Monday, September 21, 2009

'We have only four years left to act on climate change - America has to lead'



Link to original article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/obama-climate-change

'We have only four years left to act on climate change - America has to lead'

Jim Hansen is the 'grandfather of climate change' and one of the world's leading climatologists. In this rare interview in New York, he explains why President Obama's administration is the last chance to avoid flooded cities, species extinction and climate catastrophe

Along one wall of Jim Hansen's wood-panelled office in upper Manhattan, the distinguished climatologist has pinned 10 A4-sized photographs of his three grandchildren: Sophie, Connor and Jake. They are the only personal items on display in an office otherwise dominated by stacks of manila folders, bundles of papers and cardboard boxes filled with reports on climate variations and atmospheric measurements.

The director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York is clearly a doting grandfather as well as an internationally revered climate scientist. Yet his pictures are more than mere expressions of familial love. They are reminders to the 67-year-old scientist of his duty to future generations, children whom he now believes are threatened by a global greenhouse catastrophe that is spiralling out of control because of soaring carbon dioxide emissions from industry and transport.

"I have been described as the grandfather of climate change. In fact, I am just a grandfather and I do not want my grandchildren to say that grandpa understood what was happening but didn't make it clear," Hansen said last week. Hence his warning to Barack Obama, who will be inaugurated as US president on Tuesday. His four-year administration offers the world a last chance to get things right, Hansen said. If it fails, global disaster - melted sea caps, flooded cities, species extinctions and spreading deserts - awaits mankind.

"We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."

After eight years of opposing moves to combat climate change, thanks to the policies of President George Bush, the US had given itself no time for manoeuvre, he said. Only drastic, immediate change can save the day and those changes proposed by Hansen - who appeared in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and is a winner of the World Wildlife Fund's top conservation award - are certainly far-reaching. In particular, the idea of continuing with "cap-and-trade" schemes, which allow countries to trade allowances and permits for emitting carbon dioxide, must now be scrapped, he insisted. Such schemes, encouraged by the Kyoto climate treaty, were simply "weak tea" and did not work. "TheUnited States did not sign Kyoto, yet its emissions are not that different from the countries that did sign it."

Thus plans to include carbon trading schemes in talks about future climate agreements were a desperate error, he said. "It's just greenwash. I would rather the forthcoming Copenhagen climate talks fail than we agree to a bad deal," Hansen said.

Only a carbon tax, agreed by the west and then imposed on the rest of the world through political pressure and trade tariffs, would succeed in the now-desperate task of stopping the rise of emissions, he argued. This tax would be imposed on oil corporations and gas companies and would specifically raise the prices of fuels across the globe, making their use less attractive. In addition, the mining of coal - by far the worst emitter of carbon dioxide - would be phased out entirely along with coal-burning power plants which he called factories of death.

"Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as other fossil fuels combined and it still has far greater reserves. We must stop using it." Instead, programmes for building wind, solar and other renewable energy plants should be given major boosts, along with research programmes for new generations of nuclear reactors.

Hansen's strident calls for action stem from his special view of our changing world. He and his staff monitor temperatures relayed to the institute - an anonymous brownstone near Columbia University - from thousands of sites around the world, including satellites and bases in Antarctica. These have revealed that our planet has gone through a 0.6C rise in temperature since 1970, with the 10 hottest years having occurred between 1997 and 2008: unambiguous evidence, he believes, that Earth is beginning to overheat dangerously.

Last week, however, Hansen revealed his findings for 2008 which show, surprisingly, that last year was the coolest this century, although still hot by standards of the 20th century. The finding will doubtless be seized on by climate change deniers, for whom Hansen is a particular hate figure, and used as "evidence" that global warming is a hoax.

However, deniers should show caution, Hansen insisted: most of the planet was exceptionally warm last year. Only a strong La Niña - a vast cooling of the Pacific that occurs every few years - brought down the average temperature. La Niña would not persist, he said. "Before the end of Obama's first term, we will be seeing new record temperatures. I can promise the president that."

