James Hansen - 10 Years To A "Different Planet" In Absence Of Changes In Energy & Economic Policies

LONDON, Dec. 30. - Dr Jim Hansen is one of the world’s leading experts on climate, having spent a lifetime in climate science; he was one of the first scientists to warn of climate change in scientific testimony to the US Congress in 1988. Today, in an interview with The Independent, he warns that the earth is being turned into a “different planet” because of the continuing increase in man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.

Dr Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of Columbia University in New York, complained that Nasa public relations officials, appointed by the Bush administration, had tried to gag him by limiting his access to the media. But in talking to this newspaper he was outspoken, warning that we have less than 10 years to begin to curb carbon dioxide emissions before global warming runs out of control and changes the landscape forever.

There are already worrying signs that global warming is beginning to trigger dangerous “positive feedback” within the climate, which can accelerate the rate of climate change,” Dr Hansen said.
“We just cannot burn all the fossil fuels in the ground. If we do, we will end up with a different planet,” he said. “I mean a planet with no ice in the Arctic, and a planet where warming is so large that it’s going to have a large effect in terms of sea level rises and the extinction of species.” Positive feedback in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere are already starting. One is the loss of sea ice, which means less sunlight and heat it reflected back into space, making the Arctic even warmer. Another is the release of methane from the frozen tundra. Methane gas is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, Dr Hansen said.

“The greatest concern is that positive feedback at high latitudes do in fact seem to be coming into play. We can’t just let those feedback get out of control or we will have passed a tipping point,” he said.

EDIT

http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=8&theme=&usrsess=1&id=141983

>> we have less than 10 years to begin to curb carbon dioxide emissions before global warming runs out of control and changes the landscape forever. <<

I think that 10-year window has come and gone, possibly sometime in the 80s or 90s or even earlier, but I have a hard time believing it's still open now.

Even if the impossible happened and every single carbon emmission was stopped today, there would be a lag of decades before CO2 levels dropped back to safer ranges. We don't have decades of grace -- the permafrost is already thawing, the sea ice is already melting, species are already crashing and dying.

Our current technologies and infrastructure are so pervasive, our governments so ineffectual, our human resistance to change is so great, that nothing will change until circumstances force us to change. In other words, we won't stop until we crash headlong into a brick wall. Our carbon emmissions will drop when our infrastructure collapses due to the climate change itself.

What concerns me is that we're still wrangling over how to avert the inevitable, instead of preparing for the catastrophe itself. There's still enough time (just barely) to begin preparing for climate extremes and loss of arable land, but again, human nature being what it is, we will not build for that future now, we'll wait until everything has been torn down and then begin to rebuild.

Hang on to your seats, folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride to the end of this century.

From what I can tell, science can predict generalities in climate changes for a given region or regions that we can more or less count on. But no one knows for absolute sure because the system itself is so complex and interconnected.

I am interested in how melting ice shelves will affect the ocean's salinity and currents. This could well result in climate effects we can't yet predict, since we know so little about the ocean itself.

Yes, a bumpy ride in a go-cart we can't steer, heading rapidly downhill towards we don't know what, picking up speed.

wind turbines, and build a huge greenhouse wherein I could grow fruits and veggies year round.

Trouble is, no telling where I should put that house.

It will be another century before we start to really alter the climate there. So it should be a safe place for the foreseeable future.

An immediate stop to the destruction of farmland. Precisely because we have no idea where specific weather patterns will change, our agricultural production should be as decentralized as possible. We need local farms in every area of the country.

Same on the energy front. Use every resource we have to provide alternative energy for all new housing. Require high insulation efficiency. Provide no-interest loans for re-fitting existing housing.

Immediate stop to development of the coastlines, with a phased in withdrawal of property after every destructive storm. You can rebuild, you just can't rebuild where you were before.

These are only a few steps for buffering the effects of climate change. Without them, we are going to face increased hardship and higher casualty numbers. If the Midwestern breadbasket is hit hard, Americans are going to learn the meaning of "famine."

Not to be gloom and doom on new year's eve but 10 years is like a day. Nothing gets accomplished in 10 years any longer. The day Ron Reagan was elected, was the day that it was too late. Americans voted for Happy Days Forever, Reality be Damned. Carter was the last (only?) president to take the energy/environment problem seriously and we've spent 30 years running in the wrong direction. It takes a lot of track to stop a runaway train.

Now on that happy thought, I'm off to celebrate!

Climate change is not as big a problem as so called "nuclear waste," but it's pretty damn important.

While nuclear waste is a problem, it's effectively localized. Global warming, on the other hand, is truly global. There is very little problem with nuclear waste in most places on the face of the earth, but there is excess carbon dioxide everywhere.

If I had to rank the elements of the world problematique in order of the scale and immediacy of their threat to civilization, the list would look something like this:

1. Population growth (from which all the other problems flow)
2. Oil and natural gas depletion
3. Geopolitical and global financial instability
4. Water and topsoil depletion leading to food shortages
5. Climate change
6. The death of ocean life (fish, plankton etc.)
7. Deforestation and desertification
8. Biodiversity loss
9. Large scale WMD terrorism
10. Nuclear waste

"WMD terrorism" doesn't make it into my top 20 concerns.

