James Hansen talking:
there are very clear links. Let me mention three of them. One of them is sea level. Sea level was stable for the last several thousand years. But with the beginning of changes in atmospheric composition, caused by burning fossil fuels mainly, the planet is getting warmer, and sea level has begun to go up, because the ocean is getting warmer and because ice is melting. Well, on the global average, it’s gone up by about 20 centimeters, which is about eight inches; however, it’s not the same every place. Along the East Coast of the United States and the Gulf Coast, it’s larger than the global average. It’s a good foot. So that’s a significant contribution to the magnitude of the storm surges that drive the water onto Houston and the other regions. So that’s one thing.
Another is, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is increasing because the atmosphere is getting warmer, and therefore the amount of water being dumped during these storms is larger because of the human, global-made—global warming, human-made global warming, which is now more than 1 degree Celsius. And the simple equations for how much water vapor is in the atmosphere as a function of temperature would be several percent, but, in addition, the distribution of the storms that release the moisture is changing. We’re getting more of the rainfall in extreme large events. So, that’s a significant factor.
And then, the third thing is the strength of storms. Thunderstorms, tornadoes, tropical storms all get their energy from the latent energy of water vapor. And because the atmosphere now holds more water vapor, the strength of those storms can be greater. And so, there are substantial human-made effects on these storms. It’s not debatable now. These are all well-established facts.
– a handbook we’re very familiar with over the decades, the tobacco handbook. You can’t say this particular cigarette caused your lung cancer. In the same way, can you say climate change caused this particular storm or hurricane.
the location and timing of each storm is, of course, very chaotic; however, you know, there’s even research that shows that the likelihood of the kind of event where we had here, where things stalled and we had continued rainfall for several days—the chance of that happening is actually probably increasing. That’s a research topic now. But because the Arctic is warming faster than the planet, on average, it does affect the jet stream and the chance of having blocking events, where the storms stall. So, that is very likely also influenced. The chance of that happening has been increased by global warming.
I think we need to educate him about the fact that the actions that are needed to begin to reduce emissions rapidly actually make sense from a conservative standpoint. We need to make the price of fossil fuels honest, by increasing—by including their cost to society. And if we do that gradually, it will actually improve the economy, create jobs, and do it in a way which is consistent with conservative ideas. So, there’s really no reason. If he could just get educated about this, I think we could—you know, there are conservative thought leaders—James Baker III, George Shultz—who have—who recognize this, who understand this. And he’s got to start to listen to these people. And we could actually move rapidly to reducing emissions.
Exploiting the tar sands makes no sense at all, because they’re very carbon-intensive. It takes a lot of energy to get that stuff out of the ground and then to refine it, to make it usable. So, it doesn’t make any sense for us to develop those, because what the science shows is we’re going to actually have to extract some of the excess carbon out of the atmosphere. So, to go to all this expense to find a new way to get more of it to put in the atmosphere just doesn’t make any sense, economically or scientifically or in any way. So, that’s basically the connection.
it doesn’t make sense to build a lot of infrastructure on coastlines, unless we can stabilize sea level. And that’s going to be a very hard task. So, yeah, we have to be aware of what’s going on, because we do need to take actions to slow down climate change, but it’s going to take time. You know, we have not yet felt the full impact of the gases that are already in the atmosphere, just because of the delays in the system. It takes decades for the ocean to warm up and for ice sheets to melt. So there’s consequences for young people that are already built into the system. That’s why young people have filed a lawsuit against the Trump government to try to get them to take the actions that are needed.
I’m helping some of these people who have been arrested by trying to help them in their defense, to try to get them not penalized for what they’ve done, because they’re just trying to draw attention to what is crazy policies. But I think the main thing that most people should be doing is not locking themselves to pipelines, but trying to influence the democratic process. You know, we can. There’s the organization Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which is now more than 300 chapters in the United States and more than 75,000 members. And they’re talking to their congresspeople, writing letters to the editor. And I think that’s the most effective thing that most people can do. Those few people who are going out and locking themselves to the pipeline, well, I’ll try to help them in their—when they go to court, but it’s hard to win those cases.
The things that I mentioned are well understood by the scientific community, and the media should be reporting on that.
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Dr. James Hansen
former top climate scientist at NASA and current director at Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University’s Earth Institute
— source democracynow.org 2017-08-31