Billmon: Death Wish

Experts were scarcely prepared for the shock that came from the Greenland ice plateau in 1993 . . . comparison between [ice] cores showed convincingly that climate could change more rapidly than almost any scientist had imagined. Swings of temperature that were believed in the 1950s to take tens of thousands of years, in the 1970s to take thousands of years, and in the 1980s to take hundreds of years, were now found to take only decades.

. . . Computer modelers, now fully alerted to the delicate balance of salinity and temperature that drove the North Atlantic circulation, found that global warming might bring future changes in precipitation that could shut down the current heat transport. The 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, pronouncing the official consensus of the world's governments and their climate experts, reported that a shutdown in the coming century was "unlikely" but "cannot be ruled out." If such a shutdown did occur, it would change climates all around the North Atlantic -- a dangerous cooling brought on by global warming.

Physics Today.org
The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change
2003

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If Bush is worried that Kyoto would "wreck our economy," he ought to think about what a 5-10°C drop in mean temperatures on the eastern seaboard and/or or a radical change in rainfall patterns in the Mississippi River valley might do to it.