Jim Hansen: Brilliant Scientist and Angry Grandparent
Saturday was the 30th anniversary of Dr. James Hansen’s commanding testimony to the US Congress in 1988 about human-caused climate change; also known as global warming. My admiration for Hansen is already on record in my book, High Tide On Main Street, where I acknowledged his heroic status, intellectual leadership – and thanked him for assisting me during my research.
Hansen was not the first to warn that addiction to burning fossil fuels could be dangerous. That discovery had been made more than a century earlier by a Swede, Svante Arrhenius in 1896. In the following two decades several others made the same case, including Alexander Graham Bell in 1917 in the U.S. In modern times, serious concerns have been expressed by most US Presidents starting with Lyndon Johnson in 1965.
What made Jim Hansen’s Congressional testimony special was his authority as Chief Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute and his very dire message and tone. The effects of warming were no longer some distant problem, but had become a clear and present danger. He described some early evidence of change but charted a range of very ominous future scenarios that correlated with increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Recent analysis of those 1988 warnings shows that he was correct.
Arrested at the White House
From my personal encounters with Dr. Hansen I can state without hesitation that he is forthright, modest, and has the purest of motivations. He is so concerned about the future of our species that he has broken ranks with the normal culture of scientists and taken to political protest, even civil disobedience leading to his arrest as shown in the image at the right. For that, he has drawn rebuke from some fellow scientists who find that inappropriate. To me, that just adds to his integrity.
Hansen’s view is both deep and broad. He considers deep ocean currents eating away at the underside of Antarctica and global atmospheric chemistry. Looking back to his testimony in 1988, his understanding of the physics, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic and the effects on global temperature, rising sea level, and extreme storms were spot on. Some of his estimates were a little off, but his work during the last three decades has helped to make the measurements and our understanding of the complex interaction of solar energy, atmosphere and ocean much more accurate.
As my readers know, I focus on rising sea level as a special aspect of climate change, because a much higher ocean means that millions of square miles of coastal land will submerge putting trillions of dollars of assets underwater. That unambiguous effect sends a profound message beyond just the environmental one. It engages people at an economic level and threatens our emotional connection to “place.” Although Hansen looks at climate change broadly, often he leads with the point about rising sea level for the same reasons I do, namely the devastating impact on all coastal communities and the clarity of the message.
At this 30th anniversary, it is appropriate to look to his recent projections particularly with regards to sea level rise. In a paper published last year, Dr. Hansen projects that on our current path, that we could get as much as “several meters” higher sea level this century depending on what we do about the level of carbon dioxide. Three meters is about ten feet. Anything like that will be devastating, even catastrophic to communities worldwide. Surprisingly, our ability to predict exactly when sea level will rise that high is limited. Even if we knew exactly how warm the planet would be, there is no accurate way to predict precisely how the mile-thick glaciers of Greenland and Antartica will collapse. They are the primary factor for global sea level rise. (For more, see (“The Elephants of Antarctica and Greenland.”)
Dr. James Hansen with granddaughter Sophie (Photo: John Englander)
In recent years, now retired from NASA, he has become more vocal and even angry with our collective inaction. Globally, he finds the 2015 Paris Climate Accords to fall short of the effort needed to keep climate within bounds for humans and our ecosystem. Perhaps his harshest criticism is directed at recent US Presidents and Congress – both Democratic and Republican.
Hansen’s concern for humankind is embodied in his focus on his grandchildren, notably his eldest granddaughter Sophie, shown at left. His next book is scheduled for publication early next year, “Sophie’s Planet: A Search for Truth About Our Remarkable Home Planet and Its Future.”
I am doing what I can to give voice to the science identified by Dr. James Hansen. We should all heed his urgent warning both to slow the use of fossil fuels that cause “greenhouse gases” that warm the planet and also to begin adapting to the effects, many of which are now unstoppable. On this 30th anniversary, please do what you can to share his warning.