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- 1. ABSTRACT ON THE ARTICLE ABOUT HANSEN Profile of climatologist James Hansen. A few months ago, James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), in Manhattan, joined a protest outside the Capitol Power Plant, in Washington, D.C. Thirty years ago, Hansen, who is sixty-eight, created one of the world’s first climate models, nicknamed Model Zero, which he used to predict most of what has happened in the climate since. Hansen has now concluded, partly on the basis of his latest modeling efforts and partly on the basis of observations made by other scientists, that the threat of global warming is far greater than even he had suspected. Unless immediate action is taken—including the shutdown of all the world’s coal plants within the next two decades—the planet will be committed to climate change on a scale society won’t be able to cope with. Hansen grew up in Denison, Iowa, and he obtained a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Iowa. From there he went directly to work at GISS, where he studied Venusian clouds. In 1981, he became the director of GISS. He published a paper forecasting increased temperatures in the following decades and his insights were immediately recognized by the scientific community. Mentions Anniek Hansen, Bill McKibben, Michael Oppenheimer, and Spencer Weart. Describes a talk Hansen gave on climate change at the state capitol in Concord, New Hampshire. What is now happening, Hansen said, is carbon dioxide is being pumped into the air some ten thousand times faster than natural weathering processes can remove it. There’s no precise term for the level of carbon dioxide that will assure a climate disaster; the best scientists have come up with is “dangerous anthropogenic interference,” or D.A.I. Hansen estimates the dangerous amount of carbon dioxide to be no more than three hundred and fifty parts per million. The bad news is that carbon dioxide levels have already reached three hundred and eighty-five parts per million. Hansen argues that the only way we can constrain the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to drastically decrease the use of coal. But if Hansen’s anxieties about D.A.I. and coal are broadly shared, he is still, among climate scientists, an outlier. Describes the cap-and-trade system, which Hansen argues is essentially a sham. Mentions the American Clean Energy and Security Act. In order to stabilize carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, annual emissions around the globe would have to be cut by something on the order of three-quarters. So far, there’s no evidence that anyone is willing to take the necessary steps. A couple of months ago, when I went to a protest with James Hansen at a coal plant in Washington D.C., he said that he wasn’t hoping to get arrested. Just about everyone else at the protest was hoping that he would: NASA’s chief climate scientist getting led away in cuffs is a good story, and the protest would have received a lot more news coverage if the D.C. police had cooperated. Yesterday, whether he was hoping to or not, Hansen did get arrested, together with the actress Daryl Hannah and a ninety-four-year-old former Congressman from West Virginia, Ken Hechler. The three were part of a group that deliberately trespassed on the grounds of the Goals Coal plant, in Sundial, West Virginia, to protest mountaintop-removal mining. (The
- 2. Goals plant is owned by Massey Energy.) Hansen is opposed to coal in general—he believes that all coal-burning power plants will have to be shut by 2030 in order to avert catastrophic climate change—and to mountaintop-removal mining in particular. The practice is, as he put it to me recently, “doubly bad”—bad for the climate and devastating for the local environment. Many critics of the practice had hoped that the Obama Administration would put an end to mountain-removal mining; however, earlier this month, the Administration announced that it had decided only to regulate the practice more tightly. “Politicians may have to advocate for halfway measures if they choose,” Hansen said at a local elementary school before his arrest. “But it is our responsibility to make sure our representatives feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not what is politically expedient.”