JAMES HANSEN INTERVIEW

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JAMES HANSEN INTERVIEW

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NEW YORK MAGAZINE INTELLIGENCER

"‘The Planet Could Become Ungovernable’: Climate Scientist James Hansen on Obama’s Environmental Record, Scientific Reticence, and His Climate Lawsuit Against the Federal Government"


By David Wallace-Wells

July 12, 2017

This week, to accompany our cover story on worst-case climate scenarios, we’re publishing a series of extended interviews with climatologists on the subject — most of them from the “godfather generation” of scientists who first raised the alarm about global warming several decades ago.

James Hansen is the former head of climate research for NASA, the author of the legendary early “zero model” for climate change, and is now the lead scientific figure in a lawsuit being brought against the federal government alleging complicity on climate change, which Hansen and his fellow litigants argue is a violation of the equal protection clause — since the costs of change will fall unequally on future generations.

Q: Tell me, how did you get involved in this lawsuit?

A: That was interesting.

I wrote this article, “The Threat to the Planet,” in 2006, in The New York Review of Books.

It started out, “Animals are on the run.”

It was read by Mary Wood, a legal scholar at the University of Oregon who’s most responsible for developing the Atmospheric Trust idea — that the planet is held in trust by the current generation for future generations.

A student or postdoc of hers sent an email to me — I was a government employee, involved in a lot of stuff, so I never responded until finally we set up a teleconference in 2010.

I agreed to write a paper to provide the scientific basis for a lawsuit.

Then I decided, rather than writing the paper myself, I should get a bunch of international experts to be co-authors.

It took forever.

Q: Why?

A: We submitted the paper to PNAS, and I’m an Academy member, so if I submit a review, I should be able to publish.

But the editor decided it was an unusual paper, with “normative statements,” and he gave it to an anonymous editorial board member, and he said I had to take out these normative statements criticizing the government.

So we iterated back and forth two or three times.

Finally, when he said the word dangerous was normative — that’s when I withdrew the paper and submitted it to PLOS One.

And eventually finally in 2013 it was published.

The paper was used for the first lawsuit, which got as far as the D.C. District Court, just below the Supreme Court.

And we lost at that level.

Q: What happened?

A: The D.C. District Court judge essentially said that we hadn’t shown a constitutional basis for the lawsuit.

Public trust is a common-law thing, so while you can argue it is protected by the Constitution, it isn’t explicitly in the Constitution.


But even before meeting Mary, I had started in my talks to discuss equal rights and equal protection of the law for young people.

And now, in going back and doing it again, they are still using the public trust argument but also, explicitly, the idea of equal protection of the law and due process, that young people are being deprived of life, liberty, and property.

I think — I’m 99.99 percent certain we’re going to win in Oregon.

As you know, it’s—

A friendly circuit!


The West Coast is more liberal.

But I think the constitutional basis is clear.

I think that even with the very conservative Supreme Court, that we have a very good chance.

Q: Why?

A: I always felt the negative ruling in D.C. was stated in such a way that almost invited resubmission with a clearer constitutional argument.

And this is a case where you have to rely on the courts, because the other branches of government are just too short-sighted.

This long time constant is the problem.

It’s very difficult, especially when, it’s because of the power of money in the government.

And that — well, I think the court is less affected than the other branches.

Q: It’s interesting to hear you talk about it, because in reading about the suit I’ve processed it as a work of protest and advocacy, not something that was aimed at really winning.

A: I think it’s analogous to a civil-rights case, where — the courts have to get involved, but they did not get involved until the public was involved, too.

And that’s why you have to simultaneously get the public behind climate action, because the courts don’t tend to get out in front.

Courts are slow, but on the other hand it’s all been very slow.

Q: That’s one way of looking at it — that it’s slow.

There’s another way of looking at it that it’s all quite fast.

So much of the change we’ve already built into the climate is a result of activity over the last couple of decades, and when you think about the scale of change that’s being brought about that’s pretty astonishing.

A: Yeah.

Most of the emissions are in the last few decades.

Q: Especially if you’re thinking at the geological timescale, it’s astonishing we could be engineering that much change in such a short period of time.

A: In 1982, Taro Takahashi and I organized a workshop at Palisades, New York, at the Lamont Observatory.

And it was funded by Exxon Research and Engineering.

The president of Exxon Research and Engineering made the observation that, all this was a very difficult climate system, that it presents a very difficult problem because of the delayed response.

And his conclusion was, to try and deal with the system with a delayed response, you have to have anticipation.

And that was exactly right!

But then the anticipation should lead to — “Oh, we better start now moving toward carbon-free energy.”

Instead, the industry developed fracking, which doubled down on the fossil-fuel approach.

Q: Why do people have so much trouble seeing what’s happening and understanding the costs of inaction?

A: The fundamental difficulty is the delayed response — the inertia of the climate system.

The ocean is deep and the ice sheets are three kilometers thick, and they don’t respond quickly to what is really a weak forcing.

And so the system has only partially responded to the forcing we’ve put up already.

There’s more in the pipeline.

You’re talking about a system that responds on the timescale of decades to centuries — that’s a different time constant than the political constant.

Q: It seems the political attention span is getting shorter and shorter.

But there’s the question of how politics responds, but also the separate question of how the culture responds.

A: The complication with the culture is with the short-term variability in temperature.

Q: While trend lines are going up, actual temperatures bounce around a lot.

A: And the regional variability is so large, too, compared with the mean change.

But the mean change of a couple of degrees is going to translate eventually into many meters of sea-level rise.

To the person on the street, couple of degrees doesn’t sound so bad.

Q: It can sound kind of nice.

A: Right.

So it’s a problem which is inherently difficult to deal with, especially when there are financial special interests that don’t want you to make progress because they’re making a lot of money off fossil fuels.

Q: It seems like a lot of your advocacy over the last few years has been focused on focusing our attention on the future financial costs of not doing anything — on meeting that financial argument head-on.

A: Well, the tragic thing is that the solution actually doesn’t cost anything, if you do it sensibly.

What the economic studies show — the Citizens Climate Lobby supported it — a carbon price going up ten dollars a ton each year reduces emissions 30 percent in ten years.

If you made the price of fossil fuels honest by including a gradually rising carbon fee, then it actually spurs the economy and increases the GNP as you shift toward clean energies and energy efficiency.

It creates potentially millions of jobs.

But you can’t get either political party to propose that.

Now there’s this group of conservative elders — James Baker III, George P. Schultz, and some economists, Ted Halstead is the one who’s trying to organize them — trying to draw attention to the fact that it actually makes sense from a conservative perspective to make the price of fossil fuels honest, gradually.

And in the case of Democrats, they want — we persuaded Barbara Boxer and Bernie Sanders that a carbon fee makes sense, but they want 40 percent of the money for social programs.

Q: You don’t think that’s how it should work?

A: The way to spur the economy — to modernize the economy and modernize the energy infrastructure — would be to give the money back to the public.

Because a carbon fee is a progressive tax, in the sense that rich people have bigger carbon footprints.

So if you do give 100 percent of the money to the public, 70 percent of the public comes out ahead.

Q: Sounds like a political winner.

A: Yeah.

So why can’t we get it done?

I wrote a letter to Obama after he was elected in 2008, and tried to explain this.

Q: What happened?

A: I couldn’t get John Holdren to deliver the letter — he was chosen to be the science adviser.

He said he couldn’t do anything until he was confirmed.

And finally, near the end of the Obama administration, I tried to get Obama to settle our lawsuit.

Which would have made sense.

Actually the judge in Oregon was puzzled as to why Obama was fighting us.

