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Other options, including those aimed more directly at water supply, are to seed clouds with the hopes of increasing snow volumes in the high-elevation mountains. Local governments and power companies spend tens of millions of dollars a year on such seeding projects that have been shown to increase snowpack.

But, experts say, such efforts are increasingly undermined by dust and soot accumulations that increase the melt rate of snowpacks, regardless of their depth.

And the problems will persist as long as the Western climate continues to warm, perhaps by as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 90 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

If such conditions persist, Painter said this year's dust storm intensity and early snowmelt could become the norm across the region.

Belnap, the USGS research ecologist, said focused attention could help reverse the trend, but it will take more effort on the part of government and landowners.

"We do not manage for dust. We don't even think about it," she said. "I think the time is coming where we are going to have to decide we need to think about dust."

What it all means

If a 1 metre rise in sea level doesn't sound like much, consider this: about 60 million people live within 1 metre of mean sea level, a number expected to grow to about 130 million by 2100.

Much of this population lives in the nine major river deltas in south and southeast Asia. Parts of countries such as Bangladesh, along with some island nations like the Maldives, will simply be submerged.

According to a 2005 report, a 1-metre rise in sea level will affect 13 million people in five European countries and destroy property worth $600 billion, with the Netherlands the worst affected. In the UK, existing defences are insufficient to protect parts of the east and south coast, including the cities of Hull and Portsmouth.

Besides inundation, higher seas raise the risk of severe storm surges and dangerous flooding. The entire Atlantic seaboard of North America, including New York, Boston and Washington DC, and the Gulf coast will become more vulnerable to hurricanes. Today's 100-year storm floods might occur as often as every four years - in which case it will make more sense to abandon devastated regions and towns than to keep rebuilding them.

With a workable climate bill in his pocket, President Obama might have been able to begin building that global consensus in Italy. Instead, it looks as if the delegates from other nations may have done what 219 U.S. House members who voted up Waxman-Markey last month did not: critically read the 1,400-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and deduce that it's no more fit to rescue our climate than a V-2 rocket was to land a man on the moon.

I share that conclusion, and have explained why to members of Congress before and will again at a Capitol Hill briefing on July 13. Science has exposed the climate threat and revealed this inconvenient truth: If we burn even half of Earth's remaining fossil fuels we will destroy the planet as humanity knows it. The added emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will set our Earth irreversibly onto a course toward an ice-free state, a course that will initiate a chain reaction of irreversible and catastrophic climate changes.

The concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere now stands at 387 parts per million, the highest level in 600,000 years and more than 100 ppm higher than the amount at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Burning just the oil and gas sitting in known fields will drive atmospheric CO2 well over 400 ppm and ignite a devil's cauldron of melted icecaps, bubbling permafrost, and combustible forests from which there will be no turning back. But if we cut off the largest source of carbon dioxide, coal, we have a chance to bring CO2 back to 350 ppm and still lower through agricultural and forestry practices that increase carbon storage in trees and soil.

The essential step, then, is to phase out coal emissions over the next two decades. And to declare off limits artificial high-carbon fuels such as tar sands and shale while moving to phase out dependence on conventional petroleum as well.

It's a depressing outlook.

Not necessarily. I don't think 9 billion is better than 1 billion. I see humans as rather like the first photosynthesisers, which when they first appeared on the planet caused enormous damage by releasing oxygen - a nasty, poisonous gas. It took a long time, but it turned out in the end to be of enormous benefit. I look on humans in much the same light. For the first time in its 3.5 billion years of existence, the planet has an intelligent, communicating species that can consider the whole system and even do things about it. They are not yet bright enough, they have still to evolve quite a way, but they could become a very positive contributor to planetary welfare.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists
expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying
rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe - a rise
in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable - can no longer be
considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome
if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a
temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this
century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global
greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some
mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans,
are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there's growing evidence
that climate change is self-reinforcing - that, for example, rising
temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even
more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points
out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate
of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas,
and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves - the kind that
traditionally occur only once in a generation - may become annual or
biannual events.

