Within one week of being sworn in as the 44th president, Barack Obama made abundantly clear that the bright, rosy new America of Hope would be a big departure from the dark days of Bush's tenure: Obama reversed an 11th-hour decision to take wolves off of the endangered species list, asked the EPA to impose strict clean car standards, and put Karl Rove in the White House compost bin. Across the nation, environmentalists were dancing the soles off of their non-leather vegan shoes (which doesn't actually take long.)

Leave it to a bunch of egghead climate scientists to throw ice water on that parade. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that global warming is essentially irreversible. That's right: irreversible. Whereas we believed that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide then global temperatures would resume normal levels in 100 or 200 years, the study says that it would take over 1000, thanks to one culprit: the oceans. If we have an "oil addiction", then the oceans have acted like our silent-suffering codependent spouse, soaking up most of the excess heat and pretending they don't know we hide the scotch in the toilet tank.

Which doesn't mean that we shouldn't stop, climate scientist Susan Solomon says.

"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."

Or we could just throw all the oceans' clothes out on the lawn and stay up all night drunk-dialing other planets with sexier, cooler bodies of water. The choice is ours.

Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says (NPR)