Interesting ideas in a PDF presentation on climate change. It is amazing what difference we have created in moving from 285ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere to the present 390ppm. One disturbing idea is that the temperature effects have so far been buffered by warming the ocean and melting lots of ice in glaciers. Since a lot of places rely on glaciers to feed rivers during the summer, before the glaciers melt entirely we need to be building a whole lot more storage capacity in our reservoirs or many places are going to experience extremely severe water shortages in the summer months.
“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.” – John Holdren Source - page 68
Other sources for the science background to this http://realclimate.org and http://climateprogress.org/.