Email to my sons-in-law regarding James Hansen’s latest pronouncement
So how can James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, know that if we burn even half of Earth’s remaining fossil fuels we will destroy the planet?
Dr. James Hansen (writing in the Huffington Post of July 9): “It looks as if the delegates from other nations may have done what 219 U.S. House members who voted up Waxman-Markey last month did not: critically read the 1,400-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and deduce that it’s no more fit to rescue our climate than a V-2 rocket was to land a man on the moon. I share that conclusion, …. Science has exposed the climate threat and revealed this inconvenient truth: If we burn even half of Earth’s remaining fossil fuels we will destroy the planet as humanity knows it. The added emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will set our Earth irreversibly onto a course toward an ice-free state, a course that will initiate a chain reaction of irreversible and catastrophic climate changes.”
For a good while, back in the 70s, Paul R. Ehrlich et al. were threatening us with the population bomb. Now it’s Al Gore, James Hansen, and many more with their climate bomb. And of course not having gone anywhere during all this time, and still waiting in the wings is the nuclear bomb.
Poor humanity! How can we possibly survive all three? Other than the fact that we seem to be doing it I have no idea. In any case both fossil fuels, the culprit in the present scare, and humanity, following the fuels by hundreds of millions of years, are fairly recent arrivals to the 5 billion year old earth.
Is James Hansen telling us that we should be afraid of change? Yet that’s what our planet has always been most about. Might it not be better that we go along with it? In the present instance, for example, might we not to our advanatage move onto the planet’s scarcely inhabited tundra biome?
Now as I think about these things, agriculture, wasn’t that in its time a “bomb,” one that actually did destroy the hunter-gatherer society, or the planet as humanity of the time knew it? And the gasoline engine, how many earlier societies did that destroy and is still destroying?
Is Hansen saying that our planet is everything we want it to be right now and that we don’t want it to change any more, and that we should do whatever it takes at whatever cost to stop it from changing?
Well, maybe, I guess I can understand that. I would like the earth to be forever just what it was during one of those Allagash river canoe trips that we took when we were young. That was a time! Would that we could return and it could be forever.
P
