From Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA)

From an Article by Harry Stevens, Axios, June 23, 2018

Three decades have passed since then-NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the Senate Energy committee and alerted the country to the arrival of global warming.

Why it matters: The predictions of the world’s leading climate scientists have come true, with dire consequence for the planet.

In the 30-year period prior to Hansen’s testimony, the Earth’s surface was, on average, less than 0.2°F warmer than the 20th-century average. In the 30 years since, the planet’s surface has, on average, undergone a six-fold temperature increase.
Hansen’s temperature projections weren’t exactly on target, since he projected a slightly higher amount of warming than what has occurred, but about two-dozen climate scientists told Axios that overall, his main conclusions were right.
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In his June 23, 1988 testimony, Hansen made three key points:

The Earth has gotten warmer. So warm, in fact, that the temperature trend was almost certainly due to the greenhouse effect, which is enhanced by emissions of gases like carbon dioxide and methane from burning fossil fuels.

As a result, summer heat waves and other extreme weather events will become more common.

“The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now,” Hansen said. When he spoke, 1988 was on track to become the hottest year of all-time. Since then, that record has been broken six more times – in 1990, 1998, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

In an interview with the Guardian this week, Hansen gave a bleak assessment of the last thirty years. “All we’ve done is agree there’s a problem,” he said. “We haven’t acknowledged what is required to solve it.”

Be smart: Uncertainty is often cited as a reason for not addressing climate change, but the longer we go without addressing it, the harder it will be to cut emissions and avert major impacts.

As Andrea Dutton, a climate scientist at the University of Florida, told Axios:
“The true debate lies in the solutions and in mobilizing the social and political will to act upon our knowledge. Deciding not to act is a choice itself, and one that we cannot correct later. The time to act is always now. Because the longer we wait, the worse the outcomes will be.”

About the graphic: The spinning globes compare the average temperature of the Earth’s surface during the 30-year periods before and after Hansen’s testimony, relative to the average surface temperature from 1901–2000.

The data used to create the graphic was downloaded from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The land surface temperature data is from a GISS analysis, while the ocean temperature data comes from NOAA. The smoothing radius was set to 1,200 kilometers.

Take a Deep Dive on the issue of climate change:

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The Arctic is unraveling as climate change intensifies

From an Article by Andrew Freedman, Axios, December 13, 2018

Rapid climate change is transforming the Arctic, from the bottom of the sea floor to the top of windswept glaciers. Sea ice is disappearing, land-based ice is melting and a domino effect of ecosystem changes have been set into motion, with unknown results.

Why it matters: New research published this week shows the peril that awaits companies that choose to operate in the harsh, unstable region, which is increasingly the focus of oil and gas drilling activity. In addition, sea ice loss may be rewriting global weather patterns, contributing to extreme weather events as far away as the Lower 48 states.

James Hansen’s main office is EARTH

Essay by Justin Gillis, Contributing Opinion Writer, New York Times, June 23, 2018
·
The night before the day that would make him famous, James E. Hansen listened to a baseball game on the radio. But his mind kept wandering: What would he say to Congress the next day to convey that humans were endangering the planet?

He had long been trying to raise the alarm without success, and so had other scientists. But then, on June 23, 1988 — 30 years ago Saturday — a Colorado senator named Tim Wirth convened yet another hearing on the topic. Dr. Hansen was one of several scientists on the witness list.

Few people had ever heard of him, nor of the obscure NASA unit that he headed. He and a small group of colleagues studied the Earth’s climate, working in a suite of offices above the Manhattan diner that “Seinfeld” would later make famous.

He had conducted rigorous studies of historical temperatures, concluding that the planet was warming sharply. He had helped to pioneer computer modeling of the climate, and the results predicted further warming if people kept pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

June 23 turned out be a blistering day in Washington, and much of the nation was suffering through a drought and heat wave. Dr. Hansen took his seat in a Capitol Hill hearing room and laid out the scientific facts as best he understood them.

He had thought up a good line the night before, during the Yankees game, but in the moment he forgot to deliver it. When the hearing ended, though, reporters surrounded him, and he remembered.

“It is time to stop waffling so much,” he said, “and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

His near certainty that human emissions were already altering the climate caught the attention of a sweltering nation, catapulting Dr. Hansen to overnight fame. That year, 1988, would go on to be the hottest in a global temperature record stretching back to the 19th century.

With the perspective of three decades, it is fair to ask: How right was his forecast?

The question defies a simple answer. In 1988, Dr. Hansen had to offer a prognostication not just about how the Earth would respond to greenhouse gases, but also about how much of those gases humans would choose to inject into the air.

He did what any cautious forecaster would do: He offered low, medium and high scenarios. The warming over the past 30 years has indeed fallen well within his upper and lower bounds.

One of Dr. Hansen’s scenarios, Scenario B, has turned out to be a reasonably close match for fossil-fuel emissions as they actually occurred. Yet we now know Scenario B predicted too much global warming, by something like 30 percent.

Two reasons for that stand out. One is that Dr. Hansen had assumed a continued increase in certain refrigerant gases that warm the climate. Those gases were ultimately brought under control by a global treaty, the Montreal Protocol — proof that scientific warnings, if taken seriously, can be acted upon at a worldwide scale.

The bigger problem was that the computers he was using in the 1980s could not operate fast enough to give a realistic picture of the upper atmosphere; as a result, his model was most likely overestimating the Earth’s sensitivity to emissions. In the years since, computer modeling of the climate, though hardly perfect, has improved.

