Climate change is here.
If you'd like to muck around in the arcane science of climate models and carbon sinks, UW professor Bill Calvin has an excellent website with tons of links to the relevant agencies and think tanks. For example, even mild shifts in climate disrupt weather patterns. This would be bad news in any case, but it so happens that we've made ourselves doubly vulnerable to such disastrous changes. First of all, we live in areas, like shores of Puget Sound and the banks of our many rivers, which are expected to be hit hard. Bluntly, we've never planned for the sea to rise, or for rivers to dry up in the summer, or for hundred-year storms to hit us twice every winter.