Climate Change: A Universal Nightmare
By Christine Pinella
The world’s leading Climate Change scientist warned the EU and its international partners today to rethink their targets for decreasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, claiming that we have massively underestimated the problem.
James Hansen is the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. He has called for a reduction in CO2 limits.
Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of CO2-the most severe in the world-needs to be reduced to at least 350ppm. The cut is needed if “humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed”. A final version of the paper that Hansen co-authored with eight other scientists was posted today in the Archive website. No theoretical models of the Earth were used in this study. Instead, the researchers looked at the history of the Earth’s sensitivity to climate which they said gave a more accurate picture.
Studied samples from the ocean can track CO2 levels back millions of years. When the world began to glaciate in the Ice Age 35 million years ago the concentration of CO2 was 450ppm.
“If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice - that’s a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster” says Hansen.
Although previous estimates claimed that at 550ppm the world would warm to 3C, it has now been proven that the estimate would be doubled at 6C.
Hansen is a prominent figure in climate change science. He was one of the first to bring the extreme issue to Congress in the 1980’s.
The fundamental reason for his revised data was what he called “slow feedback” mechanisms which are only now becoming fully understood. They amplify the rise in temperature caused by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses. Ice and snow reflect sunlight and when they melt the barren ground absorbs heat.
Satellite technology from the past three years has shown that Greenland and Antarctica both are losing mass at alarming rates.
The belief that the shrinking of ice sheets would take thousands of years is now being thought “implausible” by researchers like Hansen. “If we follow business as usual I can’t see how west Antarctica could survive a century. We are talking about a sea-level rise of at least a couple of metres this century”.
The new target of 350ppm may lead some to believe the bar is set unrealistically high. With the US administration struggling to keep up with international efforts, climate campaigners are having a hard time setting the goal at 450ppm.
Hansen said his findings were not a call for despair. The good news is that reserves of fossil fuels have been exaggerated and another source of energy will have to be put in place. Other measures include a moratorium on coal power stations which could reduce emissions to below 400ppm.