"Ultimately, the amount of fossil fuel available could be enough to raise the atmospheric CO2 concentration higher than it has been in millions of years,"
Most of us are still thinking of climate change like we think of other natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornados and floods. They come, we recover and adjust, then things return to normal. As this article attests, Climate Change is not that kind of disaster. For all intents and purposes, Climate Change is forever. We have loaded up the atmosphere with carbon compounds that have been locked away in the earth's crust for hundreds of millions of years and that carbon is not going to go away quickly.
We have essentially done two permanent things. We have used up a significant portion of the irreplaceable hydrocarbon supply that we once had available, most of the easy supply in fact, and we have used it in such a way that the atmosphere has been drastically modified for the foreseeable future. These two effects now define the new world that we are living in and will be living in from now on.
We are far from accepting this new reality. Society works in slow motion even when things are obvious so a slowly evolving, ill-defined new reality isn't likely to get a quick response. As the consequences of these effects (reduced energy supply and more extreme weather) become apparent we will, of course, have to deal with them but we really should begin to prepare now. The longer we wait the harder it will become.
