23 June 2008The New York Times
Twenty years ago today, James E. Hansen testified before the Senate Energy Committee — in a room kept intentionally warm by committee staff — that the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and forests was already perceptibly influencing Earth's climate.
Then, as now, Dr. Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was pushing beyond what many of his colleagues in climatology were willing to say — at least publicly. His supporters say that, given how science and events appear to be catching up with his projections of two decades ago, the world had better heed his new recommendations. (Here's a useful deconstruction of Dr. Hansen's testimony by Grist and the World Resources Institute.)
His critics show few signs of ever accommodating the ideas he now presses, which include a prompt moratorium on new coal-burning power plants until they can capture and store carbon dioxide and a rising tax on fuels contributing greenhouse-gas emissions, with the revenue passed back directly to citizens, avoiding the complexities of "cap and trade" bills.
I encourage you to watch a short video I shot of my parts of my interview Dr. Hansen in his cluttered office on Friday. Here's the print story. He says that 2009 may present the last chance we have to defuse what he calls the "global warming time bomb." The YouTube player is below.
The video begins with his explanation of a visual aid he created in 1988 with Jose Mendoza, an illustrator at Goddard in the days before PowerPoint: a pair of cardboard dice showing how humans were tipping the odds toward climate troubles. Notably, perhaps because of old glue, the paper black dots were falling off.
James Hansen reflects on 20 years of climate science and efforts to get the public to understand it and act:
