Climatologist Renews Call to Act on Global Warming

20 years ago, climatologist James E. Hansen addressed the Senate with a dire warning about global warming: it was time to act. The climate was already changing, and the heat-trapping blanket of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere was accumulating fast.

Since then, little real action has been taken; if anything, things have gotten much worse. We’ve continued to release huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere as we stubbornly cling to an era of fossil fuels and free-flowing pollution. Now, Hansen says, it’s almost getting to be too late: we’re approaching the red line, and soon there will be no going back.

From The New York Times:

“If we don’t begin to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next several years, and really on a very different course, then we are in trouble,” Dr. Hansen said Friday at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which he has directed since 1981. “Then the ice sheets are in trouble. Many species on the planet are in trouble.”

Dr. Hansen said the natural skepticism and debates embedded in the scientific process had distracted the public from the confidence experts have in a future with centuries of changing climate patterns and higher sea levels under rising carbon dioxide concentrations. The confusion has been amplified by industries that extract or rely on fossil fuels, he said, and this has given cover to politicians who rely on contributions from such industries.

Dr. Hansen said the United States must begin a sustained effort to exploit new energy sources and phase out unfettered burning of finite fossil fuels, starting with a moratorium on the construction of coal-burning power plants if they lack systems for capturing and burying carbon dioxide. Such systems exist but have not been tested at anywhere near the scale required to blunt emissions. Ultimately he is seeking a worldwide end to emissions from coal burning by 2030.

Since the time to act was decades ago, it makes it all the more urgent to make swift, far-reaching, dramatic changes to the way we live in order to preserve the planet – and the species that live upon it.

This makes me want to shake global warming skeptics. We’ve seen enough of them drop by EarthFirst and leave comments to the effect of, ‘it’s too expensive to change’, ‘I don’t want to give up my lifestyle’ or ‘I just don’t believe that global warming is caused by humans’. Are you really that selfish and naïve? Do you really believe that you’re so entitled to your current lifestyle of driving an SUV, living in a needlessly large house, profiting off of oil industry stock and whatever else it is that’s so precious to you, you refuse to give it up? What about your grandchildren – what kind of a world are they going to live in? You’re leaving behind a legacy of death and destruction because you’re set in your selfish ways.

Here’s the thing: deny that global warming is caused by humans all you want, or even that global warming isn’t real, as unbelievably stupid as that is. What it comes down to is our way of life is putting a huge strain on our planet. We’re using up precious resources at an alarming pace, removing mountaintops to get to coal, spewing pollution into the atmosphere, killing millions of species, dumping trash in the oceans, creating mountains upon mountains of toxic refuse. We’re poisoning our bodies, our soil, our air, our water, the animals around us – everything that we depend upon to survive. These actions will have consequences, whether you want to face it or not. It’s time to move forward into the 21st century, and take responsibility.

Link [The New York Times]
Photo credit: Flickr user ximenatapia

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