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Climate
Change: Why We Can't Wait
By
James Hansen,
The Nation.
Posted
April 21, 2007.
The
country's leading climatologist gives us the five necessary steps we need
to take to prevent catastrophic climate change.
This is
an adaptation of a talk delivered February 26 at the National Press Club.
Comments relating to policy are Dr. Hansen's personal opinion and do not
represent a NASA position.
There's
a huge gap between what is understood about global warming by the relevant
scientific community and what is known about global warming by those who
need to know: the public and policy-makers. We've had, in the past thirty
years, one degree Fahrenheit of global warming.
But
there's another one degree Fahrenheit in the pipeline due to gases that are
already in the atmosphere. And there's another one degree Fahrenheit in the
pipeline because of the energy infrastructure now in place -- for example,
power plants and vehicles that we're not going to take off the road even if
we decide that we're going to address this problem.
The
Energy Department says that we're going to continue to put more and more
CO2 in the atmosphere each year -- not just additional CO2 but more than we
put in the year before.
If we
do follow that path, even for another ten years, it guarantees that we will
have dramatic climate changes that produce what I would call a different
planet -- one without sea ice in the Arctic; with worldwide, repeated
coastal tragedies associated with storms and a continuously rising sea
level; and with regional disruptions due to freshwater shortages and
shifting climatic zones.
I've
arrived at five recommendations for what should be done to address the
problem. If Congress were to follow these recommendations, we could solve
the problem. Interestingly, this is not a gloom-and-doom story. In fact,
the things we need to do have many other benefits in terms of our economy,
our national security, our energy independence and preserving the
environment -- preserving creation.
First,
there should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants
until we have the technology to capture and sequester the CO2. That
technology is probably five or ten years away. It will become clear over
the next ten years that coal-fired power plants that do not capture and
sequester CO2 are going to have to be bulldozed. That's the only way we can
keep CO2 from getting well into the dangerous level, because our
consumption of oil and gas alone will take us close to the dangerous level.
And oil and gas are such convenient fuels (and located in countries where
we can't tell people not to mine them) that they surely will be used. So
why build old-technology power plants if you're not going to be able to
operate them over their lifetime, which is fifty or seventy-five years? It
doesn't make sense. Besides, there's so much potential in efficiency, we
don't need new power plants if we take advantage of that.
Second,
and this is the hard recommendation that no politician seems willing to
stand up and say is necessary: The only way we are going to prevent having
an amount of CO2 that is far beyond the dangerous level is by putting a
price on emissions. In order to avoid economic problems, it had better be a
gradually rising price so that the consumer has the option to seek energy
sources that reduce his requirement for how much fuel he needs. And that
means we should be investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy
technologies at the same time. The result would be high-tech, high-paid
jobs. And it would be very good for our energy independence, our national
security and our balance of payments.
But a
price on carbon emissions is not enough, which brings us to the third
recommendation: We need energy-efficiency standards. That's been proven
time and again. The biggest use of energy is in buildings, and the
engineers and architects have said that they can readily reduce the energy
requirement of new buildings by 50 percent.
That
goal has been endorsed by the US Conference of Mayors, but you can't do it
on a city-by-city basis. You need national standards. The same goes for
vehicle efficiency. We haven't had an improvement in vehicle efficiency in
twenty-five or thirty years. And our national government is standing in
court alongside the automobile manufacturers resisting what the National
Research Council has said is readily achievable -- a 30 percent improvement
in vehicle efficiency, which California and other states want to adopt.
The
fourth recommendation -- and this is probably the easiest one -- involves
the question of ice-sheet stability. The old assumption that it takes
thousands or tens of thousands of years for ice sheets to change is clearly
wrong. The concern is that it's a very nonlinear process that could
accelerate. The west Antarctic ice sheet in particular is very vulnerable.
If it collapses, that could yield a sea-level rise of sixteen to nineteen
feet, possibly on a time scale as short as a century or two.
The
information on ice-sheet stability is so recent that the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change report does not adequately address it. The
IPCC
process is necessarily long and drawn out. But this problem with the
stability of ice sheets is so critical that it really should be looked at
by a panel of our best scientists.
Congress should ask the National Academy of Sciences to do a study on this
and report its conclusions in very plain language. The National Academy of
Sciences was established by Abraham Lincoln for just this sort of purpose,
and there's no reason we shouldn't use it that way.
The
final recommendation concerns how we have gotten into this situation in
which there is a gap between what the relevant scientific community
understands and what the public and policy-makers know. A fundamental
premise of democracy is that the public is informed and that they're
honestly informed.
There
are at least two major ways in which this is not happening. One of them is
that the public affairs offices of the science agencies are staffed at the
headquarters level by political appointees. While the public affairs
workers at the centers are professionals who feel that their job is to
translate the science into words the public can understand, unfortunately
this doesn't seem to be the case for the political appointees at the
highest levels.
Another
matter is Congressional testimony. I don't think the Framers of the
Constitution expected that when a government employee -- a technical
government employee -- reports to Congress, his testimony would have to be
approved and edited by the White House first. But that is the way it works
now. And frankly, I'm afraid it works that way whether it's a Democratic
administration or a Republican one.
These
problems are worse now than I've seen in my thirty years in government. But
they're not new. I don't know anything in our Constitution that says that
the executive branch should filter scientific information going to
Congressional committees. Reform of communication practices is needed if
our government is to function the way our Founders intended it to work.
The
global warming problem has brought into focus an overall problem: the
pervasive influence of special interests on the functioning of our
government and on communications with the public. It seems to me that it
will be difficult to solve the global warming problem until we have
effective campaign finance reform, so that special interests no longer have
such a big influence on policy-makers.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/50795?page=1 |
