JAMES HANSEN: It's Worse Than You Think

Last month James Hansen sent to his mailing list To Understand and Protect the Home Planet.  He said this effort will be published with several colleagues as co-authors in Oxford Open Climate Change as Global Warming in the Pipeline.  The New York Times reported on this paper yesterday by David Wallace-Wells.

• He called Hansen the Godfather of Climate Science.
• In 1988 Hansen appeared before a U.S. Senate committee, beginning the era for climate alarm.

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  Actually, I worked for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee from 1979-1982, and Professor David J. Rose of MIT presented a view about climate warming, which was totally ignored.  Wow, that was more than 40 years ago.  He soon thereafter retired and moved to Honolulu, where we had long discussions on the seriousness of this phenomenon. 

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  Thus, when Hansen suddenly made headlines in the later 1980's I met with him to discuss solutions.  I had a few geoengineering thoughts.  There was a sense that the world needed to wait a while to learn the science before doing anything prematurely.  I advised my team to be patient.  Well, we did nothing for so long that my first climate change remediation publication was a Huffington Post article on this subject a quarter century later.  We, meaning the entire world, are still waiting to seriously look at potential engineering solutions if humanity suddenly needs quick answers.
• 
  One needs to toss into this pot other gases and particles, some which cool the atmosphere, like aerosols, nitrogen dioxide and soot, and a potentially serious one, methane, which is anywhere from 25 to 125 worse than carbon dioxide on a molecule to molecule comparison, depending on certain conditions.  

• 
  My concern are those methane hydrates at the bottom of the ocean right on top of the Ring of Fire in the Pacific. A series of cataclysmic eruptions could release so much methane into the atmosphere that I worry about something I call The Venus Syndrome.  I have three HuffPo articles on this subject, and here is one.
• The UN's IPCC and the Hansen group do not bother much with methane, but all actually plug in quite a bit a cooling within their models, and they still all show significant temperature rise.
• But back to Hansen and his collaborators, they make several alarming claims that all point in the same direction:  THAT THE WORLD'S CLIMATE IS SIGNIFICANTLY MORE SENSITIVE TO CARBON EMISSIONS THAN SCIENTISTS HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED OR THE PUBLIC APPRECIATES, AND THAT AS A RESULT, EVEN THOSE MOST FOCUSED ON CLIMATE RISKS HAVE BEEN SYSTEMATICALLY UNDERESTIMATING HOW MUCH WARMING THE PLANET IS LIKELY TO SEE OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DECADES.
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  They say that the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5 C above preindustrial levels is "deader than a doornail."
• "We would be damned fools and bad scientists if we didn't expect an acceleration of global warming."
• One way to deal with this is just to wait.  "But in this case, if we do that, young people are screwed."

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  This latest Hansen contribution has been criticized by some, but the bottom line is that this alarm is not much different from the announcements of the IPCC.  In other words, the science seems to be in agreement.  What to do about this peril is not being addressed.
• Hansen is now 82 years old, and I am 83.  We won't get hurt, but many of you will.

Here is David Wallace-Wells being interviewed in August on The Climate Pod on this general topic.

I might add that this morning Hansen sent me an e-mail with the following article:

How We Know that Global Warming is Accelerating and that the Goal of the Paris Agreement is Dead

He included a bunch of graphics.  Here are two:

Also this morning, Time magazine featured him with this:

We Need Geoengineering to Stop Out of Control Warming, 

Warns Climate Scientist James Hansen

Finally, the top front page headline in The Japan Times this morning was:

PAST 12 MONTHS HOTTEST EVER:  NEW ANALYSIS

"Records will continue to fall next year, especially as the growing El Nino begins to take hold, exposing billions to unusual heat,” said Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central. "While climate impacts are most acute in developing countries near the equator, seeing climate-fueled streaks of extreme heat in the U.S., India, Japan and Europe underscores that no one is safe from climate change.”

"This is the hottest temperature that our planet has experienced in something like 125,000 years, the hottest temperatures that humans have experienced for the time when we’ve decided to write down things, build cities and live together in large groups,” added Pershing.

Yes, I'm still in Japan, and had a day of rest in Yokohama.  In a few minutes, we will be off to Sendai on a bullet train.

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