James Hansen - Can We Still Avoid Dangerous Human-Made Climate Change?

[RedEarth]

....this is from a live blog session Hansen participated in back on November 9, 2006....

LIVEBLOG: James Hansen - Can We Still Avoid Dangerous Human-Made Climate Change?
LIVEBLOG: James Hansen - Can We Still Avoid Dangerous Human-Made Climate Change?


James Hansen whips out more incredible facts than any 30 minute talk would normally be able to shake a stick at. Bottom line: The earth will warm 3 degrees C by the end of the century if we stick to the Business as Usual scenario he outlines. This means no more ice sheets, the extinction of 50% of the species on earth, and major disruptions as a result of regional climate change - northern lattitudes are going to get much warmer, and the American Southwest is going to turn into a desert - forests rendered moonscape, according to Hansen.

On the heels of last month's paper in PNAS by Hansen on how even 1 degree of warming could set off runaway warming as a result of carbon released by thawing permafrost, this is scary stuff.

Deviating from the hard science for a while and venturing into the traditionally verboten territory of policy prescriptions, Hansen outlined an alternative scenario, in which we bulldoze all old-style coal power plants by 2025 and replace them with "clean coal" - presumably he means carbon sequestration (of course there's still debate about whether this new and relatively unproven technology will actually work).



http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=liveblog_james_hansen_can_we_still_avoid&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1&cat=19

[Double T]

1. 'WE' CAN NOT avoid dangerous human-made climate changes because.......

humans will not alter their behavior that creates the stuff causing climate changes.

[bagrman]

2. Change would take to much effort.

[bloom]

3. I think that there is no question that there will be change.

The question is How much? How much will people change to reduce the effects?


When I some read people's reactions (like those who express an entitlement to wasting resources) - it makes me think that the capitalist ideas and values are the biggest problem. The world might need a different economic system entirely or at the very least - a lot more regulation of the type that Americans export (what some people call the "nanny state" - esp. free-market capitalists).

[I_Will]

4. People will not change...but some will be able to adapt to the changes wrought..

Pity those who cannot adapt for whatever variety of reasons (which may end up being me or you...who knows?).

I imagine hardline "survival of the fittest" folks might way, all's well and that's how it's supposed to work. As humans, the social aspects that overlay this possible "natural selection" - and the struggles through who persists and who perishes - will make it heart-wrenching if it happens quickly.

If it's more gradual (perhaps longer than a generation or two?), our societal norms and mores may adapt as well, and it may be easier for those of the future to accept mass extinctions of people, plants and animals, great displacements and migrations, and the whole authoritarian leadership, war, pestilence and famine (and all the rest of that "biblical proportion" metaphorical stuff). Kind of an interesting and bizarre shift in the definition of "fundamentalism", springing up around Darwinism, as it were.

Anyway, I'm talking out of my #$%, as I'm not a sociologist, a climatologist, a policy-maker or anything even close.

I'm just an individual with a couple of kids, who is hopeful that things won't get as bad for them as it appears it might. If things do get that bad or worse, I just hope that my kids will be able to adapt and be comfortable making decisions about things that I don't even want to imagine.

Peace!

[GliderGuider]

5. The short answer is, of course, "NO"

The killer lurking behind the veil of carbon dioxide is called "hysteresis" - the delay between the time when a system input is applied or removed, and the time when the system responds. We have been putting major amounts of CO2 into the air for decades, but the effect wasn't evident because it takes time for the heat from trapped solar radiation to build up in the atmosphere. So in the absence of any signal that this was a bad thing, we just kept doing it. Now we understand it's Not Good, and we might (just might) stop doing it so much. Unfortunately, the CO2 already in the air will keep trapping heat for another 50 years or more. Even if we stopped generating any more whatsoever, we have another 50 years of warming to look forward to.

The reason I say "just might" is because we really can't stop pouring CO2 into the air. Our industrial civilization is utterly dependent on fossil fuels, and any sharp reduction in their use would damage us severely. To make matters worse, we have no realistic alternatives that can be deployed within the next decade or two, at least not at a sufficient scale to displace enough fossil fuels to do much good.

Finally, to add insult to injury, if we do come up with a handy-dandy alternative to fossil fuels, it will be used as an addition to, rather than a replacement for, their use. This is guaranteed by the desire of the developing world to taste the OECD lifestyle. If we make more fossil fuels available to them by reducing our own consumption, they will simply say "Thanks, guys!" and burn them up.

Of course oil production is about to peak, but even hitting that limit won't do much good, because there will still be more than enough oil available to let us keep raping Gaia. And if we don't have quite enough oil or natural gas to fill our boots, hell, there's always coal. And not the clean variety Hansen is praying for, either. It will be good old-fashioned soot-in-the-skies stuff - CO2, heavy metals and all - because those needing and using it the most will be those who can least afford sequestration technology.

We're hooped.