In making my post, I was once again failing to use the sarcasm button, for which I am often lectured.

Here is how I would rank the top problems, more or less:

1. Population growth.
2. Climate change.
3. The destruction of freshwater resources
4. Oceanic habitat destruction.
5. Land based habitat destruction.
6. Biodiversity loss.
7. The toxicity of fossil fuels and fossil fuel wastes.
8. Racism, including its expression as genocide.
9. Poverty.
10. Human ignorance.
11. Anti-nuclear mysticism.


To some extent the ordering is arbitrary since all eleven factors closely depend upon one another.

The only reason I put waste in there was to make the point that it was at the very bottom of my list of concerns. I would rate the absence of fossil fuels as a bigger risk than their toxicity, but that's just quibbling.

A couple of months ago (heck, even a few weeks ago) I would have agreed with you about WMD terrorism. It makes my list now not because I think that the risk of an attack is great, or that the destructiveness of the actual event would be very large - in fact both of those factors are insignificant IMO. The reason I include it is because of my recent reading and thinking about adaptive cycles and system resilience. The work of Dr. Buzz Holling and the group of scientists who call themselves "The Resilience Alliance" has illuminated what I feel is a critical aspect of complex systems - their loss of resilience as they reach the peak of their growth phase.

I think the growth of human civilization has massively over-extended. The level of global interconnectedness this has required, rather than making civilization more resilient has actually made it quite brittle. This means that a shock at any place in the system has a good chance of cascading through its interconnections, potentially causing a major system breakdown. Unlike climate change, loss of ocean species, or even oil depletion - all of which are relatively gradual processes that we can more or less adapt to - a major terrorist attack is a shock will trigger a convulsion within the socio-economic portion of our system, which could cause a cascading chain of failures. Vulnerable connections that are potential vectors for collapse include transportation, economic, political and diplomatic linkages.

We've already seen a dress rehearsal of this in the effect 9/11 had on American internal policies and foreign relations. Things are no better now than they were 5 years ago. So even though such an attack is a low-probability event, the current state of the system is such that the impact could be enormous. That's the reason it's on my list.

I agree with many of your comments, except that I still think terrorism is over-rated as a threat to humanity.

That's it.

The jetstream will slow down and become non-existant. Weather for your area will be whatever it was the day the jetstream stopped - if it's miserable and cold - it may get a bit colder FOREVER.
If it is miserably warm, it might get a bit warmer FOREVER.
That's it.

I don't know - maybe there is some sci-fi way to get ourselves out of this - an Isaac Asimov thing wherein we put up a series of artifical planets to help us.

And of course some theorize that the chemtrails are being done to save us from global warming. (others theorize that the chemtrails are about killing off all the plant speices that are not Genetically Modified Organisms)

I didn't realize that. Is the jet stream the only thing that "moves" the weather? Doesn't just the spinning of the earth affect that to some extent?

Just not the same currents. While I'm not a meteorolgist, I'm pretty certain that currents originate from differential temperatures, salinities, and water densities.

Once the cold, freshwater-holding glaciers and ice shelves are gone, some new, post-jet-stream current pattern will emerge (from differential heating at different latitudes, etc.) that will affect weather on the landmasses. The new pattern's effects probably will not be as congenial as the jet stream has been, especially for Europe and Northeastern America.

As has been said above, it looks like a bumpy ride ahead. So even the weather on the day the jet stream dies will not be an accurate predictor of what's next.

-app

I'm referring to a study done by two scientists who like twenty years ago created a computer modelled ezxperiment as to what would happen to the planet if glaciers melted (I used to have their names and the University that sponsored them in an otebook somewhere,but no longer do)

Eventually under their theory, everything on the planet became extemely stagnant - they claimed weather ceased to "flow" from one area to another. If this stagnation set in, I imagine viral, bacterial and fungal diseases would soar to alarming numbers nd new previously unheard of epidemics would do their nasty work on whatever population was left.

At the time they were working, it was just a playful game for them. It was a good ten years before Chilean oceanogrqaphers sounded the alarm about the glaciers - and on that day in Spring 1995 that the ocanographers contacted Greenpeace they were in tears over it.(At the time,Greenpeace was one of the few organizations willing to bet its shirt on the globakl warming theory

without even trying I seem to read one scarey environmental (global warming-related) article a day.

THIS is the scariest, I think, and part of the reason is that I'm sure he's way wrong too -- I think we've passed the point of no return. But even if not, 10 years within which to maneouver is an impossibility.

I really do -- and have -- blamed Clinton for this. In the final analysis, this will be his worst failing, and HE had the environmental VP at his elbow, too.

I agree that Clinton's administration was an environmental failure. However he had neither Congress or much public concern to rely on.

His failures were numerous, especially getting behind lower CAFE standards. He backed away from a number of campaign promises but even had he wanted to, Congress and the general population wouldn't have been behind any true action.

People weren't ready for it in the late '70s, people aren't really ready for it now....