Because Obama, when he talked about the planet, he sounded like us.


Q: He uses the phrases “existential threat,” though I think some people don’t quite understand what he means by that.

A: I think what Holdren thought was that what we were asking was unrealistic.

We were asking the government to commit to reducing emissions by 6 percent a year.

Six percent a year over 30 years is about an 80 percent reduction.

And then it turns out that John Kerry went to Morocco in 2016 with the U.S. plan, which was 80 percent reduction by 2050.

So it’s virtually the same as what we were asking.

Then, as soon as Trump was elected, I said, this is now really a time the Obama administration should settle the case.

Q: It would have been a sneaky way to lock in some climate policies …

A:So I sent an email to John Podesta, and surprisingly got a response almost immediately, asking me to use a different email address — I’d used the one that was hacked.

Q: Wow.

A: And he did try to help.

Eventually, though, Obama rejected the idea, because his lawyers preferred his plan, his Clean Power Plan, which is being challenged in various courts.

Q: You didn’t like that plan?

A: That was a screwy thing right from the beginning.

Once Kerry failed to get congress to pass cap-and-trade, Obama took the route of trying to reduce emissions by regulations.

It was a lawyer approach — the National Resource Defense Council, a huge, ‘Big Green’ organization, is all lawyers.

But it’s not very effective.


Yeah, we got a reduction of 7 percent emissions, but that’s because gas became cheap.

The reduction was for economic reasons — a number of utilities shifted from coal to gas.

But that just locked in fracking.

Which is exactly the wrong path, to lock in fracking.

It doesn’t reduce emissions very much.

I think we need a third party.

And I would organize it around this issue.

I think it’s going to be up to young people.

You know I had testified before Congress in the early ’80s talking about this, and then I bailed out of things — I didn’t want to be involved in the public aspect.

It was not until the middle of the Bush era that I decided to give a public talk.

I gave a talk at Virginia Tech in 2008, during the presidential campaign.

All the young people were out knocking on doors for Obama.

In Iowa, where I’m from, the young people were the biggest support which allowed Obama to upset Hillary in the primary.

And when Obama won the election, they just assumed that because he’d said we have a planet in peril, that he’d do something.

But I think they have to also pay attention to what’s actually being proposed because it was not a real solution.


Q: You mean cap-and-trade?

A: Two-thousand pages of giveaways to everybody.

That year I went to John Kerry’s office, and had a long discussion with him.

And in principle he seemed persuaded a carbon fee made more sense than cap-and-trade, but he said, I can’t get one vote for it.

In order to get a senator or representative to vote for it, you have to give them something, for their district.

Q: It’s interesting, there’s this whole little school in political science which argues the ending of earmarks was actually disastrous for the working of American politics, because now we don’t even have that to bargain with any more.

And so the only thing politicians can strategize about is how close they are to party leadership.

Obviously partisan cooperation was declining well before that, but the end of earmarks have made compromise even harder.

A: That’s interesting.

Q: In your view, why is a fee so much more effective than a cap-and-trade system?

A: What’s the cap on India?

You have to have a system that can go international.

You only need, frankly, the U.S. to have a carbon fee, and then you have border duties on products from countries that don’t have a carbon fee, and that’s incentive for other countries to have their own carbon fee.

When you try to cap something — unless it’s across the board, on everything, it just reduces the demand.

A successful cap that reduces the demand makes it cheaper.

And how would you put a cap across coal, oil, and gas?

That’s not the way it works.

And also the public is simply not going to let it happen.

They see the price at the pump going up, and they’re not going to get the money …

It doesn’t even have to go up very far.

You know, over the weekend, I was trying to finish this paper — it’s called “Young People’s Burden.”

Q: Yeah, you sent it to me.

A: I think it’s about to be accepted.

People have been so reluctant to accept these papers.

Q:Why do you think that is?

A: Because — it’s what I call ‘scientific reticence.’

I wrote a paper in 2007 called ‘Scientific Reticence and Sea Level Rise.’

You’re rewarded in science for not stepping out too rapidly.

But I was working on a video over the weekend with my oldest grandchild, to try to get people to understand this.

The narrative that is out there is completely wrong.

The narrative is, Al Gore says we’ve turned a corner.

It’s actually getting worse!


The annual addition is increasing — it’s not only that we’re not going down, we’re increasing the forcing.

Q: One of the few areas where encouraging news is coming from is green energy — that seems to be coming a bit faster than most people expected, and more cheaply than most people expected.

But it also seems like the news we’re receiving from the Arctic in particular is just much worse.

You also think carbon removal is important, right?

A: At the time of our 2013 paper, for the first lawsuit, we argued that you could get carbon down to 350 parts per million by the end of the century without technological extraction.

But now, in our new paper — which I hope will be accepted this week — we are saying until 2020 emissions are going to be more or less similar than they are now.

To start reduction at that time, in order to get back to 350 ppm by the end of the century, we’ll have extract 50 gigatons of carbon technologically, in addition to 100 gigatons we’d need to extract in these quasi-natural agricultural and forestry ways.

Fifty gigatons is a lot.

The cost of that is in the trillions of dollars.

Q: And I know a lot of scientists are really worried about how to do that.

It doesn’t seem like a consensus that we know how to do it even if we had the will and the money.

A: And it is going to cost to money, because it takes energy.

So I just don’t think that’s very plausible.

Q: When I read the IPCC stuff, but also other academic papers, it seems like that two-degree threshold is really quite optimistic, and that we’re on track for something more like four or five degrees.

You’ve mostly focused on the danger of that optimistic outcome — 1.5 to 2 degrees.

I’m curious why you’ve focused on that level, that end of the spectrum, and also what worries you have about things getting somewhat significantly worse than that.

A: What I focused on is, what is the carbon that you should aim for, if you want to avoid some strong feedbacks and large consequences.

In 2006 I think it was … Bill McKibben asked me what should be the target for CO2.

He was going to form this organization, 450.org, and that’s when I told him, hold on, what I’m finding is that’s actually a pretty dangerous level.

So he did hold on for a while.

So what should humanity aim for?

It’s not any larger than 350 ppm, and it might be less.

It just turns out that if you look at the paleoclimate, it’s really very sensitive.

Q: I just think about all those greenhouse extinctions, and how dramatically those changes unfolded.

A: The natural climate changes move much slower.

The one that looks like a spike, like a delta function, the biggest one, is the PETM — and that took a couple thousand years.

We’re talking about a couple of centuries.

Q: The rapidity with which we’re going through it makes it all that much harder for ecosystems to adapt, and species to adapt.

A: Yeah.

Q: To think for a minute at the scarier end of the spectrum.

If we do end up four or five degrees warmer, within a relatively short period of time — that’s the IPCC’s RCP8.5 scenario, by the end of the century, and that’s not counting some of these dramatic feedback mechanisms, what would that do to the planet, in your mind?

A: I don’t think we’re going to get four or five degrees this century, because we get a cooling effect from the melting ice.

But the biggest effect will be that melting ice.

In my opinion that’s the big thing — sea-level rise.

Because we have such a large fraction of people on coastlines — more than half of the large cities in the world are on coastlines.

The economic implications of that, and the migrations and the social effects of migrations — the planet could become practically ungovernable, it seems to me.

But if you’re really talking about four or five degrees, that means the tropics and the subtropics are going to be practically uninhabitable.

It’s already becoming uncomfortable in the summers, in the subtropics — you can’t work outdoors.

And agriculture — more than half of the jobs are outdoors.

Q:Food production seems a real worry.

A: Population is a problem.

That’s why you want to have energy that’s needed for people to eliminate poverty, because countries that have become wealthy have the population under control.

