NEW YORK TIMES
May 9, 2012
Game Over for the Climate
By JAMES HANSEN
GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is
happening. That is why I was so troubled to read
a recent interview with President Obama in
Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would
exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”
If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.
Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated
with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon
dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire
history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil
source, and continue to burn our conventional
oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would
reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era,
more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level
was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That
level of heat-trapping gases would assure that
the disintegration of the ice sheets would
accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise
and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures
would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of
the planet’s species would be driven to
extinction. Civilization would be at risk.
That is the long-term outlook. But near-term,
things will be bad enough. Over the next several
decades, the Western United States and the
semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will
develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when
it does come, occurring in extreme events with
heavy flooding. Economic losses would be
incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would
be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could
no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.
If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we
need to reduce emissions dramatically. President
Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands
oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining,
which Canada desires in part for export markets,
but also to encourage economic incentives to
leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.
The global warming signal is now louder than the
noise of random weather, as I predicted would
happen by now in the journal Science in 1981.
Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably.
We can say with high confidence that the recent
heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in
Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands,
were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.
We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide
traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount
keeps the climate conducive to human life. But
add too much, as we are doing now, and
temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This
is not the result of natural variability, as some
argue. The earth is currently in the part of its
long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would
normally be cooling. But they are rising — and
it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million
to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar
sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to
add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar
sands found mainly in the United States, contains
at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If
we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of
finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil
fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon
concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that
would, as earth’s history shows, leave our
children a climate system that is out of their control.
We need to start reducing emissions
significantly, not create new ways to increase
them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon
fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then
distribute 100 percent of the collections to all
Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The
government would not get a penny. This
market-based approach would stimulate innovation,
jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging
government or having it pick winners or losers.
Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users,
would get more back than they paid in increased
prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use
resulting from the carbon price would be nearly
six times as great as the oil supply from the
proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the
pipeline superfluous, according to economic
models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.
But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon
emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true
costs, leveling the energy playing field, the
world’s governments are forcing the public to
subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions
of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic
stampede to extract every fossil fuel through
mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic
fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction,
and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.
President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,”
but he does not provide the leadership needed to
change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak
candidly to the public — which yearns for open,
honest discussion — explaining that our continued
technological leadership and economic well-being
demand a reasoned change of our energy course.
History has shown that the American public can
rise to the challenge, but leadership is essential.
The science of the situation is clear — it’s time
for the politics to follow. This is a plan that
can unify conservatives and liberals,
environmentalists and business. Every major
national science academy in the world has
reported that global warming is real, caused
mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The
cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait
— we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and
be judged immoral by coming generations.
James Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute
for Space Studies and is the author of “Storms of My Grandchildren.”
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