Reply #3: Yesterday would have been nice.

[Lionel Mandrake]

Trying to stop global warming may be an exercise in futility, but slowing it down and learning to live with it are better than ignoring it.

The biggest problem is that without geo-engineering (which may be impractical) the permafrost will all melt. This will release a lot of methane. Some of the methane will drift up into the stratosphere, where it will act as a greenhouse gas. Methane is a much more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels entirely, the methane released from the permafrost would produce much more global warming than we have seen up to now.