But if you do begin to lose major cities than the planet becomes ungovernable.

Q: And what level of sea-level rise would precipitate that?

What worries you?

A: Once sea levels go up significantly, you won’t have stable shorelines.

Just parts of the city will go under water, but then it doesn’t make sense to continue to build there.

So, I don’t know.

By the time you get to even one-meter rise, you’re going to be losing more land.

We argue in our paper “Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms,” which we published in 2016, that you could get multi-meter sea-level rise in 50 to 150 years.

Q: To switch subjects for a moment, can you tell me about the end of your time at NASA?

A: It became — I was getting involved in more and more of these outside activities.

I mean, suing the government is not something you can do on government time!

And getting arrested five different times — NASA was not very happy about this.

Plus, I needed more time for my other work.

Q: When was that?

A: Early 2013.

Q: And how do you think the new administration changes things?

A: Now we have an easy target, because what they’re doing is so crazy.

I don’t see how we can lose.

Because what they’re doing is so dangerous.

Obama — he was continuing to approve offshore drilling and the things which, we would argue, don’t make sense, since we have to phase out fossil fuels.

But now, it’s just so extreme, I think that makes it a much easier case.

They’re willingly doing things that are certain to cause great harm to young people and future generations.

Q:It seems almost out of spite.

The Obama record is obviously mixed on these issues, but you at least got the sense there was some intellectual sympathy, even if they were compromised in what they were able to do.

But the motivations of this entire administration just seem so … nasty.

A: But they’re consistent with what the fossil-fuel industry wants, and they’re providing a lot of funding to Republicans especially.

Q: Although some of the reporting I’ve seen is that the people in the fossil-fuel industry have been shocked at how much they’re getting from the new administration.

A: Yeah.

Q: Like they were asking for a hundred bucks and getting a thousand and going, “Okay, we’ll take it!”

What do you think is going to happen to Paris?

A: I doubt that Paris withdrawal makes much difference.

Countries that only promised to do what they felt was in their best interest anyhow, so I don’t think countries will back off.

And I think this will be a short-lived reversal by the U.S., whether it’s from the courts or the next election.

Q: And are you encouraged by the news out of India and China?

A: Yeah, although it’s misstated by the environmental community as if they’re solving the problem.

They’re not closing their coal plants, and as I mentioned globally the rate of greenhouse-gas growth is actually accelerating.

So you do have to have some carbon-free alternative energies to complement the renewables.

I don’t know of any alternatives — you have hydropower, for a certain amount, in certain countries, but I think we should have been working with China to develop safe nuclear power.

That’s the only way that they will get rapidly off of coal.


That has been a mistake.

We should have put a price on carbon rather than trying to have regulations that choose specific technologies.

Q: Do you think people are too scared about the risks of nuclear power?

A: I think there’s a lot of misinformation.

It’s incredible.

More than 10,000 people are dying each day from the small particles coming out from fossil-fuel burning, which is more than have been killed in history from the radiation from nuclear-power plants.

It’s an irrational fear of low-level radiation.

You have to avoid high levels of radiation, but we know ways to do nuclear which are much safer — that will not explode, that won’t produce a meltdown.

But the real thing that’s needed is a simple, honest carbon price.

Q: I know you started your career working on Venus, and some of the fringier people I’ve talked to point to Venus as a scary allegory for how climate change can really transform a planet.

A: Well, yeah, but it took a very long time.

One flaw in my book Storms of My Grandchildren is my inference you can get runaway climate change on a relatively short timescale.

You have to get rid of the ocean before you get to a Venus situation, and that requires you getting the water to escape.

That took hundreds of millions of years for that to occur on Venus.

You could certainly get to a disastrous situation without getting rid of the ocean, but if you want to go to a Venus-type situation, then you have to lose the ocean.

Venus did.

Hydrogen isotopes on Venus do indicate that it once had a lot of water, but doesn’t now.

Q: Do you think that’s possible on a many-millions-of-years timescale?

A: It can’t be done with fossil-fuel burning.

It can and will be done as the sun becomes a red giant.

But that’s going to be billions of years.

Q: Is there anything you’d say about the shorter-term disaster scenario?

A: I think on the shorter term, the planet becomes much less habitable — low latitudes become less habitable, and if we lose coastal cities everything starts going backwards.

The progress we’ve had over the last centuries, more people having a higher standard of living — that’s going to go in the other direction.

So we really have to stabilize it at a level that allows ice sheets to remain on Greenland and Antarctica with sizes comparable to what they have now.

And that requires that the warming be not more than a degree or so.

But the business community really doesn’t understand that.

I remember when we wrote our first paper on this, in 1981, and the New York Times reported it on the front page.

I remember saying to one of my co-authors, “This is going to be very interesting, sometime during our careers, we’re going to see these things beginning to happen.”

Q: You probably thought you’d see the world responding.

A: Yeah!

And it worked with the ozone.

Q: Is that just because it was a smaller problem?

A: DuPont told Reagan it was okay, because they were working on alternative chemicals and could make just as much money at that.

That’s what the whole fossil-fuel industry should be working on — alternative energies.

But they chose instead to double down on fossil fuels.

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Re: JAMES HANSEN INTERVIEW

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YALE ENVIRONMENT 360

Soot Pollution Accelerating Glacial Melting on Tibetan Plateau


December 15, 2009

Increased levels of black soot from air pollution sources across Asia have accelerated the rate of glacial melting on the Tibetan Plateau, exacerbating the effects of global warming in what is home to the planet’s largest non-polar ice masses, researchers say.

Temperatures in the region have increased 0.3 Celsius (.5 F) in the last 30 years — twice the global average rate.

After studying five glacial ice cores collected across the Tibetan Plateau, NASA and Chinese scientists said a significant contributing factor is increased soot deposits, which darken the snow and ice, increasing the absorption of sunlight.

Black soot may be responsible for about half of the glacial melt, said James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and co-author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“(C)ontinued, ‘business-as-usual’ emissions of greenhouse gases and black soot will result in the loss of most Himalayan glaciers this century,” Hansen said.


The glaciers provide water storage for more than a billion people across south and east Asia, sending fresh melt water down the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, and other river systems.

From 1950 to 1980, about 50 percent of the glaciers were in retreat, the authors say.

In recent years, nearly 95 percent have been retreating.

Published at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/soot-pollu ... an-plateau
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Re: JAMES HANSEN INTERVIEW

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NASA

Survival of Tibetan Glaciers


By James Hansen — December 2009

Glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, sometimes called Earth's "third pole", hold the largest ice mass outside the polar regions.

These glaciers act as a water storage tower for South and East Asia, releasing melt water in warm months to the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and other river systems, providing fresh water to more than a billion people.

In the dry season glacial melt provides half or more of the water in many rivers.

Tibetan glaciers have been melting at an accelerating rate over the past decade.

Glacier changes depend on local weather, especially snowfall, so glacier retreat or advance fluctuates with time and place.

Thus it is inevitable that some Tibetan glaciers advance over short periods, as has been reported.

But overall, Tibetan glaciers are retreating at an alarming rate.

Global warming must be the primary cause of glacier retreat, which is occurring on a global scale, but observed rapid melt rates suggest that other factors may be involved.

To investigate the possible role of black soot in causing glacial melt, a team of scientists from Chinese research institutes extracted ice cores from five locations on the Tibetan Plateau (Figure 1).

Black soot, which includes black carbon (BC) and organic carbon (OC), absorbs sunlight and can speed glacial melting if BC reaches values of order 10 ng/g (nanograms per gram) or larger.

The ice core data revealed that BC reached values of 20-50 ng/g in the 1950s and 1960s for the four stations that are downwind of European pollution sources.