Hansen's uncompromising views are, in some ways, unusual. Apart from his senior Nasa post, he holds a professorship in environmental sciences at Columbia and dresses like a tweedy academic: green jumper with elbow pads, cords and check cotton shirt. Yet behind his unassuming, self-effacing manner, the former planetary scientist has shown surprising steel throughout his career. In 1988, he electrified a congressional hearing, on a particular hot, sticky day in June, when he announced he was "99% certain" that global warming was to blame for the weather and that the planet was now in peril from rising carbon dioxide emissions. His remarks, which made headlines across the US, pushed global warming on to news agendas for the first time.

Over the years, Hansen persisted with his warnings. Then, in 2005, he gave a talk at the American Geophysical Union in which he argued that the year was the warmest on record and that industrial carbon emissions were to blame. A furious White House phoned Nasa and Hansen was banned from appearing in newspapers or on television or radio. It was a bungled attempt at censorship. Newspapers revealed that Hansen was being silenced and his story, along with his warnings about the climate, got global coverage.

Since then Hansen has continued his mission "to make clear" the dangers of climate change, sending a letter last December from himself and his wife Anniek about the urgency of the planet's climatic peril to Barack and Michelle Obama. "We decided to send it to both of them because we thought there may be a better chance she will think about this or have time for it. The difficulty of this problem [of global warming] is that its main impacts will be felt by our children and by our grandchildren. A mother tends to be concerned about such things."

Nor have his messages of imminent doom been restricted to US politicians. The heads of the governments of Britain, Germany, Japan and Australia have all received recent warnings from Hansen about their countries' behaviour. In each case, these nations' continued support for the burning of coal to generate electricity has horrified the climatologist. In Britain, he has condemned the government's plans to build a new coal plant at Kingsnorth, in Kent, for example, and even appeared in court as a defence witness for protesters who occupied the proposed new plant's site in 2007.

"On a per capita basis, Britain is responsible for more of the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere than any other nation on Earth because it has been burning it from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. America comes second and Germany third. The crucial point is that Britain could make a real difference if it said no to Kingsnorth. That decision would set an example to the rest of the world." These points were made clear in Hansen's letter to the prime minister, Gordon Brown, though he is still awaiting a reply.

As to the specific warnings he makes about climate change, these concentrate heavily on global warming's impact on the ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica. These are now melting at an alarming rate and threaten to increase sea levels by one or two metres over the century, enough to inundate cities and fertile land around the globe.

The issue was simple, said Hansen: would each annual increase of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere produce a simple proportional increase in temperature or would its heating start to accelerate?

He firmly believes the latter. As the Arctic's sea-ice cover decreases, less and less sunlight will be reflected back into space. And as tundras heat up, more and more of their carbon dioxide and methane content will be released into the atmosphere. Thus each added tonne of carbon will trigger greater rises in temperature as the years progress. The result will be massive ice cap melting and sea-level rises of several metres: enough to devastate most of the world's major cities.

"I recently lunched with Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, and proposed a joint programme to investigate this issue as a matter of urgency, in partnership with the US National Academy of Sciences, but nothing has come of the idea, it would seem," he said.

Hansen is used to such treatment, of course, just as the world of science has got used to the fact that he is as persistent as he is respected in his work and will continue to press his cause: a coal-power moratorium and an investigation of ice-cap melting.

The world was now in "imminent peril", he insisted, and nothing would quench his resolve in spreading the message. It is the debt he owes his grandchildren, after all.

The climate in figures

• The current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 385 parts per million. This compares with a figure of some 315ppm around 1960.

• Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that can persist for hundreds of years in the atmosphere, absorbing infrared radiation and heating the atmosphere.

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's last report states that 11 of the 12 years between 1995-2006 rank among the 12 warmest years on record since 1850.

• According to Jim Hansen, the nation responsible for putting the largest amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is Britain, on a per capita basis - because the Industrial Revolution started here. China is now the largest annual emitter of carbon dioxide .

• Most predictions suggest that global temperatures will rise by 2C to 4C over the century.

• The IPCC estimates that rising temperatures will melt ice and cause ocean water to heat up and increase in volume. This will produce a sea-level rise of between 18 and 59 centimetres. However, some predict a far faster rate of around one to two metres.

• Inundations of one or two metres would make the Nile Delta and Bangladesh uninhabitable, along with much of south-east England, Holland and the east coast of the United States.

Friday, September 11, 2009

9/11 and the Elusive Meaning of Freedom...



