Bad news re: life on earth
Michael Le Page reviews Storms of My Grandchildren: The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity by James Hansen in New Scientist. The review begins:
"I did not want my grandchildren, someday in the future, to look back and say, ‘Opa understood what was happening but did not make it clear’." So Opa, otherwise known as renowned climate researcher James Hansen, is telling it as he sees it, and the result is the most frightening book I have ever read, for three reasons.
First, Hansen has come to believe, based on studies of past climate change, that the threat facing us is far worse than he thought even a few years ago. The very survival of life on Earth is at stake, he says. The sun is 2 per cent brighter than it was just 250 million years ago, and if we burn up all the fossil fuel on the planet – all the oil, coal, tar sand and tar shale – we will trigger a runaway greenhouse effect that will ultimately lead to the oceans boiling away, he claims.
This won’t happen in our lifetimes, but if we don’t curb our emissions now it will become harder and harder to avert the total extinction of life. Which brings us to the second reason: Hansen thinks nothing meaningful is being done to limit emissions. "Your governments are lying through their teeth," he says. He believes the Kyoto protocol is a dismal failure, and its proposed successors, along with the cap-and-trade schemes favoured by President Barack Obama, have no chance of achieving what is needed either. "Unfortunately, nature and the laws of physics cannot compromise – they are what they are," he points out.
It gets worse…