BC and OC amounts decreased strongly in the early 1970s, probably because of clean air regulations in Europe.

However, the ice cores also reveal that in the past decade BC and OC began to increase again, even on the Zuoqiupu glacier (Figure 2), which is mainly subject to Asian sources.

The data suggest that increased black soot arises from Asian sources, especially the Indian subcontinent.

The measured concentrations of BC and OC refer to fresh snow.

But as the snow melts in the spring and summer the black soot concentrations on the glacier surface increase, because the soot particles do not escape in the melt water as efficiently as the water itself.

As a consequence, the soot noticeably darkens the glacier surface during the melt season, increases absorption of sunlight, and speeds glacier disintegration.

In a new paper by Xu et al., we concluded that black soot is contributing to the rapid melt of glaciers in the Himalayas.

And continued, "business-as-usual" emissions of greenhouse gases and black soot will result in the loss of most Himalayan glaciers this century, with devastating effects on fresh water supplies in dry seasons.

But business-as-usual emissions are not inevitable.

An alternative scenario, which stabilizes the glaciers and has other benefits for global climate and human health, requires a reduction of major human-made climate forcing agents that have a warming effect — that means greenhouses gases, especially carbon dioxide, as well as black soot.

Quantitative policy implications have been defined: coal emissions must be phased out over the next 20 years, and unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands and oil shale, must remain undeveloped.

Combined with improved agricultural and forestry practices and reduction of methane and black soot emissions, these actions would avoid demise of the Tibetan glaciers.

Not coincidentally, these policy actions are the same as those required to stabilize Earth's energy balance and keep the climate near the Holocene climate range in which civilization developed.

The question is whether the global community can exercise the free will to limit fossil fuel emissions and move to clean energies of the future — or is it inevitable that all fossil fuels will be burned?

The conclusion is that prospects for survival of Tibetan glaciers can be much improved by reducing black soot emissions.

The black soot arises especially from diesel engines, coal use without effective scrubbers, and biomass burning, including cook stoves.

Reduction of black soot via cleaner energies would have other benefits for human health and agricultural productivity.

However, survival of the glaciers also requires halting global warming, which depends upon stabilizing and reducing greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide.

Related Links

NASA Earth Observatory: Image of the Day: 2009-12-15

NASA News Release: Black Carbon Deposits on Himalayan Ice Threaten Earth's "Third Pole"

NASA News Release: New Study Turns Up the Heat on Soot's Role in Himalayan Warming

Reference

Xu, B, J. Cao, J. Hansen, T. Yao, D.J. Joswia, N. Wang, G. Wu, M. Wang, H. Zhao, W. Yang, X. Liu, and J. He, 2009: Black soot and the survival of Tibetan glaciers. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 106, 22114-22118, doi:10.1073/pnas.0910444106.

Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, P. Kharecha, D. Beerling, R. Berner, V. Masson-Delmotte, M. Pagani, M. Raymo, D.L. Royer, and J.C. Zachos, 2008: Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim? Open Atmos. Sci. J., 2, 217-231, doi:10.2174/1874282300802010217.

Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA Official: Gavin A. Schmidt
Website Curator: Robert B. Schmunk
Page updated: 2018-04-10 16:43

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_14/
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Re: JAMES HANSEN INTERVIEW

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ScienceMag.org

"Hansen's Climate Science and Advocacy Project Under Way"


By Eli Kintisch

Feb. 26, 2014 , 2:45 PM

James Hansen may have retired from NASA but he’s still active in the climate change wars.

Five months into its existence, his Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University is moving ahead on its unique goals.

Led by the 72-year-old climate scientist, the initiative focuses on bringing policy-relevant science to the public, building on dogged — and often controversial — efforts along those lines by its director.


Some climate scientists devote part of their time, or just lip service, to advocacy or outreach; the program makes these tasks integral to its scientific mission.

The intent for the program’s three-person team, all of whom previously worked at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University, is to continue science, outreach, and advocacy work on climate change but without the limitations that come with a federal job, like working on agency priorities, managing a big lab, or avoiding political activities during work.

Text from a recent proposal to a foundation, shared with ScienceInsider, makes clear that Hansen’s group wants to have a political impact.

It assails the position “that scientists should not go all the way to describing policy implications of their research.”

Instead, it asserts, “The objectivity of science is particularly effective in ferreting out the relative merits of alternative policies.”

“The centerpiece of our project remains scientific research," says Pushker Kharecha, Hansen’s deputy.


The team’s studies, according to the proposal text, seek to "connect the dots from advancing basic climate science to promoting public awareness to advocating policy actions.”

The first paper produced by the team, published in December, is an example of this approach.

Using paleoclimate data, recent observations of the modern climate, and computer modeling, it concludes that a widely adopted goal of limiting global warming to a 2°C increase would lead to “disastrous” consequences.


“Continuation of high fossil fuel emissions, given current knowledge of the consequences, would be an act of extraordinary witting intergenerational injustice,” the paper says.

The program’s team is composed of Hansen, Kharecha, and Makiko Sato, also a climate scientist.

But they expect that other climate researchers from Goddard who are soon to retire from government will soon join them to bolster the team at low cost.

(They would all have federal pensions.)

The team has raised sufficient funds to support its efforts for at least 2 years, Kharecha says.

Its donors include nonprofits and foundations such as the Flora Family Foundation and ClimateWorks and individuals, including philanthropists Jeremy Grantham and H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest.

“We hope to get external grants from federal funding agencies as well,” Kharecha says.

Kharecha says the new position has given him more time to work on a project to develop high school curriculum around climate change.

By the same token, having resigned his job as GISS director last spring, Hansen has more time for various outreach efforts, he tells ScienceInsider in an e-mail from Beijing, where he was meeting with advisers to the Chinese government.

These efforts include meetings with European policymakers last year, his current Chinese trip, an upcoming confab with lawmakers in Oregon, and a planned trip to Italy to help opposition to new coal plants there.


“I’ve been able to meet with him more, as he’s not quite as slammed with the organizational duties,” says attorney Julia Olson, director of Our Children’s Trust, an advocacy group suing the U.S. government to act on climate change.

Hansen, supported by his two Columbia colleagues and other scientists, has written an amicus brief for that effort, which relies on the doctrine of environmental “public trust.”

He plans to testify in the case, which is ongoing in courts in several states.

That’s something he could not have done as a government employee, he says, given rules pertaining to federal scientists’ political and legal activities.

“In the government I could not have done most of the things that I am doing now, because they had to be done on vacation time and I was running out of that,” Hansen adds.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/02 ... -under-way
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Re: JAMES HANSEN INTERVIEW

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THE GUARDIAN

"'We should be on the offensive' – James Hansen calls for wave of climate lawsuits - Veteran climate scientist says litigation campaign against government and fossil fuels companies is essential alongside political mobilisation in fighting ‘growing, mortal threat’ of global warming"


Jonathan Watts @jonathanwatts

Fri 17 Nov 2017 03.30 EST Last modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 11.58 EST

One of the fathers of climate science is calling for a wave of lawsuits against governments and fossil fuel companies that are delaying action on what he describes as the growing, mortal threat of global warming.

Former Nasa scientist James Hansen says the litigate-to-mitigate campaign is needed alongside political mobilisation because judges are less likely than politicians to be in the pocket of oil, coal and gas companies.

“The judiciary is the branch of government in the US and other countries that is relatively free of bribery."

"And bribery is exactly what is going on,” he told the Guardian on the sidelines of the UN climate talks in Bonn.


