Someone worth paying attention to

James Hansen, a long term, leading figure in climatology has just published a paper indicating that we have understated the danger of carbon dioxide emissions.

James Hansen is Head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has been warning the world about climate change since 1981.

This month he has published a paper that is very worrying. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) method of predicting the future has been to draw model scenarios of future changes. This, it seems, does not reveal the true scale of the problem.

In this paper James Hansen and his colleagues take a different line. They study the natural changes in climate that have occurred on the earth through past geological ages as a way of understanding the feedback effects that have occurred as one climate system interacted with another. They prove that the effects of ice sheet melting and release of greenhouse gases by soils and changes in vegetation can be really important in magnifying a change. These effects can occur within centuries or less and once set in train their results are potentially catastrophic. Hansen’s calculations show that we have already produced enough CO2 to drive the earth into a serious warming episode, much more serious than current IPCC projections.

In support for his theory recent evidence has shown that arctic ice melting and global glacier retreat are occurring much faster than IPCC predictions.  The good news is that we still have time to react. These slow change systems can turn round if the driver, which is our emissions of CO2, is removed. He concludes that we must stop burning fossil fuels now, and that buiding new coal-fired power stations without carbon sequestration is foolish in the extreme.

He concludes: “The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.”

You can download the paper here

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