Mark Floegel points out that today (July 13) is the fourth anniversary of the appearance of James Hansen’s declaration that we had precious little time to get our collective act together, emissions-wise, and asks, How do you plan to commemorate HD4?:
What’s “Hansen Day”? Hansen Day – or what should be known as Hansen Day – is July 13. It was on that date in 2006 that NASA scientist and leading climate change expert James Hansen wrote in the New York Review of Books: “…we have at most ten years-not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made the task more difficult, since emissions in the developing world are accelerating.” The entire article is worth reading, or re-reading.
Statistics in the article still surprise me. How could I have forgotten? Warmer isotherms – the bands in which given temperatures dominate – are moving toward the poles at 35 miles per decade, while species that depend on those isotherms are migrating at four miles per decade. If we don’t change our ways – and we haven’t since Dr. Hansen published the article – isotherms will be moving at 70 miles per decade by this century’s end, a recipe for mass extinction.
The same business-as-usual scenario may yield an increase in sea levels of 80 feet (!) by the end of the century, wiping out every coastal city in the world, sending hundreds of millions of people scrambling and setting off global warfare. It seems too impossibly catastrophic to be true, so we ignore it and do nothing.
…
This year marks the fourth Hansen Day – there are only six left. Hansen Day should be recognized as a day to take stock of where we have come since July 2006 (the wrong way, really) and think about how far we’ll have to go to avoid the hazards Dr. Hansen outlined in his article.
The (sizable) piece by Hansen in The New York Review of Books is here.
As for what I will do on HD4… I plan to continue the re-evaluation of our situation and my role in trying to address this ongoing challenge. I’m obviously not alone in this frame of mind, as the comments on this ClimateProgress post show.
While I have no firm view of what I should and can be doing, I would like to ask everyone who reads this to post a comment with your thoughts about your role in helping us all to avoid the impacts of climate change and/or peak oil. (If you want to do so while remaining anonymous to the world at large you can simply make up a name, as you don’t have to be registered to comment. You can let me know who you are, also optionally, via the e-mail field on the form, which only I will see.)
Thinking of the comments on that CP thread, I’m not at all optimistic about the prospects for organizing a political movement that will have any appreciable effect on US climate and energy policy. You influence public policy in America by marshaling either a lot of dollars for campaign contributions or an overwhelming number of votes. The first option is a losing cause; anyone here think we can organize enough dollars to outspend the fossil fuel companies in campaign donations to enough people running for Congress and/or the White House to swing matters in the right direction? No, neither do I.
The second option is just as difficult as the first, simply because we’re trying to overcome not only American voter apathy, which can be stunningly resilient except in the most extraordinary of times, but also the determined voting block of the political right, who can be lead around by just about anyone to play the Gays, Guns, and God cards. (Need I remind anyone here how the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 turned out? Or how quickly we turned our backs on President Carter and elected Mr. Happy Fun Times in 1980? Or how hard it is to get any national politician to utter the words “peak oil” in a substantive?)
More than anyone here can imagine I wish I were wrong when I say that until one or both of those fundamental laws of American politics change we will need what fiction writers call an “inciting incident”, a Climate 9/11 or a Climate Pearl Harbor, something so big and so painful, something that so effectively makes us viscerally question if we’re leaving our children a livable world, that it makes us look outward to the approaching impacts and the horizon beyond them and act once again like the country we once were.
I’m calling for higher income taxes on the rich, starting with me. Not related? It takes just a little steam out of the demand for luxuries, takes a little incentive out of lobbying for coal, oil, and other bads, lowers the pressure on shredding the safety nets, and gives our govt a little more resources for moving to clean energy (and for facing other threats).
It is fiscally responsible and lowers the debt. It slows our march to plutocracy, and brings us a little closer together. And it supports the troops — sending them food and ammo while they are out there protecting my wealth. Don’t forget that progressive income taxes support the troops.
heat isotherms seem also to be radiating from the poles now….
Just finished reading Bill’s Eaarth. His timing is perfect. An iconic book, which I hope he sent a signed copy to Obama (and every world leader for that matter).
Now half way through Storms of our Grandchildren. On page 83 there is this startling realization,
“…Once the ice sheets’ collapse begins, global coastal devastations and their economic reverberations may make it impractical for humanity to take action to rapidly reverse climate forcings.”
Hansen is fixed on sea-level impact, but we know that other less spectacular effects of climate change will result in the same outcome. It is a very accurate statement, however.
With this in mind, the recent behavior of the sea ice and the rate of Greenland ice melt is disturbing….
…Greenland is not melting …
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Watts-Up-With-That-concludes-Greenland-is-not-melting-without-looking-at-any-actual-ice-mass-data.html
Hello, Mark.
As a field biologist, I’ve looked longer and harder than most at these problems. We, as a global species, will not direct the way the Earth behaves, except inadvertently as now with a little bit of climate change and a lot of ecosystem destruction. The necessary answers will be reactions to our damaging actions, and will automatically put us in our place – reduced in numbers. That is, unless we get smart.
IF we can turn science around (from being PC and part of the main problems and unfit to contribute answers), AND IF we can keep our pathetic civilisation afloat (with electricity and computers and their main databases in operation), THEN, Science would be able to help. The turn-around will create a climate in which good science is respected because scientists are given responsibility and act responsibly.
What else? End.
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I was able to pull the strings to have Katharine Hayhoe speak at the Oklahoma Sustainability Network Conference in June and make her presentation on Climate Change science and discuss her work with the audience. She was clearly the most influential speaker there.
I have worked to further the goal of combining a better revision of the building codes for Oklahoma and pushing for their faster adoption, the development of training programs in coordination with a team from a State agency and working for demonstration projects to retrofit existing structures for better efficiencies to improve the carbon emissions in Oklahoma.
I have been working to establish more programs on a local level in Oklahoma, with a desire to build them into something model-able elsewhere for groups who are interested in working with their communities to have better local communities which I think will translate or evolve into more efforts such as “Transition Town”-type efforts with more personal involvement. If people become personally active, I think their buy-in will be more sincere and the programs will be more effective. This will not change the world, but it is a way to get change started in a number of locales – not all big ones.
Others I am associated with have led in other ways – local foods, advancing the Oklahoma Food Cooperative (which works to get local producers involved), and to get more vocal people involved in advisory boards. We are trying to build on an active base to develop a greater voice which I hope will evolve from the community, which I think will then lead to change – probably not in time to meet any of the goals Hansen and others have set, but it is better than doing nothing.
I am very very scared. So are the scientists that study climate change.
We need to get the fear to main street. Organize the machine that worked so well to get us prepared for WWII.
To my eyes this is the only way.
That means getting famous scientists to cry on camera.
That means getting people like Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper on board to convince folks this is not exaggerated. It’s real. It’s coming. It’s an unprecedented disaster unless we, the entire world, puts everything we have into fixing it.
We need unlimited funding for geophysical engineering research.