NASA climate scientist Dr James Hansen has made some comments on the US presidential election and on Australian climate change policy.
Hansen describes why he is cautious about whether the winning candidate in the US presidential election will actually deliver on climate change and states:
My caution about what a winning candidate will actually deliver is based on experience. If my “Trip Report” (http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080804_TripReport.pdf), recounting dismal failure to help officials in various countries “get it”, did not convince you, I offer another example: Australia. Response to my “Dear Prime Minister Rudd” is at (http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080401_DearPrimeMinisterRudd_reply.pdf) hardly illuminates the Australian position, but their subsequently stated goals of 450-550 ppm CO2 does. That plan appears to have been written by the coal industry, and, if adopted globally, practically guarantees destruction of most life on the planet. I would be more critical, except that much of the problem is probably due to our failure to make the climate story clear enough. More later on this topic and the ways in which moneyed interests finagle “cap and trade” to everybody else’s detriment.
November 11, 2008 at 11:28 pm
[...] those who missed it Climate Dilemma has Hansen: Australian target “practically guarantees destruction of most life on the planet” which sums it up nicely, if not [...]
January 2, 2009 at 12:51 am
Resolution for 2009: SPEAK OUT loudly, clearly and often
Dear Friends,
In calling for change in our time, great scientists are speaking about what could somehow be true to wealthy and powerful people who prefer that the “business as usual” status quo be maintained. Industrial/big business powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians want to keep things going along just as they are going now, come what may for the children and coming generations, for life as we know it, for the integrity of Earth and its environs.
Many voices are needed to support “voices in the wilderness” like those of Jim Hansen and John Holdren, exemplary scientists who have been willing to speak truth to those with the power to make the kinds of necessary change that make belief in a good enough future at least a possibility. Assuring a chance of a good future for the children and for life as we know it is an achievable goal that will lead us to overcome the arrogance and avarice of many too many leaders of my “Not So GREAT GREED GRAB Generation” of elders.
If too many leaders of the family of humanity choose to keep doing precisely the things they are advocating and doing now, and if we in the human community keep getting what we are getting now, then it appears a sustainable world for our children cannot be achieved. By so doing, the limited resources of Earth will be permanently dissipated, its biodiversity massively extirpated, its environment irreversibly degraded and life as we know it recklessly endangered. The current gigantic scale and anticipated growth of per-capita overconsumption of limited resources, global production and distribution capabilities, and absolute human population numbers worldwide are simply, clearly and patently unsustainable, even to the year 2050. Given Earth’s limitations as a relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible planet, the projected increases in these currently unbridled consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species could soon lead the human family to come face to face with some sort of colossal ecological wreckage.
Now is the time to speak out loudly, clearly and often about what is true for you. Forget about political correctness and convenience. Let go of economic expediency and greediness. Embrace necessary change rather than waste another day preserving the selfish interests of the small group of rich and powerful people, and their many minions, all of whom are adamantly and relentlessly defending an unsustainable, same old “business as usual” status quo.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176