Who else would hear Obama say his administration was going to listen to scientists and immediately decide to confront him with his best shot? (Hansen is sending in a letter to be delivered by Obama’s own science adviser Holdren saying the entire foundation of Obama’s policy must be discarded immediately to be replaced with policy aimed at achieving 325 – 350 ppm as soon as possible.)

What Hansen says and does is worth studying.

Click on the image and allow the movie to load to get the full panoramic impact–where your mouse acts as a joy stick to allow you to navigate in every direction. You may even be able to pick out someone you know!

Again, kudos to Jim for decades of service to protect our home planet!

For a panoramic, 360-degree photo of Jim about to address hundreds of citizens in historic Lexington, Massachusetts about the need for an American energy revolution, and the important role of the 350.org group that he inspired author/activist (and Lexington native) Bill McKibben to start, go to http://www.gwenet.org/350.org.mov. (Allow movie time to load.)

April 2006
One of the country’s leading climate scientists says there is “a good chance” for a “super El Niño” next winter, a powerful warming in the Pacific Ocean linked to wet winters in the Southwest.

http://ff.org/ centers/ csspp/ library/ co2weekly/ 20060414_02/ 20060414_05.html

That puts Hansen’s 2009 prediction in a different light:

“Given our expectation of the next El Nino beginning in 2009 or 2010,…”

Anne

I know this is a wasted post since you will probably kill it.

[JR: Why would I kill it? I've said I'm not a fan of short-term predictions since many other factors come in to play. The inevitability of medium and longer term warming is what matters to humanity.]

The Oklahoma University Environmentalists do not like the words”Global Warming”

If that is so, then there is a serious problem in that group, or possibly the email you received was spam? I believe most “rank and file” environmentalists do not share your concern and I didn’t hear that in a email.

Actually what they should be liking (per Holdren) is “climate disruption,” but I doubt that’s what was meant. Anyway, your correspondent is clearly somewhat disconnected from reality.

As one of those rank-and-file environmentalists, I don’t love Hansen’s position on 4th-gen nukes (noting that after all it’s just for a research program to see if it’s workable), but it’s hard to criticize his logic that unpleasant medicine of some sort will be needed if our society lacks the self-control to make the needed emissions reductions.

Absent such reductions or workable CCS, our choices are nukes or large-scale climate modification. I think Hansen considers the latter to be horrendously risky, and I can’t disagree. I think most of the environmentalists following this debate generally understand this reasoning. Also, bear in mind that *in principle* the 4th-gen nukes would resolve the safety, waste disposal and (partially) mining problems that were the reasons for opposing nukes.

“They just say ‘Isn’t he that pro Nuke wonk?’ I would not think of bringing up his name in Oklahoma….The Oklahoma University Environmentalists do not like the words”Global Warming” and the anti nuclear activists just see red.”

If his outstanding work gets cut off from the broader movement because they just stop listening to him, then we are all in trouble.

And thankfully more and more people in general understand that the “personal action” required of us, by us, is to do what we can, as citizens, to make ever stronger and wiser climate/energy policies politically possible.

Thanks, Jim, for all you have been doing for many people over many years by speaking out loudly, clearly and often for the sake of protecting biodiversity from extinction, the environment from degradation, the Earth from wanton dissipation and the children from reckless endangerment.

Please note that not only does humanity face a challenge from human-forced climate destabilization, good scientific evidence of human population dynamics is also being all but universally ignored.

It seems somehow not quite right for the human family not to be actively encouraged to consider — and not to deny — the potentially profound implications of extant scientific evidence regarding the population dynamics of absolute global human population numbers. The research appears to indicate with remarkable clarity and utter simplicity that human population dynamics is essentially similar to the population dynamics of other species; that increases and decreases in absolute global human population numbers can be better understood as a function of food supply; and that human carrying capacity is primarily determined by food availability. The failure of able people with widely accepted knowledge of biology, population dynamics and the biophysical world to communicate openly, in an intellectually honest and morally courageous way, regarding the predicament presented to humanity by distinctly human-induced and -driven threats to human wellbeing, life as we know it, environmental health and Earth’s body from the unbridled growth of the human species now overspreading the surface of Earth is as unacceptable as it is unforgivable. The elective mutism of leading experts inside and outside the scientific community has to be replaced, I suppose, with more adequate, more reasonable, more sensible and readily available evidence of what could be real about the way the world in which we live actually works as well as about the “placement” of human beings within the order of living things. By so doing, the family of humanity can get about the necessary work of responding ably to the recognizably daunting global challenges which are looming ominously before us on the horizon.

Somehow, the human family will most assuredly find its way forward from “here and now” to a good enough and sustainable future for the children, coming generations and life as we know it in this wondrous planetary home we inhabit and call Earth.

Godspeed,

Steve Salmony

Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php