In other words, we're facing a clear and present danger to our way
of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify
failing to act?

Kennett argues that much of the geological research community has turned a blind eye to the evidence of methane hydrate's role in climate change. "It's a paradigm problem. The community is not prepared at this time to make a paradigm shift," he says. "[Climate change] is the biggest issue of our time. I think we need to look at this."

He suggests we start by taking a cold, hard look at the Arctic, where a great deal of methane hydrate exists in permafrost and under the continental shelf. Because of the extreme cold, hydrates are stable at shallower depths in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth. Warm up the Arctic a bit, and these shallow hydrates will be the first to come apart, Kennett warns. "Is this already happening? Are we living in it now?"

Kennett has valid reasons for wondering. Inside the Arctic Circle, the ocean is reportedly bubbling like a freshly uncorked magnum of Dom Perignon. In September, scientists aboard a Russian research vessel described methane gas fizzing up from the seabed in several areas of the Arctic. Just a few days later, British scientists exploring the ocean west of the Norwegian island of Svalbard reported hundreds of these methane plumes.

It all sounds pretty ominous, but researchers aren't ready to attribute the recently observed methane bubbles in the Arctic to melting hydrates. Scientific reports of the plumes have not yet been published or peer-reviewed. Although Kennett is fearful of a methane catastrophe, he's not yet sure this is it. "I need to be convinced," he says.

He's not the only one. For one thing, says Archer, "there weren't observations before, so it's hard to say if it's a new phenomenon." Perhaps methane has been sputtering up from the Arctic for decades, with no one around to see it. What's more, many potential sources of methane exist. As bacteria break down thawing organic matter, they release the gas as a byproduct. "There's all this juicy organic carbon preserved in these areas," Archer points out. "These methane escapes could be from decomposing peat."

Ruppel, too, is a long way from ringing any alarm bells over the Arctic bubbles. "Perhaps people are jumping to conclusions before the story is really clear in the Arctic," she says. "My suspicion is that almost all of that methane has nothing to do with gas hydrates."

But let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that the Arctic gas plumes do turn out to be from methane hydrates. Does that mean it's curtains for life as we know it? Not necessarily.

Dr. Carl N. Hodges is turning the tide on sea-level rise and revolutionizing agriculture in the process.

As the founder and chairman of The Seawater Foundation, Dr. Hodges is convinced that by following nature's example, it is possible to prevent climate change induced sea-level rises. With a background in atmospheric physics and mathematics, Dr. Hodges has developed an integrated agricultural and aquacultural farm in Africa -- with a second one in Mexico -- which uses seawater to green the desert.

Rather than using seawater for desalination -- which requires great energy consumption -- Dr. Hodges proposes that seawater can be drawn inland to irrigate seawater-tolerant crops and plants, creating arable land, food and employment in areas once thought too dry to sustain life.

Bush Sin 1: Blew hot air on global warming

By refusing to agree to mandatory greenhouse gas emission reductions, the Bush administration gave major developing nations, such as China and India, carte blanche to do the same. After all, why should these growing economies do anything about global warming when the one of the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluters and richest nations couldn't be bothered?

"The most shameful thing we've done of all is to walk away from the international debate on climate, which has crippled the debate and caused everyone else in the world to think that we're hypocritical and deluded," says Bill McKibben, author and climate activist. "The Chinese have all the coal they need to destroy the atmosphere by themselves to get rich, and we have no moral objection as to why they shouldn't just go ahead and burn it, because that's precisely what we did."

They don't call it global warming for nothing. The result: eight precious years wasted in the fight against global warming as we watched carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere shoot up, while scientists' predictions about the speed and severity of global warming became increasingly dire.

Obama mission

Signal that the United States will change its shameful record on global warming -- even before taking office. Attend the international climate talks in Poznan, Poland, this December, and electrify the rest of the world with a promise that the U.S. is serious about reducing greenhouse gases. That could set the stage for the major climate negotiations to come in Copenhagen, Demark, in December 2009, when a climate treaty to succeed Kyoto needs to be hammered out.