Serious Science for Critical Times
Dr. James Hansen has written a personal, idiosyncratic, urgent, heartfelt book about climate change, past and future. The reader can feel his frustration at the stubborn inaction of governments in the face of what he sees as a looming disaster. But one also feels the warmth, the grandfatherliness, advertised by the book's title. Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity is more than half science, but it is part emotion. Scientists are people too.The book's message in brief: It's worse than we thought, and here's why. Politicians are subservient to fossil fuel polluters. We have to do something about it unless we want to leave our descendants a severely damaged, and perhaps uninhabitable, world.
Hansen, in spite of the public role he has felt called upon to play, is 100% scientist. The book's structure uses his own journey as a researcher, and as an expert called upon to brief government leaders, to explain a lot of serious science. Climate forcings, paleoclimatology, aerosols, and more are presented to the reader in more depth than is usual for a book targeted at the general public.
Science of Climate Change
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| Color version of book's Figure 18 "Deep ocean temperature during the Cenozoic era" [Do we really want to go back to the Permian-Eocene Thermal Maximum when sea levels were 75 meters higher?] |
The science, Hansen is saying, is fundamental, undeniable, and convincing. He naturally feels that the reader should understand it in order to follow the argument that climate change is a serious threat to society. We may be setting in motion changes in the Earth's climate that could wipe out life on the planet and will certainly make life tougher for coming generations in this century. He urgently wants to get that message across.
Frustration with Inaction
This is a polemic. Hansen feels that politicians are in the palm of economic interests that benefit from continuing "business as usual" even in the face of urgent warnings of enormous risks. He is urging the people to take action.His deep understanding of climate forcings and their effects in the past leads him to a much greater degree of alarm than many other scientists or environmentalists feel comfortable expressing. He has been criticized by other climate activists for lacking "a realistic idea of what is politically possible".
Hansen doesn't pull his punches. He thinks "cap and trade" is useless. He thinks expanded use of nuclear power is part of the solution. In these areas he treads beyond the strict boundaries of his expertise.
But when he says that targets like 450ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere are much too high and will lead to disaster, he speaks of science he has studied in depth. He implores us to get back to 350ppm.
A striking conclusion from this analysis is the value of carbon dioxide--only 450 ppm, with estimated uncertainty of 100 ppm--at which the transition occurs from no large ice sheets to a glaciated Antarctica. This has a clear, strong implication for what constitutes a dangerous level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. If humanity burns most of the fossil fuels, doubling or tripling the preindustrial carbon dioxide level, Earth will surely head toward the ice-free condition, with sea level 75 meters (250 feet) higher than today. It is difficult to say how long it will take for the melting to be complete, but once ice sheet disintegration gets well under way, it will be impossible to stop.Neither politicians nor political climate activists and thought leaders like to be told that they are being "exceedingly foolish". Yet Hansen goes further. "But maybe Congress doesn't really care about your grandchildren. [p. 215]" "The present situation is analogous to that faced by Lincoln with slavery and Churchill with Nazism--the time for compromises and appeasement is over. [p. 211]"
With carbon dioxide the dominant climate forcing, as it is today, it obviously would be exceedingly foolish and dangerous to allow carbon dioxide to approach 450 ppm. [p. 160]
A Book Worth Reading
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| Sophie and Connor, Dr. Hansen's grandchildren |
How the book's call to action affects you will depend on your biases and personality. Some will be moved to do something, some will be more informed but still passive, some will be annoyed, some will be indifferent. But all will have learned something.
Want to buy it? Click here: Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity
Dr. Hansen's web site is here.
He and Dr. Makiko Sato have also created the Updating the Climate Science page to supplement and update the content of Storms of my Grandchildren.
The book's official web page is here.
Good reviews of the book at Daily Kos and the Los Angeles Times.
The color version of the book's Figure 18 is from this site.
The picture of Sophie and Connor is from here. A black-and-white version is in the book at page 272.
The contents of the book are copyright © 2009 by James Hansen. The illustrations are copyright © 2009 by Mikiko Sato.
I can't comment on Dr. Hansen's book directly, but I do appreciate your comment on him straying beyond his expertise a bit on the nuclear front.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who has worked in this area for over 20 years, my biggest concern is the vast knowledge gap in the public and the press and academia regarding where their (cheap) electric power comes from and what the real world problems are in producing it. Achieving a better understanding of our energy present will surely help us develop a better energy future. Mostly there is talk in generalities about new technologies and smart grids, with the assumption that a few people in lab coats will sort out the details.
But the details will matter a great deal, so it will help if the average citizen has a little better grasp of the issues. I've tried to do my part, offering a free, realistic portrait of this generation of US nuclear plants. "Rad Decision: A Novel of Nuclear Power" is written as a thriller to avoid reader boredom - and that seems to be working, judging from the comments I've received at the website. It is not a polemic - every power source has its good and bad points, after all, and there's no "right answer," just a series of tradeoffs. Instead of listening only to those peering in from the outside, why not see what someone in the bowels of the atomic fun industry has to say? Go to http://RadDecision.blogspot.com
"I'd like to see Rad Decision widely read" - Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog.
“I got to about page four and I was hooked, I couldn’t put it down… It was very easy to read, the characters were well described, and they were vibrant.” - DAVID LEVY, noted science author and Parade Magazine contributor.