Without Hansen and his fellow Nasa researchers who raised the alarm about the effect of carbon emissions on global temperatures in the 1980s, it is possible that none of the thousands of delegates from almost 200 countries would be here.

But after three decades, he has been largely pushed to the fringes.

Organisers have declined his request to speak directly to the delegates about what he sees as a threat that is still massively underestimated.


Instead he spreads his message through press conferences and interviews, where he cuts a distinctive figure as an old testament-style prophet in an Indiana Jones hat.

He does not mince his words.

The international process of the Paris accord, he says, is “eyewash” because it fails to put a higher price on carbon.

National legislation, he feels, is almost certainly doomed to fail because governments are too beholden to powerful lobbyists.

Even supposedly pioneering states like California, which have a carbon cap-and-trade system, are making things worse, he said, because “half-arsed, half-baked plans only delay a solution.”

For Hansen, the key is to make the 100 big “carbon majors” – corporations like ExxonMobil, BP and Shell that are, by one account, responsible for more than 70% of emissions – pay for the transition to cleaner energy and greater forests.

Until governments make them do so by introducing carbon fees or taxes, he says, the best way to hold them to account and generate funds is to sue them for the damage they are doing to the climate, those affected and future generations.

Hansen is putting his words into action.

He is involved in a 2015 lawsuit against the US federal government, brought by his granddaughter and 20 others under the age of 21.

They argue the government’s failure to curb CO2 emissions has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property.

A district court is due to hear the case in February in Oregon, though the federal government has tried to delay the case.


Hansen believes Donald Trump’s actions to reverse environmental protections and withdraw from the Paris accord may be a blessing in disguise because the government will now find it harder to persuade judges that it is acting in the public interest.

“Trump’s policy may backfire on him,” he said.

“In the greater scheme of things, it might just make it easier to win our lawsuit.”

He feels a growing sense of urgency.

Current government commitments are so inadequate that temperature rises are currently on course to exceed 3C by the end of the century.

Hansen says that would mean existing problems – rising sea levels, displacement by flooding, droughts disrupting food production, wildfires consuming forests, worsening storms and hurricanes – would get three times worse.

“Three degrees would be disastrous."

"You can imagine the planet becoming ungovernable because we would lose the coastal cities where most people live …"

"You’ll see migrants from those parts of the world and also so much disruption to the centres of wealth."

"So we can’t go down that path.”

Hansen is a believer in direct action.

“I’ve been arrested five times."

"The idea was to draw attention to injustice,” he says.


He has also testified on behalf of others who have lost their liberty during climate campaigns.

On January, he will speak in defence of an activist who turned off the tar sands pipeline in North Dakota.

But he says litigation and political mobilisation are more effective than protests.

“Those are defence."

"We should be on the offensive."


"The lawsuits versus Trump and the fossil fuel industry are offence."

"People should use the democratic process,” he says.

“That’s our best chance."

"It’s better than getting arrested.”

He draws comparisons with two other great, slow-moving, but ultimately successful legal and public opinion battles: against segregation, where the innate conservatism of judges was overcome by the civil rights movement, and tobacco, where the courts accepted the science despite a misinformation campaign by the industry.

“Climate change is a human rights issue,” Hansen says.

“We are seeing injustice against the young."

"The present generation has a responsibility to future generations.”


Worldwide, the number of legislative activities related to climate change has increased from 99 to 164 in the past two years, according to a report earlier this year by the Grantham Research Institute and the Columbia Law School.

Their study found that two-thirds of the litigation resulted in stronger regulations.

The vast majority of cases have been heard in the US, most notably the 2007 supreme court ruling that greenhouse gases are a public health threat.

To support future actions, some legal experts are volunteering their services, such as the Earth Justice group in San Francisco, whose motto is: “The Earth needs a lawyer”.

There have been sporadic successes elsewhere, including a lawsuit by a group of Dutch citizens who overturned their government’s move to weaken its greenhouse gas reduction target.

“Over the past 10 years courts are becoming more flexible,” said Cosmin Corendea, legal expert the at United Nations University Institute for Environment.

“These isolated cases have started to flash up."

"It shows the willingness of courts to serve people.”

Corendea echoed Hansen’s call for more climate litigation in the countries that have highest emissions.

“Go out there if you have the resources to do that and see if you can help other countries that can’t get to the courts so easily,” he said.

“Any good litigation may help."

"It can raise awareness and create legal practice.”

According to Hansen, the action cannot come too soon.

In a press conference at the climate conference, which is the first under the presidency of a small island state – Fiji – he noted that the risks are rising and so should the push for justice.

“We are entering a period of consequences and are in danger of being too late,” he warned.

“I have come to note that greenhouse gas climate forcings are accelerating, not decelerating, and sea-level rise and ocean acidification are accelerating."

"We confront a mortal threat, now endangering the very existence of island and low-lying nations in the Pacific and around the planet."

"Accordingly, ambition must be increased and enforced.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... e-lawsuits
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Re: JAMES HANSEN INTERVIEW

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THE GUARDIAN

"Ex-Nasa scientist: 30 years on, world is failing 'miserably’ to address climate change - James Hansen, who gave a climate warning in 1988 Senate testimony, says real hoax is by leaders claiming to take action"


Oliver Milman in New York @olliemilman

Tue 19 Jun 2018 01.00 EDT Last modified on Tue 19 Jun 2018 11.40 EDT

Thirty years after a former Nasa scientist sounded the alarm for the general public about climate change and human activity, the expert issued a fresh warning that the world is failing “miserably” to deal with the worsening dangers.

While Donald Trump and many conservatives like to argue that climate change is a hoax, James Hansen, the 77-year-old former Nasa climate scientist, said in an interview at his home in New York that the relevant hoax today is perpetrated by those leaders claiming to be addressing the problem.

Hansen provided what’s considered the first warning to a mass audience about global warming when, in 1988, he told a US congressional hearing he could declare “with 99% confidence” that a recent sharp rise in temperatures was a result of human activity.


Since this time, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions have mushroomed despite repeated, increasingly frantic warnings about civilization-shaking catastrophe, from scientists amassing reams of evidence in Hansen’s wake.

“All we’ve done is agree there’s a problem,” Hansen told the Guardian.

“We agreed that in 1992 [at the Earth summit in Rio] and re-agreed it again in Paris [at the 2015 climate accord]."

"We haven’t acknowledged what is required to solve it."

"Promises like Paris don’t mean much, it’s wishful thinking."

"It’s a hoax that governments have played on us since the 1990s.”

Hansen’s long list of culprits for this inertia are both familiar – the nefarious lobbying of the fossil fuel industry – and surprising.

Jerry Brown, the progressive governor of California, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, are “both pretending to be solving the problem” while being unambitious and shunning low-carbon nuclear power, Hansen argues.

There is particular scorn for Barack Obama.

Hansen says in a scathing upcoming book that the former president “failed miserably” on climate change and oversaw policies that were “late, ineffectual and partisan”.

Hansen even accuses Obama of passing up the opportunity to thwart Donald Trump’s destruction of US climate action, by declining to settle a lawsuit the scientist, his granddaughter and 20 other young people are waging against the government, accusing it of unconstitutionally causing peril to their living environment.


“Near the end of his administration the US said it would reduce emissions 80% by 2050,” Hansen said.

“Our lawsuit demands a reduction of 6% a year so I thought, ‘That’s close enough, let’s settle the lawsuit.’"

"We got through to Obama’s office but he decided against it."

"It was a tremendous opportunity."

"This was after Trump’s election, so if we’d settled it quickly the US legally wouldn’t be able to do the absurd things Trump is doing now by opening up all sorts of fossil fuel sources.”

