Climate Science

By Adrian Whitehead
For those of you that don't know of him yet James Hansen is the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Earth Institute.

James is one of the few scientists who speaks strongly about climate change and has released papers that shows the situation to be much worse than is suggested by the IPCC reports. For example, he recently showed that sea level rise could be as much as 4-5m by the end of the century rather than below 1m maximum as proposed by the IPCC.

His most recent work has been released as a draft paper at Columbia University and is titled “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” (1). This paper has numerous critical findings including that we have already got an additional 2 degrees temperature warming built into the system not 0.6 degrees as commonly reported and that 450 ppm CO2 is enough to trigger a 60-80m sea level rise.

By Ted Trainer

Almost everyone who thinks the greenhouse problem is serious takes it for granted that it can be solved, just by moving off the carbon-based fuels. In addition we have been told by Nicholas Stern and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the cost will be negligible. So, you may ask, why don’t those stupid politicians just develop the sustainable alternatives?

Almost no critical thought has been given to what the limits to renewable energy sources might be. My Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society (2007) seems to be only the second book published on the theme. Here are a few of the basic reasons which I think show that it will not be possible to solve the greenhouse problem at any cost so long as this society remains committed to affluence and growth.