According to the conclusions reached by an international team of scientists, the greenhouse gas levels expected over the next several years will lead to devastating long-term droughts and a significant sea-level rise. The worst part is that these effects will persist for more than 1,000 years, no matter the actions taken.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the researchers from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Switzerland and France explained that carbon dioxide will stay in the atmosphere much longer than any other greenhouse gas.

At this point, the atmosphere’s carbon concentration measures 385 parts per million. The plan is to find a way of stabilizing it at about 450 ppm, but the worrying projections point out that it will reach 550 ppm by the year 2035, with a constant rise of 4.5 percent every year from that moment on. Even if there will be a way of keeping it at 450 ppm, it will still lead to significant sea rising that will threaten many coastal areas and also, areas like North Africa, Western Australia, Southern Europe and Southwestern United States will experience about 10 percent less rainfall. Even though it may not seem like much, such a number was recorded in many major drought periods in the past. 

"I think you have to think about this stuff as more like nuclear waste than acid rain: The more we add, the worse off we'll be," said NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon during a conference call. "The more time that we take to make decisions about carbon dioxide, the more irreversible climate change we'll be locked into," he added.

The anticipated rising sea levels are expected to cause "irreversible commitments to future changes in the geography of the Earth, since many coastal and island features would ultimately become submerged." There is also a note on the ocean’s role of absorbing a massive amount of carbon, but unfortunately, it will reach a limit and will not be able to carry on at the same pace.

In the same journal there is another study completed and presented by scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Their focus is on the emperor penguins from the Antarctic which will be extinct by 2100 if the sea ice continues to shrink as predicted. According to their scenario, over the next 90 years, the number of breeding pairs in a colony in Terre Adelie, Antarctica, will reach 400 from today’s 6,000, as they are completely dependent on the sea ice. The only solution for the emperor penguins would be to migrate or change the timing of their growth stages, but unfortunately the "evolution or migration seem unlikely for such long-lived species at the remote southern end of the Earth."