Today is September 11 – a date that has forever changed human history. In reaction to the attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, the United States became involved in a war that has killed, maimed, injured, and impacted countless Americans, non-Americans, soldiers, and civilians. The United States has plunged itself into debt, dedicating precious time, energy, money, human and ecological life to fund a war that was waged, at least outwardly, in the name of ‘freedom’ and protection of ‘national security’. So what, exactly, is this thing we are fighting for called ‘freedom’? According to the September 11 commemoration events, freedom is something that the American people have that was threatened by the attacks. Today’s events emphasize pride in America and pride in American freedom. To defend American freedom (and supposedly the freedom of the Afghanis and Iraqis) we went to war against those who commit acts of terror that threaten our freedom.

Ok, great. But what, exactly, is freedom, what does it really have to do with being attacked eight years ago on this day, and what does it have to do with war?

In the last few weeks, the Obama IS America! (OIA!) crew went traveling through South America and Australia. While on a bus through Brazil, one of our correspondents had an interesting experience. There was a woman sitting in the seat behind her who put her young child in her lap. The child was moving around, and kicked the seat of our correspondent several times, waking her up from her sleep. She turned around to inform the lady that her son was kicking the seat, and kindly asked her to stop him. The woman denied that her child was doing any such thing and called our correspondent crazy, which set off a brief exchange of unpleasantries between the two women. In the midst of this exchange, the OIA! correspondent noticed that the seat next to the lady was empty. She asked her if she would put her child in the empty seat in order to prevent any potential seat kicking, to which the lady replied, "No, he is free to sit wherever he wants".

To be Free. To have Freedom. What is freedom? What does it mean to be free? Is freedom the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want? Are you free if someone else determines what you are or aren’t free to do? Is it possible that what this woman identified as her child's freedom to sit where he wants is actually something else entirely? Perhaps. But, if so, then what? Perhaps what she mistakenly called his 'freedom' was her own ego and desire to not be wrong in a situation. Perhaps his 'freedom' was her maternal defense of her child in a situation that she thought might be in some way harmful to him. Perhaps she really believes that freedom is doing whatever you want, regardless of the consequences for others, and therefore our correspondent's comfort was meaningless next to the comfort of her and her child. Notably, the child did not speak once during this exchange, and whether or not he really cared if he sat on his mother’s lap or not remained unclear.

A few short days later, our Obama IS America! correspondent found herself staying at a bed and breakfast in the Atlantic Rainforest (also in Brazil), run by a Brazilian and American husband and wife that live on the property with their three children. One day during her stay, the son of the owners (about the same age as the boy discussed above) was playing with his toys on the front porch. He had spread himself and his toys all over the floor, blocking the passage of guests and his family members through the building’s primary exit. Upon seeing the difficulty that our correspondent was having trying to pass through the corridor because of her child, the mother asked her son to please make room for our correspondent. As he started to move his toys, she turned to our correspondent and said, "You know the kids are so free here, we like to let them run around and play, but sometimes they are kind of hard to control. Sorry if he got in your way!"

The contrast between these two interactions is quite marked. ‘Freedom’ for the second mother seems to be something she fosters in her children, but which is bounded by a consciousness of others and of one’s surroundings. She proclaims her son’s freedom not in defiance of a perceived threat or insult, but as a given, even while acknowledging that the freedom she allows her son to have sometimes inhibits her ability to control his actions. The mother in the first scenario feels that our correspondent’s freedom to sit comfortably threatens the freedom of her own child to sit where and how he wants, asserting his right to this freedom without any apparent regard or concern for the impact of her son’s freedom on the people around him.

Let’s consider for a moment how each mother’s reaction impacted our correspondent. The situation on the bus ended with hurt feelings, flared egos, and an exchange of insults between the mother and our OIA! correspondent. On the contrary, the situation with the second mother ended on a peaceful and pleasant note, and our correspondent even went so far as to pat the child on the head as she walked past him, while informing his mother that she had not felt inconvenienced in the least. So what does it mean that the mother of one child is concerned about her child’s freedom to play and the freedom of others to walk safely and comfortably, while the other mother exhibited offense and denial when informed of the impact of her child’s behavior on others? Does ensuring one's freedom require a consciousness of others, or is the line drawn at the self?

