I met James Hansen several decades ago, and remember him all the back to  1988 when he first testified in Congress .  This was six years after I had left the U. S. Senate, a time period when global warming was an issue of importance only to a very few scientists.  I am on his mailing list, and this morning received his views on  The Venus Syndrome and Runaway Climate . Paper starts with: Mars, Venus and Earth   are the Goldilocks planets – too cold, too hot, and just right. These planets reveal how a planet’s surface temperature depends on atmospheric gases as well as the planet’s distance from the Sun. The physics is energy balance: a planet sends back to space, as (infrared) heat radiation, the energy in sunlight that it absorbs. Absorbed solar energy depends simply on the Sun’s irradiance, ⁱ   the planet’s distance from the Sun, and the fraction of incident sunlight that the planet absorbs (the remainder being reflected). The surface temperature is then ...

During the past few weeks I have focused on the theme of War and Peace on this nostalgic Tuesday.  However, I previously only analyzed the War portion.  This all  began on August 5  with my first  Huffington Post  article:   Well, Barack, We have a Problem.. ., which was published on 29May2008.  That initial  HuffPo  was an article on peace. On 23March2009 my  HuffPo  was entitled  The 10% Solution .  This essay provided details to that first attempt:  an ultimate plan to attain World Peace. The timing was right, for the world had suffered through the  Great Recession  from December 2007, and would continue through the date of this article into June 2009. The U.S. stock market had dropped 35%, but Chinese and Russian stocks fell 70%. There was no serious enemy during this period, for Iran was losing money producing oil, there were ragtag bunches of terrorists in the Middle East and North Korea was ...

Yesterday I featured Part 1 of this posting.  I left at #9, Supervolcanoes.  Here are the remaining eight ways Humanity could go extinct.  I will today particularly focus on what I've all my adult life feared most, nuclear war. #8  Solar Storms The most intense storm peaked in the September 1-2 period of 1859, and is known as the  Carrington Event .  Carrington was a British astronomer. The aurora borealis over the Rocky Mountains was so bright, that gold miners thought it was morning. Even Hawaii saw this phenomenon . Telegraphs gave operators shocks.  However, there is a much-publicized conversation between two operators in Boston and Portland ( Maine ) who were able to communicate without using batteries to power the line. If this were to happen today, the USA alone stands to lose $3.35 trillion to our general economy. Researchers examining carbon-14 tree rings and beryllium-10 in ice cores found two other major solar storms:  in the years 774-...