http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/17/news/economy/climate_fortune/index.htm

Published on 17 Jan 2006 by Fortune. Archived on 19 Jan 2006.

Cloudy with a chance of chaos..........A disturbing consensus is emerging among the scientists who study global warming: Climate change may bring more violent swings than they ever thought, and it may set in sooner. Lately John Browne, the CEO of BP, has been jolting audiences with a list of proposed solutions that hint at the vastness of the challenge. It aims at stabilizing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at about double the pre-industrial level while continuing economic growth. To do that, carbon emissions would have to be reduced ultimately by seven gigatons a year. A gigaton, or a billion tons, is even bigger than it sounds. Eliminating just one, argues Browne, would mean building 700 nuclear stations to replace fossil-fuel-burning power plants, or increasing the use of solar power by a factor of 700, or stopping all deforestation and doubling present efforts at reforestation. Achieve all three of these, and pull off four more equally large-scale reallocations of capital and infrastructure, and the world would probably stabilize its carbon emissions.

There's just one catch: Even change on this vast scale might not stop global warming.

comments about the above article:
This article has to be the most apocalyptic thing that I have ever seen in a U.S. business publication. I'm sure that there are similar articles in a lot of environmental magazines, but Fortune? They are basically presenting the possibility of mass starvation around the globe. They are posing the question that what if the recent good weather since the end of the Little Ice Age was just an interlude between violent weather extremes?

The entire article is excellent