Obama IS America! argues that true freedom requires a consciousness of others, because consciousness of others and of their peace and freedom ensures one's own security. The more peace generated at the individual level, the more that society as a whole will be peaceful and the more likely it will be that people everywhere can be free to live as they wish. Concern for the freedom of others, respected to the same degree as freedom for oneself or one's loved ones, lessens the likelihood of becoming a target for someone else's animosity. Perhaps respect for others also implies more personal and psychological freedom, because by respecting others, one is not bound by the limitations of one’s own ego.

Let’s keep the above reflections in mind for a moment and consider the following. The reaction of the United States government to being attacked on September 11, 2001 was to go to war. We went to war in the name of ‘freedom’ – American freedom, freedom for the Afghani people from the Taliban, freedom for the Iraqis from Sadaam, freedom for the world from Iraq's 'nuclear weapons program' and from

terrorism in general. The United States expressed its concern for itself and for its own freedom through attack on others, reciprocating an act of violence with more violence in the name of ‘freedom’ for Americans from ‘evildoers’ and freedom for citizens of the countries we attacked. Did we accomplish what we set out to do? Yes, we removed the Taliban and killed Saddam Hussein, and sure, it can be said that these acts were good for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq because of the brutality of the regimes removed. However, through the invasion process, our military has killed, maimed, tortured, and raped innocent Iraqi and Afghani people on a regular basis. Studies have shown that the risk of death for Iraqi citizens increased after our invasion[1] as did post-invasion terrorism around the world[2], while other studies analyze the potentially horrific impacts this war has had on the environment – ozone destroying chemicals released into the air, massive sandstorms caused by destruction of deserts by heavy vehicles, and ground-water contamination by depleted uranium are just some of the impacts predicted[3]. It is not just the terrorists that will reap the consequences of massive environmental damage, but all living beings on our planet. After all, our ecosystems are intrinsically connected.

In light of such violence and destruction, it is hard to imagine how our world or any of its inhabitants have become more ‘free’ after eight years of war. American freedom to live and to live without fear has perhaps been compromised to a greater extent now than when the attacks first happened. It is hard to know if this is the way things would have been if we had waited and tried to find a more compassionate resolution to the September 11 attacks other than war. However, at this point in time, perhaps what matters most is how we as a nation will choose to respect, protect, and conceive of ‘freedom’ from now on, and when we as a world society will evolve to a point where war and violent conflict are obsolete.

Freedom is too meaningful, too important to our existence, and too far from being a reality for the majority of people on the planet – regardless of wealth – for us to treat 'freedom' as any other word or any other symbol. Human beings, through some strange order of historical circumstances, have created and chained themselves to systems that destroy our Planet’s ecological systems, destroy each other, and reward hate, selfishness and greed amongst the world's human populations. Peace, compassion, and human and environmental rights seem to have somehow taken a backseat to economic growth, nationalism, and an overemphasis on private interests at the expense of community wellbeing.

If today we commemorate those who died on American soil during the September 11th attacks, let us remember that our government's reaction to their deaths (which is a de facto reflection of our society’s reaction, whether because we wanted war or because we didn't say ‘no’ loudly enough) have led to the deaths, injuries, and human rights violations of tens of thousands of people, the majority of whom had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks on our country. Remembering those killed eight years ago today without meditating on the fact that we chose to respond to their deaths by starting a war with devastating impacts on others, to this blogger, feels empty and hypocritical - more of a symbolic gesture to commemorate a day that we don't quite understand, than a soulful tribute to the meaning and preservation of Freedom.

In honor of the victims of 9/11 both on American soil and abroad, Obama IS America! pledges to work hard to make the world a place that is peaceful, compassionate, loving, and plentiful for all, so no one ever feels that they need to resort to tactics of hate or violence to accomplish whatever it is that is important to them.



[1] See, for example Roberts, Les, et al. "Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey." The Lancet 364.9448 (2004): 1857-864. Accessed on September 11, 2009. .

[2] Glasser, Susan B. "U.S. Figures Show Sharp Global Rise In Terrorism." Washington Post. The Washington Post Company, 27 Apr. 2005. Accessed on September 11, 2009. Web. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/26/AR2005042601623.html>.

[3] Jernelov, Arne. “The Environmental Effects of the Iraq War.” Project Syndicate, Apr. 2003. Accessed on September 11, 2001. Web. <>.