Seth Borenstein, Associate Press Yahoo News 24 Jun 08;
Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world's only hope is drastic action.
James Hansen told Congress on Monday that the world has long passed the "dangerous level" for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and needs to get back to 1988 levels. He said Earth's atmosphere can only stay this loaded with man-made carbon dioxide for a couple more decades without changes such as mass extinction, ecosystem collapse and dramatic sea level rises.
"We're toast if we don't get on a very different path," Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences who is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science, told The Associated Press. "This is the last chance."
Hansen brought global warming home to the public in June 1988 during a Washington heat wave, telling a Senate hearing that global warming was already here. To mark the anniversary, he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming where he was called a prophet, and addressed a luncheon at the National Press Club where he was called a hero by former Sen. Tim Wirth, D-Colo., who headed the 1988 hearing.
To cut emissions, Hansen said coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon dioxide emissions shouldn't be used in the United States after 2025, and should be eliminated in the rest of the world by 2030. That carbon capture technology is still being developed and not yet cost efficient for power plants.
Burning fossil fuels like coal is the chief cause of man-made greenhouse gases. Hansen said the Earth's atmosphere has got to get back to a level of 350 parts of carbon dioxide per million. Last month, it was 10 percent higher: 386.7 parts per million.
Hansen said he'll testify on behalf of British protesters against new coal-fired power plants. Protesters have chained themselves to gates and equipment at sites of several proposed coal plants in England.
"The thing that I think is most important is to block coal-fired power plants," Hansen told the luncheon. "I'm not yet at the point of chaining myself but we somehow have to draw attention to this."
Frank Maisano, a spokesman for many U.S. utilities, including those trying to build new coal plants, said while Hansen has shown foresight as a scientist, his "stop them all approach is very simplistic" and shows that he is beyond his level of expertise.
The year of Hansen's original testimony was the world's hottest year on record. Since then, 14 years have been hotter, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Two decades later, Hansen spent his time on the question of whether it's too late to do anything about it. His answer: There's still time to stop the worst, but not much time.
"We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes," Hansen told the AP before the luncheon. "The Arctic is the first tipping point and it's occurring exactly the way we said it would."
Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer.
Longtime global warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., citing a recent poll, said in a statement, "Hansen, (former Vice President) Gore and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans are not buying it."
But Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., committee chairman, said, "Dr. Hansen was right. Twenty years later, we recognize him as a climate prophet."
Scientist urges carbon tax to help climate
Reuters 23 Jun 08;
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. scientist who 20 years ago first told Congress that the Earth's climate was warming said on Monday that urgent action was needed to cut greenhouse gases and proposed a tax on carbon emissions.
James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said at a congressional briefing that a carbon tax would be the most efficient way to cut global warming emissions and encourage non-fossil energy sources.
"We have to level with the public that there has to be a price on carbon emissions," Hansen said. "That is the only way we are going to begin to move toward a carbon free economy."
Hansen said urgent action was needed to cut carbon dioxide emissions that are warming the globe and are already causing arctic ice to melt. He said world leaders had only one or two years to act before the Earth reaches a "tipping point" with major consequences to the global climate and species survival.
"We have reached an emergency situation," Hansen said.
He said the government should not keep the proceeds from any carbon tax, but refund the money to taxpayers to help them pay for more fuel efficient technology.
President George W. Bush has opposed any broad program to curb carbon emissions saying it would hurt the economy and has consistently resisted any tax increases. But global warming is an issue in this year's presidential campaign and is expected to be a major topic of discussion at next month's meeting of leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations in Japan.
Twenty years ago today, Hansen testified before a Senate committee and told lawmakers that "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now."
Hansen's testimony helped spur the first congressional efforts to curb greenhouse gases. The most recent effort, legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions died in the Senate earlier this month in face of a veto threat from the White House.
(Reporting by Donna Smith; Editing by Sandra Maler)
Adverts urge world to axe CO2 to 1980s levels
Reuters 23 Jun 08;
OSLO (Reuters) - The world should cut the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to below that of 20 years ago, more deeply than most government plans, to avoid the worst of climate change, a group of 150 advocates said on Monday.
"We've gone too far -- in a dangerous direction," scientists, politicians, business leaders and others said in full-page advertisements in the Financial Times, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and two Swedish dailies.
They said that concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by burning fossil fuels, should be cut to below 350 parts per million (ppm) of the atmosphere, well below current levels of 385 ppm.
"Remember this number (350) for the rest of your life," said the headline of the advertisement, the latest by advocates in a battle over the shape of a new world treaty on climate change due to be agreed by the end of 2009.
Signatories included U.S. scientists James Hansen and Robert Corell, the European Union's Environment Agency, ex-Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson and Jose Maria Figueres, former President of Costa Rica. It was backed by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Swedish Tallberg Foundation.
It said that Hansen, of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, warned the U.S. Congress on June 23, 1988 about rising levels of carbon dioxide from human activities, led by burning fossil fuels. At the time, levels were at 350.
The advertisement called on governments to adopt the 350 ppm target in negotiations on a treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N. pact for fighting global warming, which now runs to the end of 2012.
They said that scientific consensus had until recently set 450 ppm as the safe zone to avoid the worst effects of climate change such as heat waves, droughts, floods, melting glaciers and rising sea levels.
The U.N. Climate Panel, drawing on the work of 2,500 scientists, said last year that stabilizing greenhouse gases at between 350 and 400 ppm would limit world temperature rises to between 2.0 and 2.4 Celsius (3.6 and 4.3 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
The European Union and many environmental groups say 2.0 Celsius is a threshold for "dangerous" climate changes.
On the other side, the U.S. Competitive Enterprise Institute produced advertisements in 2006, for instance, saying that carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas vital to life and to modern society.
"Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution: we call it life," it said.