Hansen’s frustrations temper any satisfaction at largely being vindicated for his testimony, delivered to lawmakers on 23 June 1988.

Wearing a cream-coloured suit, the soft-spoken son of Iowan tenant farmers hunched over the microphone in Washington to explain that humans had entered a confronting new era.

“The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now,” he said.

Afterwards, Hansen told reporters: “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”


He brandished new research that forecast that 1988 was set to be the warmest year on record, as well as projections for future heat under three different emissions scenarios.

The world has dutifully followed Hansen’s “scenario B” – we are “smack on it” it, Hansen said last week – with global temperatures jumping by around 1C (1.8F) over the past century.

These findings hadn’t occurred in a vacuum, of course – the Irish physicist John Tyndall confirmed that carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas in the 1850s.

A 1985 scientific conference in Villach, Austria, concluded the temperature rise in the 21st century would be “greater than in any man’s history”.

The changes in motion would “affect life on Earth for centuries to come”, the New York Times warned the morning after Hansen’s testimony.

Three decades of diplomacy has blossomed into an international consensus, albeit rattled by Trump, that the temperature rise must be curbed to “well below” 2C (3.6F) above pre-industrial times.

But in this time emissions have soared (in 1988, 20bn tons of carbon dioxide was emitted – by 2017 it was 32bn tons) with promised cuts insufficient for the 2C goal.

Despite the notable growth of renewable energy such as solar and wind, Hansen believes there is no pathway to salvation without a tax on carbon-producing fuels.

“The solution isn’t complicated, it’s not rocket science,” Hansen said.

“Emissions aren’t going to go down if the cost of fossil fuels isn’t honest."

"Economists are very clear on this."

"We need a steadily increasing fee that is then distributed to the public.”

Hansen faced opposition even before his testimony – he recalls a Nasa colleague telling him on the morning of his presentation “no respectable scientist” would claim the world is warming – and faced subsequent meddling and censorship from George HW Bush’s administration.

He eventually retired from Nasa in 2013 and promptly reinvented himself as an activist who was arrested, wearing his trademark hat, outside the White House while protesting against the Keystone oil pipeline.

The dawdling global response to warming temperatures means runaway climate change now looms.

The aspirational 1.5C (2.7F) warming target set in Paris could be surpassed by 2040.

Huge amounts of ice from western Antarctica are crashing into the ocean, redrawing forecasts for sea level rise.

Some low-lying islands fear extinction.

“It’s not too late,” Hansen stressed.

“There is a rate of reduction that’s feasible to stay well below 2C."

"But you just need that price on carbon.”

John Holdren, who was Obama’s chief science adviser, told the Guardian that the Paris agreement achieved what was possible without support from Congress and that legally binding lawsuits would be “problematic”.

However, he added that while he had reservations about Hansen’s policy ideas he was one of the “true giants” of climate science.

“Poor Jim Hansen."

"He’s a tragic hero,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard academic who studies the history of science.

“The Cassandra aspect of his life is that he’s cursed to understand and diagnose what’s going on but unable to persuade people to do something about it."

"We are all raised to believe knowledge is power but Hansen proves the untruth of that slogan."

"Power is power.”

That power has been most aggressively wielded by fossil fuel companies such as Exxon and Shell which, despite being well aware of the dangers of climate change decades before Hansen’s touchstone moment in 1988, funded a network of groups that ridiculed the science and funded sympathetic politicians.

Later, they were to be joined by the bulk of the US Republican party, which now recoils from any action on climate change as heresy.

“Obama was committed to action but couldn’t do much with the Congress he had,” Oreskes said.

“To blame the Democrats and Obama is to misunderstand the political context."

"There was a huge, organized network that put forward a message of confusion and doubt.”


Climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who testified at the same 1988 hearing about sea level rise, said the struggle to confront climate change has been “discouraging”.

“The nasty anti-science movement ramped up and now we are way behind.”

“I’m convinced we will deal with the problem,” he said.

“[But] not before there is an amount of suffering that is unconscionable and should’ve been avoided.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ge-warning
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Re: JAMES HANSEN INTERVIEW

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ClientEarth

"Climate litigation a lasting legacy of Hansen’s historic testimony 30 years ago"


News / 25 June 2018

Saturday marked 30 years since then NASA climate scientist James Hansen gave his historic testimony on human-induced global warming to a US Senate committee.

While not the first warning to decision-makers, it was certainly the most publicised with news media reporting his findings that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.”


Since then Hansen’s warning has been proven correct.

Hansen has since called for a wave of climate lawsuits against governments and fossil fuel companies that are delaying urgent climate action.

ClientEarth CEO James Thornton said: “James Hansen was right then and he’s right now when he says one of the best ways to hold governments and companies to account is through the rule of law."

“Until decision-makers take urgent, meaningful action on climate change, we must strengthen and maintain our legal frameworks to ensure those responsible are doing all they must for affected generations today and into the future."

“I think we can be excused for feeling a deep sadness when marking 30 years since Hansen’s historic testimony to the US Senate left decision-makers in no doubt that global warming was real and already underway."

“Sadness and frustration that since then so much stalling and obfuscation has already led to a greater chance of extreme weather events, sea level rise and the loss of biodiversity."

“But we must realise that we’re now at a critical moment where no more time can be wasted."

"As realists, we must acknowledge the amazing progress the international community has made so far – and, as optimists, we must focus on what we need to do now to prevent further climate change.”

This week, the Uganda High Court will begin hearing the country’s first climate change case, with four young people and local NGO Greenwatch suing the country’s government for failing to protect them from climate change dangers like drought and food shortages.

https://www.clientearth.org/climate-lit ... years-ago/
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Re: JAMES HANSEN INTERVIEW

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THE GUARDIAN

"Americans 'under siege' from climate disinformation – former Nasa chief scientist - Fake news spread by those with a profit motive is leaving many people oblivious to the threat of climate change, says former head of US space agency"


Hannah Devlin Science correspondent @hannahdev

Thu 8 Jun 2017 10.15 EDT Last modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 16.29 EST

Americans are “under siege” from disinformation designed to confuse the public about the threat of climate change, Nasa’s former chief scientist has said.

Speaking to the Guardian, Ellen Stofan, who left the US space agency in December, said that a constant barrage of half-truths had left many Americans oblivious to the potentially dire consequences of continued carbon emissions, despite the science being unequivocal.


“We are under siege by fake information that’s being put forward by people who have a profit motive,” she said, citing oil and coal companies as culprits.

“Fake news is so harmful because once people take on a concept it’s very hard to dislodge it.”

During the past six months, the US science community has woken up to this threat, according to Stofan, and responded by ratcheting up efforts to communicate with the public at the grassroots level as well as in the mainstream press.

“The harder part is this active disinformation campaign,” she said before her appearance at Cheltenham Science Festival this week.

“I’m always wondering if these people honestly believe the nonsense they put forward."

"When they say ‘It could be volcanoes’ or ‘the climate always changes’… to obfuscate and to confuse people, it frankly makes me angry.”

Stofan added that while “fake news” is frequently characterised as a problem in the right-leaning media, she saw evidence of an “erosion of people’s ability to scrutinise information” across the political spectrum.

“All of us have a responsibility,” she said.

“There’s this attitude of ‘I read it on the internet therefore it must be true’.”


Stofan resigned from her post at the top of Nasa in December, but said she had decided to do so before the US election results.

“It wasn’t anything to do with it, but I’m glad I’m not there now,” she said.

However, she welcomed the continued commitment to Nasa’s Mars program in the most recent budget and was relieved that cuts to the agency’s Earth observation program, which contributes to climate and environment monitoring, were relatively small, at $167m (the total Earth science budget is now $1.754bn).

