Hansen

Uncertainty overdone

by Bryan Walker May 21, 2012

Earlier this month James Hansen wrote a trenchant op-ed in the New York Times.  He reiterated the warning that the exploitation of the Canadian tar sands will be game over for the climate, spelt out some of the long-term drought consequences for the US of continued warming and identified notable heat waves of the last [...]

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Coal controversy continues

by Bryan Walker May 4, 2012

Two North American pieces I’ve read this week appealed to me for their directness about the export of coal. One, via James Hansen, was a letter from a Canadian group to Warren Buffet, informing him of their intention this Saturday to prevent coal trains from his BNSF railway company from passing through White Rock, British [...]

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Hansen’s righteous cause

by Bryan Walker April 19, 2012

The latest communication from James Hansen to his email list this week was a sharp reminder that the New Zealand Government’s commitment to the pursuit of unexploited fossil fuels is part of widespread malpractice. The global stampede to find every possible fossil fuel is not being opposed by governments, no matter how dirty the fuels [...]

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The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars

by Bryan Walker February 21, 2012

It was clearly never Michael Mann’s wish to be embroiled in the public controversy that has been manufactured by the denial industry around his and his co-authors’ work. He’s a scientist first and foremost, the nine-year-old who wanted to know what it meant to go faster than the speed of light, the high school student [...]

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The unfettered rage of dismal denial

by Bryan Walker February 10, 2012

I knew that climate scientists were on the receiving end of some nasty emails, but it was still a shock to read James Hansen’s recent communication, in the course of which he gives a sample of the emails that he’d had in just the one week. They’re a dismal example of the unfettered rage which [...]

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2011: a hot cold year

by Gareth January 22, 2012

The NASA numbers are in, and 2011 was the ninth warmest year since 1880 — 0.51ºC above the 1951-80 global mean. Nine of the ten warmest years in the long term record have occurred in this century. According to the analysis released by James Hansen and his team at GISS, a combination of low solar [...]

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Hansen: extreme heat the new normal

by Bryan Walker January 11, 2012

James Hansen and two fellow-authors have circulated a new paper which they will be submitting for publication, Perceptions of Climate Change: The New Climate Dice. I’m not qualified to comment on its scientific detail beyond reporting it as relatively accessible to the lay person, but there were elements in the discussion with which it concluded [...]

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Science sidelined at Durban

by Bryan Walker December 14, 2011

An image that has lingered with me from all the reports of the Durban conference was the Democracy Now interview with a somewhat disconsolate Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chair. He was at Durban to represent the science, a rather thankless task since he detected very little interest in what the science has to say. “I’d [...]

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The Ecological Rift

by Bryan Walker October 25, 2011

Why do we continue with business as usual when we know that it is leading us to disastrous climate change? According to the authors of The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth it is because our capitalist economic system is driven by forces which cannot stand back and weigh the consequences of their drive. [...]

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Butterfly futures flutter by

by Bryan Walker October 2, 2011

James Hansen’s latest discussion paper begins and ends with Monarch butterflies. He watches some on his property in Pennsylvania as they prepare to leave for their migration to Mexico and reflects on the prospects for their survival as a species as global warming takes hold. The Monarchs cross Texas on their way south, a difficult [...]

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