped has long term consequences.
“These are all … changes that are starting to happen in at least a minor way already,” says Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University. “So the question becomes, where do we stop it, when does all of this become dangerous?”
The answer, he says, is sooner rather than later.
“That’s really a political decision because there’s more at issue than just the science. It’s the issue of what the science says, plus what’s feasible politically, plus what’s reasonable economically to do,” Oppenheimer says.
But despite this grim prognosis, Solomon says this is not time to declare the problem hopeless and give up.
“I guess if it’s irreversible, to me it seems all the more reason you might want to do something about it,” she says. “Because committing to something that you can’t back out of seems to me like a step that you’d want to take even more carefully than something you thought you could reverse.”
We all need to think twice about how we are now living, the consequences being felt for much longer than first anticipated.