Throughout her career, Stofan has highlighted the role of planetary science in understanding the Earth’s environment and said it provided some of the most inarguable proof that atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to a warmer climate.

She draws parallels between carbon emissions on Earth and the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, a planet which once had oceans but is now a toxic inferno with surface temperatures approaching 500C.


The Earth is not destined for such an extreme scenario – even if all the CO2 were burned its oceans would not boil off completely – but Venus demonstrates the dramatic changes that can unfold when the fine balance of planet’s atmosphere is tipped.

“We won’t go all the way to Venus, but the consequences of putting more and more CO2 into the atmosphere are really dire,” she said.

“There are models that suggest if we burn off all our fossil fuels, the Earth would become uninhabitable for humans.”

The quest to find “habitable zones” beyond the Earth has been a major motivation throughout Stofan’s scientific career and she said that the answer to the question of the existence of extraterrestrial life-forms suddenly seems within reach.

Missions to capture water coming from the plumes of Europa and Enceladus, could yield the first indications.

The search is requiring scientists to be imaginative and open-minded about what alien life might look like – it might involve complex molecules, but be DNA-free, for instance.

The uncertainty over what hypothetical alien life would even look like means that any initial discovery could be ambiguous and a source of scientific dispute, Stofan predicts.

“It would be great if when we found life it was easy and we image a droplet of liquid and something goes swimming across it, no one’s going to disagree with that,” she said.

A more realistic scenario is that it would take decades for confirmation, and this reasoning is why Stofan is a strong advocate of a manned Mars mission, arguing that a robotic rover would not be capable of reliably confirming the existence of life, past or present, that might be lurking beneath the surface.

Human explorers could operate drills designed to extract soil samples from far deeper than the few inches achieved by Nasa’s Curiosity rover, or the two metres limit anticipated for Esa’s upcoming ExoMars mission, and could perform more sophisticated scientific analysis.

She predicts humans could orbit the red planet within 20 years and reach the surface in 30.

“I still feel that to settle the question and to have agreement it’s going to have a lot of samples and a lot of analysis and to me that means humans,” she said.

However, she dismissed the idea, popularised by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, that mankind should be preparing to colonise other planets to avoid self-annihilation.

“I don’t see a mass transfer of humanity to Mars, ever,” she said, adding that she had been concerned recently when a teacher told her that her pupils thought the climate “doesn’t matter as we’ll all go and live on Mars”.

“Job one is to keep this planet habitable."

"I’d hate us to lose focus on that,” she said.

• This article was amended on 12 June 2017. An earlier version said Stofan resigned “in December, before the US election results”. To clarify: she resigned in December, but made the decision before the election results.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... -scientist
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Re: JAMES HANSEN INTERVIEW

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Environmental Defense Fund

"Hansen was right: Marking an anniversary by misleading the public"


By Ilissa Ocko

Published: July 18, 2018

With the thirtieth anniversary of former NASA scientist Jim Hansen’s landmark testimony to Congress on the urgent need to address climate change, numerous articles marked the occasion by demonstrating that his 1988 predictions have proven to be accurate.

Inevitably, some writers seized the opportunity to revive long-debunked arguments in an attempt to cast doubt and confusion on the threat.


Perhaps the most misleading – and certainly the highest profile – was a June 21st op-ed in the Wall Street Journal written by Pat Michaels and Ryan Maue.

Michaels is director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, a think tank financially linked to the fossil fuel industry.

And Michaels has been found to have previously misled Congress by presenting a doctored graph of Hansen’s projections during public testimony before the House Small Business Committee.

Four decades of climate model projections have fared well

Their latest effort implies that U.S. climate policy is based on Hansen’s forecasts in 1988, and therefore we must “reconsider environmental policy” according to an evaluation of “how well his forecasts have done.”

In reality, climate policy is based on hundreds of years of collective research and an overwhelming amount of observational evidence gathered from all over the world.

Climate model development began as early as the 1950s, and projections from 1973 to 2013 (including Hansen’s 1988 paper) have been compared to observed temperatures by multiple institutions.

All showed reasonably accurate surface temperature increases between 1970 and 2016, Hansen’s 1988 study included.

The largest uncertainties come not from lack of understanding of the climate system, but from unknown future human decisions.

For example, if Hansen’s 1988 study had included the greenhouse gas emissions reductions that followed the Montreal Protocol Treaty – which took effect in 1989 and phased out ozone-depleting chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) – the results from his “most likely” scenario would have matched projections by today’s more sophisticated models.

Considering the lack of available data and computing power in 1988, this is incredibly impressive.

Predicting exactly what emissions path we’ll take is therefore a policy, and not science, question.

Climate scientists work towards understanding how the climate will respond to a range of future emissions scenarios, and unless a particular emissions pathway comes to fruition, it is never expected that the climate model results will be exactly right even if the science is perfect.

However, even without accounting for the Montreal Protocol Treaty adjustment, Hansen predicted in his “most likely” scenario nearly 1 degree (C) of warming by 2016 with respect to a 1964-1983 average, and observations from the standard datasets by NASA and Cowtan and Way both show this amount of warming.

On the other hand, Michaels and Maue’s piece misleads readers by inaccurately claiming that Hansen’s lowest projection was most accurate; a quick look at the data shows that this is not so.

The article goes a step further, inaccurately claiming that “Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago.”

First, IPCC does not devise models themselves, but it collates, synthesizes, and standardizes model results from dozens of independent climate models worldwide.

But the main problem with this claim is that it is based on comparisons of model results with satellite data that has since been found to have major calibration errors that underestimated temperature measurements.

Correcting for the errors reveals that the models are very much in line with what we observe.

Another major flaw in the piece is that Hansen’s and the “IPCC’s” models “don’t consider more-precise measures of how aerosol emissions counter warming caused by greenhouse gases."

Several newer climate models account for this trend and routinely project about half the warming predicted by U.N. models, placing their numbers much closer to observed temperatures.

The most recent of these was published in April by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry in the Journal of Climate, a reliably mainstream journal.

Sophisticated climate models have long considered effects of aerosols, both directly and via cloud modifications.

Lewis and Curry estimated a lower than average climate sensitivity not because of aerosols but because they selected a very low ocean heat uptake rate – a controversial choice among climate scientists; accounting for the latest ocean heat content data would have increased the climate sensitivity value to be on par with other model estimates.

Further, their study used a version of a temperature dataset that didn’t include adjustments due to lack of coverage of the Arctic.

Temperature IS rising…

The authors of the opinion piece write that “Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16.”

This is a tired canard that has been fully debunked elsewhere.

This argument is based on flawed and cherry-picked data, and ignores the latest scientific understanding.

First, when the flawed, underlying satellite data was corrected, it showed 140% faster warming since 1998 that was consistent with other datasets.

Second, the data is cherry-picked to fit the authors’ argument; it is clearly unscientific to discount the El Niño of 2015-16, but not the common La Niñas that masked some of the warming, and not the El Niño of 1997-98 that makes the warming thereafter appear to “slow down.”

Third, El Niño was found to play a very minor role in global temperature rise in 2015, which shattered previous records.

While it played a relatively larger role in 2016, it is certainly not the cause of a century-long global temperature rise trend, and just amplifies warming when it occurs – in contrast to the La Niñas that mask warming when they occur.

Overall, five ground-based temperature datasets and two satellite datasets all from different scientific groups show rapid warming over the past 30 years that continues into the 21st century.

The 2010s have been warmer than the 2000s, the 2000s were warmer than the 1990s, the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 1980s were warmer than the 1970s.

