James Hansen and his colleagues have published a study of heat waves that have occurred around the world since 2003. He claims that it will prove that man-made climate change is no longer a “theory” it is a “scientific fact.” Read the following quote for his view regarding the extreme heat waves Europe, the Middle East and North America has experienced over the last ten years:
“These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.”
James Hansen was right in the 1980s about the dangers he saw from climate change if we as a species refused to act, and act quickly, to limit our use of carbon based fuels, to stop the destruction of the rainforest through clear-cutting and burning, and to otherwise take measures to limit the production of greenhouse gases. Now he has lived long enough to see his warnings become our reality. He was ignored, ridiculed, mocked and called an alarmist.
The people who did their best to portray him as a “mad scientist,” a conspiracy theorist and a hack government employee trying to justify his job have been proven wrong over and over again. Indeed, if anything, his warnings of the dangers in his testimony to Congress and in his published papers were not strong enough. That’s because he has a quality his critics lack — integrity. He never argued a position regarding climate change that was more extreme than the current scientific evidence at the time would justify. He may have feared worse, but he did not claim the worst would occur, only that we were taking absurd risks with the future of our world.
Well now he has lived long enough to see his worst fears realized, and sooner than he imagined. Now he is willing to assert that there is a exceedingly slim chance that the changes to our climate and the extreme weather effects we are experiencing are the result of natural variation, and slim just left town. Once again he will be ignored, ridiculed mocked, and painted in the worst possible light by those in the media and the fossil fuel industries.
Too bad he’s right, isn’t it. Because these extreme (and by extreme I mean of biblical proportions) storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, crop loss, extinction of species and increased disease are certainly created by all of us, the human species that has wrecked this planet in its desperate attempts to sustain a civilization based on 19th century technology that is unsustainable. But then again, maybe you believe you hold the next winning lottery ticket and all your dreams will come true, just like millions of other people. Maybe you believe the climate change denialists who claim everything we are witnessing is normal and natural and therefore there is nothing we can do about it, so why try. Maybe you believe the second coming of Jesus Christ or the Twelfth Imam (or some other end of the world fantasy) is only a matter of months or a few years away, an apocalypse that will end time, one where all all the good people go to Paradise or heaven.
Well, an apocalypse is coming all right, one caused by human hubris, greed, ignorance, folly and the willingness to deny the “facts on the ground” even when they are staring all of us in the face, year after blighted year. James Hansen can say he told you so. My bet is that he is both sad and angry about that fact.
Steven, you keep arguing as if facts matter to the institutional forces blocking efforts to respond to climate change, or to the suckers who enable them with their insistence that their imaginary sky friend would never allow such a thing.
This is the best thing I’ve seen a while on why traditional science-based arguments on climate change haven’t produced an appropriate response, and what might:
http://grist.org/article/why-climate-change-doesnt-spark-moral-outrage-and-how-it-could/
Worth a read.
Some days Geov, I’m just angry.
As if facts matter.
My stepfather once relayed how in 1955 he was attending a University biology class and some ahead-of-his-time-low-IQ-wingnut blurted out “some of us here don’t believe in evolution”. The professor said, “Well, I don’t care about your religious beliefs, but I’m not teaching the THEORY of evolution I’m teaching the FACT of evolution, and if you don’t master the FACTS of evolution you will fail this class and fail this subject.”
1955. 57 years ago.
If a professor did that today he’d be captured on a cell phone video, it would go viral on the right, and he’d be fired by a timid University president.
Facts don’t matter – what matters is who has the the biggest media megaphone.
A few days ago on NPR there was some scientist from NASA or NOAA claiming that the weather still has no connection to long-term climate change. He cited the cold weather in Europe as one example of how global short-term temperatures are actually balancing out to historic levels. I was hoping Hansen would address this claim.
Wish I remembered who the guy was and where I heard this. In any case, it’s the kind of thing that keeps people from going all in on the outrage over what’s happening.
Are you sure it wasn’t Muller? He has a tendency to spout off about things he has no scientific knowledge of, and then seek funding to study it and discover that he was wrong.
But there is still a distressing tendency among NOAA scientists to say that specific weather events have no connection to climate change when a correct understanding of weather requires an understanding that every weather event is impacted by a warmer, more moist atmosphere. Because that is what drives weather.
We may have to start thinking of ways to proactive cool the planet, if only to buy us some time.
I think I read somewhere there were people working on that, I just can’t remember which book it was in, I’ll try to find it.
Interesting, please post when you find it!
I just remembered it was in one of the Freakonomics books, I’ll have to dig those out of storage to find the name of the company.
Here’s the general info from a Time article about the book:
There were a few more ideas in the book outside of this hose idea. There’s a whole chapter of the book devoted to this idea of Global Cooling techniques.
that’s really interesting
I’ve been told there are some TED talks on the subject, too.
The advertising that shows up with this article:
let’s face it, the only way any action is gonna be forthcoming is if the severity of the problem is faced.
I’m guessing that he’ll see any efforts by flat earther crowd as nothing more than a cementing of his Galileo-like status our ancestors (assuming we survive to print the books) will be reading about in the future.