As an SUV driver, I can't help but feel a little guilty from time to time about the warming caused by my carbon footprint. So, it was nice to see this story from NPR which told me that "climate change is essentially irreversible" and so my conclusion from the story is that it is now OK for me to drive my SUV without feeling guilty.

Climate change is essentially irreversible, according to a sobering new scientific study.

As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the world will experience more and more long-term environmental disruption. The damage will persist even when, and if, emissions are brought under control, says study author Susan Solomon, who is among the world's top climate scientists.

"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."

That's the case for some of the gases that contribute to climate change, such as 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.

Actually, the most troubling part of the story was this line near the end.

"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."

So, as I read this, the author of the study is saying that because climate change is irreversible, we should be even more committed to solving the problem than a problem that we could actually solve? Maybe I'm just too stupid to understand, but that makes zero sense to me.

On the serious side, while I don't believe that what was originally global cooling... which then became global warming and is now just called global climate change to avoid confusion can be attributed to man, I am still a believer in being a good steward of the planet. I think reducing our reliance on fossil fuels is a good thing. I'd also like to see a resurgence of nuclear power for electrical production and exploration to access those fossil fuels that we already have under the ground here in the USA in order to reduce energy costs and thus free up fiscal resources for research on alternative energy solutions.