Our view: It's time to buckle down to reality of global warming; hard choices loom

San Diego County's terrain is often described as a coastal desert, a wonderful term that not only captures the land we live on but also the geological features marking our borders to the west and east. On Friday, history's largest collection of Earth, atmosphere and ocean scientists told us that we should expect both coast and desert to encroach upon our settled communities in the coming century, thanks to the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere.

The time is past when global climate change could be dismissed as a "liberal" issue, or even a political one. The phenomenon grimly described Friday by a team of 3,700 researchers from around the world, including several from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, must be seen as a matter of survival. For we have built, and in all likelihood, overbuilt in this coastal desert with too little concern for the fragility of the ecosystem on which we rely.

In a year in which climate change hit the mainstream, Friday's release of the summary of the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is the latest high-water mark. But what we do from here is of even greater importance.

Folks who take the growing scientific consensus about global warming seriously have in the past been labeled "alarmist" or "Chicken Littles." Skeptics have pointed to reported growth in Greenland's glaciers, or a few loud and credentialed critics of the global warming theory. Much fun is had harkening back to the dire predictions of a coming ice age that magazine covers trumpeted 30 years ago.

But it's no accident that many are confused about the state of the scientific debate over global warming; that doubt has been sown on purpose. Much as the tobacco industry funded sympathetic scientists for decades to foul the political arena with favorable research, the colossal carbon-generating industries have sunk millions into polluting public policy debates over global warming. We the media have also poorly served you by too often portraying the debate as more balanced than the science has long supported.

And those glaciers in Greenland? The last year has seen unprecedented melting in its ice sheet, so much so that the estimates of sea level rise reported Friday are already too conservative, many scientists say.

Sea levels in the Pacific off California's coast rose 7 inches during the last 100 years, and are expected to rise another 2 feet in the coming century. Not coincidentally, the United Nations' sponsored panel found that Arctic sea ice has been shrinking about 8 percent each decade since 1979. If you thought North County's beaches already looked starved of sand, keep watching. Ditto for the crumbling bluffs and straining sea walls.

Perhaps even more worrisome, the buildup of carbon dioxide is making the oceans more acidic, threatening the corals and plankton that underpin the incredibly complex and important marine food chain.

But if our problem to the west will be a surplus of water, that won't be the case to the east, scientists say.

Last month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that 2006 was the hottest year in the continental United States since records began being kept in the late 1800s. All 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1990, including six of the seven hottest since 2001. While the world's average temperatures got hotter by 1 degree Fahrenheit over the last century, average temperatures in San Diego County are expected to rise between 4 degrees and 8 degrees over the next 100 years.

Hear the chilling words spoken Friday by Scripps professor Lynn Talley, lead author of one of the report's chapters: "We may drown, but we'll probably burn first." Other Scripps scientists tell us that those hotter temperatures could trigger 30 percent more wildfires in Southern California before the century is out. More burning trees means more carbon escaping into the atmosphere, just one of the many feedback loops strongly suggesting that global warming will only accelerate as the 22nd century looms.

We will have a harder time finding the water with which to douse those fires, and more importantly, quench our thirsts. Between 70 percent and 95 percent of the water we use is pumped through pipelines from the Colorado River and Northern California's massive State Water Project. Most of that water starts out as snow, but warming temperatures are already giving us more rain and less snow. But snowmelt is the cornerstone of our water storage and delivery system; we don't have enough reservoirs to hold the rain we need down here.

The list of dire implications from Friday's report goes on, regrettably.

But as important as it is for us to grapple with the report's frightening facts, it is even more important for us to ponder the policies we must pursue. The overwhelming majority of experts in climate-related fields tell us that we can't stop the changes coming to our climate, but we can lessen their effects and buy time while we seek solutions.

In coming weeks, we pledge to examine some of the responses being considered on the local, state, federal and global levels. But please, read the summary released Friday. It can be found online here . We're going to need the combined intelligence, ingenuity and actions of the entire North County, California, United States and planet Earth population if we're to solve this one.

We're all in this together.