So while his temperature forecast was not flawless, in a larger sense, Dr. Hansen’s 1988 warning has turned out to be entirely on target. As emissions have soared, the planet has warmed relentlessly, just as he said it would; 1988 is not even in the top 20 warmest years now. Every year of this century has been hotter.

The ocean is rising, as Dr. Hansen predicted, and the pace seems to be accelerating. The great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarcticaare dumping ever-rising volumes of water into the sea. Coastal flooding is increasing rapidly in the United States. The Arctic Oceanice cap has shrunk drastically.

If his warning in 1988 had been met with a national policy to reduce emissions, other countries might have followed, and the world would be in much better shape.

But within a few years after he raised the alarm, fossil-fuel interests and libertarian ideologues began financing a campaign of lies about climate research. The issue bogged down in Congress, and to this day that body has taken no action remotely commensurate with the threat.

Dr. Hansen retired from NASA in 2013, but at age 77, he feels his work is not done. Today, from an office at Columbia University, he spends his time fighting the government he once served. He is an expert witness for a lawsuit that young people have filed in Oregonagainst the federal government, contending that its failure to tackle climate change is a threat to their constitutional rights of life and liberty.

His granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, is one of the plaintiffs in the case, which has gotten much farther than many legal experts thought it would. The case may go to trial later this year.

Prophets of impending calamity are rarely thanked for their efforts, especially when they turn out to be right. But Dr. Hansen did receive a form of thanks recently, sharing half a of a $1.3 million prize for his attempts to warn the public about the risks of climate change.

The congressional failure to respond to his warning might be seen now as a harbinger of the political crisis that has since engulfed the United States. How can Congress tackle global warming if it lacks the capacity to solve far smaller problems?

Lately, Dr. Hansen has been thinking about the connection between the political crisis and the climate crisis. He is a strong proponent of a new system of voting, called ranked choice, that has been adopted in many other countries and a few parts of the United States, with the goal of recreating a political center.

“It’s very hard to see us fixing the climate,” Dr. Hansen said, “until we fix our democracy.”

>>> Mr. Gillis is a former New York Times environmental reporter and a contributing opinion writer. A version of this article appears in print on June 24, 2018, on Page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: “He Was Right About The Climate.”

Prof. James Hansen speaks clearly

Climate scientist James Hansen: We aren’t doing nearly enough to slow climate change

From an Article by Natasha Geilin, ThinkProgress, October 4, 2016

James Hansen, former NASA director and well-known climate scientist, is out with another dire climate warning: The last time that the Earth was this hot, the oceans were about 20 feet higher than they are right now.

And while that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re in for an unstoppable, 20-foot rise in sea level (although it ostensibly could get that bad), it does mean that the world is leaving a dangerous, and expensive, climate change problem for future generations.

“There’s a misconception that we’ve begun to address the climate problem,” Hansen told reporters on a press call Monday. “The misapprehension is based on the Paris climate summit where all the government leaders clapped each other on the back as if some great progress has been made, but you look at the science and it doesn’t compute. We are not doing what is needed.”

Hansen’s warning is based off a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper — submitted Tuesday to the Earth Systems Dynamics Journal — that he authored with 11 other climate scientists. In the paper, the authors argue that the Earth has warmed by about 1.3°C relative to pre-industrial levels, and that the atmospheric concentration of the most potent greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide — has been accelerating in recent years. The last time the Earth was this hot was during the last inter-glacial period, known as the Eemian, when sea level was about 20 to 30 feet higher than it is today.

In order to stay below the aspirational target of limiting the planet to 1.5°C of warming set in Paris, the paper argues that negative carbon dioxide emissions — that is, sucking carbon dioxide from the air — will be necessary. In a blog post accompanying the paper, Hansen warns that proposed techniques for carbon sequestration, like carbon capture and storage or air capture of carbon dioxide, could cost anywhere from $104 to $507 trillion this century, with “large risks and uncertain feasibility.”

Speaking to reporters, Hansen suggested a better method for achieving negative carbon emissions could be through sequestering carbon dioxide in the Earth’s soil. Soil currently stores three times as much carbon as is contained in the atmosphere, and some studies suggest that through better management and restoration practices, the soil could sequester the majority of fossil fuel emissions generated by humans.

Hansen’s paper was written in part to support litigation brought against the U.S. government by Our Children’s Trust, which argues that the government is violating young peoples’ constitutional rights by failing to act on climate change. The lawsuits, filed in every state as well as against the federal government, are based on a legal theory known as atmospheric trust litigation, developed by University of Oregon law professor Mary Wood. The theory argues that the atmosphere is a crucial natural resource that the government must hold in trust for future citizens. By failing to pass policies that stop climate change, the reasoning goes, the government is failing to preserve the natural environment for future generations.

Hansen, along with his granddaughter, is a party in the Our Children’s Trust litigation in Oregon. That case is currently awaiting a decision from a federal judge as to whether the litigation will be allowed to move forward. Earlier this year, a group of fossil fuel companies, including representatives of ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, and Koch Industries, filed a motion to intervene, arguing that a decision in favor of the children would force an “unprecedented restructuring of the economy.”

In discussing how the paper relates to his involvement with the legal case, Hansen said he hoped the paper would help spur courts to action.

“I think it is essential that the third branch of government, the courts, get involved in the climate story,” he said. “We need to quantify what is needed in an understandable way so that the judicial system can make an evaluation and step in and have some effect where the other branches of government have failed us.”

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net