On the Nature Blog, 'The Great Beyond', on January 27, 2009, Daniel Cressey wrote

No way back from climate change

Much like the sins in Pandora’s Box, once carbon dioxide is out, it’s not going away anytime soon. And it has real and quantifiable impacts.

In this week’s PNAS, Susan Solomon, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and her colleagues report that “the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop”.

See NOAA Press Release