And temperature changes are hardly the only indicator of a changing climate.

So the article’s central question – “Why should people world-wide pay drastic costs to cut emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made?” is specious.

Global temperature is not acting as if those cuts have been made.

And basic physics known since the 1800s shows that the global temperature will continue on this path unless we cut emissions of greenhouse gases drastically.

In the U.S., we have also observed considerable warming.

However, Michaels and Maue further tried to discredit Hansen by saying, without any evidence or source, “No such spike has been measured” in greater than average temperatures in the late ‘80s and ‘90s in the southeast U.S. and Midwest, as Hansen suggested in his 1988 paper.

First, several states in these areas have seen higher than average temperature rise, including Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Second, reading Hansen’s actual paper shows caveated language that there will be regional variations, and that there is a “tendency” for the southeast and central U.S. to be warmer than average.

Hansen also fully acknowledges that major improvements are needed in our understanding of the climate system and our ability to predict change, especially the urgent need for more global measurements.

For example, we didn’t know in 1988 important variability dynamics that have governed temperature change in these regions.

… and the planet IS reacting

The excess warmth has touched every continent and every ocean.

We’ve observed considerable melting of land ice, something that Hansen highlighted in a testimony during a 2007 case on auto emissions.

However, the opinion piece didn’t quite accurately depict his sentiments, paraphrasing his words as “most of Greenland’s ice would soon melt, raising sea levels 23 feet over the course of 100 years.”

Rather, Hansen was referring to ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica, stated that “it is nearly certain that West Antarctica and/or Greenland would disintegrate at some point if global warming approaches 3°C,” and caveated his estimation of sea level rise as “his opinion” (and therefore implying this as not a scientifically robust finding).

The authors cite “a Nature study that found only modest ice loss after 6,000 years of much warmer temperatures than human activity could ever sustain.”

But the same study acknowledges a major rise in sea level during that time, which if not from Greenland, was from Antarctica.

As for climate-related extreme events that have been on the rise over the past 30 years, the opinion article claims that hurricanes have not gotten stronger, but observational evidence shows they have.

The article claims that tornadoes have not gotten stronger, but that was never a mainstream theory, and observations have shown that tornadoes are clumping together causing more severe outbreaks.

Michaels and Maue finally conclude that the list of what has been predicted and didn’t happen “is long and tedious.”

I’d like to see that list, because the sampling they provided is filled with inaccuracies and easily refuted.

Jim Hansen’s 1988 testimony is a landmark moment.

No matter how the opponents of climate action try to sow doubt and confusion, the judgement of history is clear: Hansen was right.

This entry was posted in Basic Science of Global Warming, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, News, Science, Setting the Facts Straight.

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Re: JAMES HANSEN INTERVIEW

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate"


By Philip Shabecoff, Special To the New York Times

June 24, 1988

The earth has been warmer in the first five months of this year than in any comparable period since measurements began 130 years ago, and the higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution, a space agency scientist reported today.

Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the ''greenhouse effect.''

But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.

Dr. Hansen, a leading expert on climate change, said in an interview that there was no ''magic number'' that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather.

But he added, ''It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.''

An Impact Lasting Centuries

If Dr. Hansen and other scientists are correct, then humans, by burning of fossil fuels and other activities, have altered the global climate in a manner that will affect life on earth for centuries to come.

Dr. Hansen, director of NASA's Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, testifed before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

He and other scientists testifying before the Senate panel today said that projections of the climate change that is now apparently occurring mean that the Southeastern and Midwestern sections of the United States will be subject to frequent episodes of very high temperatures and drought in the next decade and beyond.

But they cautioned that it was not possible to attribute a specific heat wave to the greenhouse effect, given the still limited state of knowledge on the subject.


Some Dispute Link

Some scientists still argue that warmer temperatures in recent years may be a result of natural fluctuations rather than human-induced changes.

Several Senators on the Committee joined witnesses in calling for action now on a broad national and international program to slow the pace of global warming.

Senator Timothy E. Wirth, the Colorado Democrat who presided at hearing today, said: ''As I read it, the scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth's atmosphere gets warmer."

"Now, the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.''

Trapping of Solar Radiation

Mathematical models have predicted for some years now that a buildup of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil and other gases emitted by human activities into the atmosphere would cause the earth's surface to warm by trapping infrared radiation from the sun, turning the entire earth into a kind of greenhouse.

If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit from the year 2025 to 2050, according to these projections.

This rise in temperature is not expected to be uniform around the globe but to be greater in the higher latitudes, reaching as much as 20 degrees, and lower at the Equator.


The rise in global temperature is predicted to cause a thermal expansion of the oceans and to melt glaciers and polar ice, thus causing sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.

Scientists have already detected a slight rise in sea levels.

At the same time, heat would cause inland waters to evaporate more rapidly, thus lowering the level of bodies of water such as the Great Lakes.

Dr. Hansen, who records temperatures from readings at monitoring stations around the world, had previously reported that four of the hottest years on record occurred in the 1980's.

Compared with a 30-year base period from 1950 to 1980, when the global temperature averaged 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature was one-third of a degree higher last year.

In the entire century before 1880, global temperature had risen by half a degree, rising in the late 1800's and early 20th century, then roughly stabilizing for unknown reasons for several decades in the middle of the century.


Warmest Year Expected

In the first five months of this year, the temperature averaged about four-tenths of a degree above the base period, Dr. Hansen reported today.

''The first five months of 1988 are so warm globally that we conclude that 1988 will be the warmest year on record unless there is a remarkable, improbable cooling in the remainder of the year,'' he told the Senate committee.

He also said that current climate patterns were consistent with the projections of the greenhouse effect in several respects in addition to the rise in temperature.

For example, he said, the rise in temperature is greater in high latitudes than in low, is greater over continents than oceans, and there is cooling in the upper atmosphere as the lower atmosphere warms up.

''Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming,'' Dr. Hansen said at the hearing today, adding, ''It is already happening now.''

Dr. Syukuro Manabe of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration testified today that a number of factors, including an earlier snowmelt each year because of higher temperatures and a rain belt that moves farther north in the summer means that ''it is likely that severe mid-continental summer dryness will occur more frequently with increasing atmsopheric temperature.''

A Taste of the Future

While natural climate variability is the most likely chief cause of the current drought, Dr. Manabe said, the global warming trend is probably ''aggravating the current dry condition.''

He added that the current drought was a foretaste of what the country would be facing in the years ahead.


Dr. George Woodwell, director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole, Mass., said that while a slow warming trend would give human society time to respond, the rate of warming is uncertain.

One factor that could speed up global warming is the widescale destruction of forests that are unable to adjust rapidly enough to rising temperatures.

The dying forests would release the carbon dioxide they store in their organic matter, and thus greatly speed up the greenhouse effect.

Sharp Cut in Fuel Use Urged

Dr. Woodwell, and other members of the panel, said that planning must begin now for a sharp reduction in the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide.

Because trees absorb and store carbon dioxide, he also proposed an end to the current rapid clearing of forests in many parts of the world and ''a vigorous program of reforestation.''

Some experts also believe that concern over global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels warrants a renewed effort to develop safe nuclear power.

Others stress the need for more efficient use of energy through conservation and other measures to curb fuel-burning.

Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric physicist with the Environmental Defense Fund, a national environmental group, said a number of steps can be taken immediately around the world, including the ratification and then strengthening of the treaty to reduce use of chlorofluorocarbons, which are widely used industrial chemicals that are said to contribute to the greenhouse effect.

These chemicals have also been found to destroy ozone in the upper atmosphere that protects the earth's surface from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/g ... enate.html
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