In the News Now: 'Climate change, irreversibility, and urgency'

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego Distinguished  Professor Emeritus Richard Somerville writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that if society continues to allow greenhouse emissions to rise, “our children and their descendants, and ultimately all living things, will be faced with the consequences of more severe climate disruption.”

He adds in his essay “Climate change, irreversibility, and urgency” that “a failure to reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly and soon — soon being within a decade or so — will have large adverse effects that are, because of the physics and biogeochemistry of the climate system, essentially irreversible on human time scales. This is not an ideological or political assertion but an unavoidable consequence of a simple reality.”