CLIMATE CRISIS May Be Worse Than You Think, Says James Hansen, Part 1

New Study Warns of an Imminent Spike of Global Warming and Deepens Divides Among Climate Scientists

From an Article by Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News, 11/2/23

James Hansen, the scientist who first sounded the climate alarm in Congress, sees a decrease in aerosol pollution driving a surge of warming and criticizes the U.N. climate science panel, drawing a backlash from other researchers.

During the past year, the needles on the climate dashboard for global ice melt, heatwaves, ocean temperatures, coral die-offs, floods and droughts all tilted far into the red warning zone. In summer and fall, monthly global temperature anomalies spiked beyond most projections, helping to drive those extremes, and they may not level off anytime soon, said James Hansen, lead author of a study published today in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change that projects a big jump in the rate of warming in the next few decades.

But the research was controversial even before it was published, and it may widen the rifts in the climate science community and in the broader public conversation about the severity and imminence of climate impacts, with Hansen criticizing the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for underestimating future warming, while other researchers, including IPCC authors, lambasted the new study.

The research suggests that an ongoing reduction of sulfuric air pollution particles called aerosols could send the global average annual temperature soaring beyond the targets of the Paris climate agreement much sooner than expected, which would sharply increase the challenges faced by countries working to limit harmful climate change under international agreements on an already treacherous geopolitical stage.

Differences about climate science projections is not the main problem, said Jeffery Sachs, director of the Columbia University Earth Institute, who moderated a panel presentation by the authors of the new study. “We’re in a grim situation,” he said. “And it’s even grimmer that the politicians have failed their responsibility to the world now for quite a long time. We have a massive political failure. Our politicians like wars. They don’t want to save the planet, in the right way.”

Hansen and the international co-authors also reanalyzed paleoclimate records going back several thousand years and found that the planet’s most important ocean heat transport currents could slow or shut down this century because they are more sensitive to increasing freshwater from melting ice than shown by widely used climate models, including those used as the basis for scientific projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has also been criticized by other scientists, including some who are authors with the IPCC, for downplaying climate risks.

The findings suggest that the same widely used models and projections also downplay how fast vast global ice sheets could melt and speed sea level rise to a rate that would be difficult to adapt to, the authors of the new paper said.

Combining the the paleoclimate data with modeling and detailed observations from the last few decades, the team concluded that the world is in for a wild ride of climate impacts, including possible superstorms that could toss house-sized boulders to the top of seaside cliffs, radical changes to global rainfall patterns that would affect agriculture in densely populated regions and possibly several meters of sea level rise by 2100, as compared to the IPCC-projected range of .29 to 1.1 meters.

“Look at what we are seeing the last few months at the current level of warming,” said co-author Leon Simons, a researcher with the Club of Rome, in the Netherlands. “We see the impacts happening now. The forest fires in Canada are a very concrete example, emitting almost 2 billion tons of CO2 and bringing smoke to Europe. That’s just one example. There will be much more of that in the next few years.”

A Surge of Alarming Studies and Public Actions From Researchers

In the last few years, Hansen, Simons and several other research groups have tried to raise awareness about the potential for sudden and unexpected climate shocks in the near future that would affect most people alive right now. For example, studies show the growing risk of multiple simultaneous crop failures in different parts of the world that would seriously threaten global food security.

On Sept. 19, the Stockholm Resilience Center published research showing that six of nine climate-related planetary boundaries have been breached, which “risks the stability of the entire planet,” according to the authors, including Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and Konrad “Koni” Steffen, who researched and warned of the dangers of a Greenland Ice Sheet meltdown until his untimely death in a crevasse there in 2020.

Last week, the Alliance of World Scientists said “moral urgency” compelled them to again warn of a global climate emergency, with the currently projected 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 making global societal collapse a “plausible and dangerously underexplored” possibility, a scenario the researchers wrote about in a December 2022 study.

The rise of such warnings coincides with widespread criticism that the IPCC’s scientific process is too slow to help society make decisions to deal with the rapidly changing climate, and that the panel’s key findings are watered down because politically appointed science officials and administrators have the final say over what is included in the panel’s key summary reports that are meant to inform public policy. That vicious cycle of slow and overly restrained science feeds public complacency and justifies government inaction, according to Hansen.

Hansen’s early testimony to the U.S. Congress in 1988 was politically groundbreaking, presenting decision-makers with compelling scientific information that he hoped would prompt action. When, after decades, it had not, he followed up by joining protests against the Keystone Oil Pipeline and getting arrested outside the White House in 2011, and again in 2018 in West Virginia while protesting mountaintop removal for coal mining, all while he was still head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Other researchers have also pressed for more urgency from scientists and scientific organizations recently. Rose Abramoff and Peter Kalmus interrupted a talk at the American Geophysical Union annual conference in Chicago last December, unfurling a banner urging scientists to “GET OUT OF THE LAB AND INTO THE STREETS” and and criticizing the paths outlined by major climate institutions as too slow to avert catastrophe. Abramoff was fired from her job at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for her actions at the conference.