This time we really mean it

Yes, it turns out climate change is not only real, it could wipe us all off the face of the planet.

And yes, some of us were already aware of this fact. For the rest (including the Bush White House,) scientists in the United States, speaking via the UK (where newspapers will actually report this news) have stated the civilization is in "imminent peril:"

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in "imminent peril".

Well actually they say that the planet is in peril, but I'm guessing the planet will still be here; it is we who will be missing from this watery picture.

The unnatural "forcing" of the climate as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens to generate a "flip" in the climate that could "spark a cataclysm" in the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, the scientists write.

Dramatic flips in the climate have occurred in the past but none has happened since the development of complex human societies and civilisation, which are unlikely to survive the same sort of environmental changes if they occurred now.

"Civilisation developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end," the scientists warn. Humanity cannot afford to burn the Earth's remaining underground reserves of fossil fuel. "To do so would guarantee dramatic climate change, yielding a different planet from the one on which civilisation developed and for which extensive physical infrastructure has been built," they say.

Basically -- this means that we have to stop using that oil we keep fighting over, and we have to stop using it now.

Yes, now: even before we completely run out. Yes -- before 'peak oil.' And yes, even before Exxon, Chevron, BP and Halliburton are done making their a killing on it. It appears mass planetary extinction and a total annihilation of civilization trumps most financial killings, even when the profits are going to bloated, greedy oil companies.

Ah, if only we mere mortals could get their attention...

Dr Hansen said we have about 10 years to put into effect the draconian measures needed to curb CO2 emissions quickly enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperature. Otherwise, the extra heat could trigger the rapid melting of polar ice sheets, made far worse by the "albedo flip" - when the sunlight reflected by white ice is suddenly absorbed as ice melts to become the dark surface of open water.

The glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland in the northern hemisphere, and the western Antarctic ice sheet in the south, both show signs of the rapid changes predicted with rising temperatures. "

The albedo flip property of ice/water provides a trigger mechanism. If the trigger mechanism is engaged long enough, multiple dynamical feedbacks will cause ice sheet collapse," the scientists say. "We argue that the required persistence for this trigger mechanism is at most a century, probably less."

(Bush leans back in his chair and grins at Dick. "Well heck - we got like, maybe a whole century before this happens, right? I mean - before everybody dies? I know I won't be around. Dick - you won't be around either, right?")