Storms of my grandchildren
by James E. Hansen · first published 2009
33% recommend67% neutral
"In Storms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansen--the nation's leading scientist on climate issues--speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: The planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although the threat of human-caused climate change is now widely recognized, politicians have failed to connect policy with the science, responding instead with ineffectual remedies dictated by special interests. Hansen shows why President Obama's solution, cap-and-trade, which Al Gore signed on to, won't work; why we must
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…timescale of the change. In the past changes occurred over centuries, we are causing the change in decades. That timescale risks catastrophe. If you genuinely want to understand then I recommend reading Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen, or at least googling a few book reviews to get a sense.
on “Global Weirding: Visualizing Climate Change” ↗An excellent introductory book is Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen. It speaks to the science and directly addresses the common objections that deniers bring up. What surprised me is that the science comes at this from multiple angles, so even if someone…
on “Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release” ↗…encouraging. A recent book that covers similar ground, also with a lot of references, is Unprecedented by David Ray Griffin; the conclusions are similar. If you want more detail on the geologic evidence, see Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen. You're surely right that there will be things that improve. However, we know from geology and paleontology what's happened in previous major warming periods: mass extinction, and a huge…
on “Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI” ↗…One reason we know what to expect is that the Earth has gone through warming cycles before and we can see what happened in the geological evidence. A good presentation of that evidence is in Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren.
on “‘12 Monkeys’: Why Terry Gilliam’s Movie Is Relevant Today” ↗…from orbital variations, which leads to greenhouse gas emissions, which leads to the global average temperature going up several degrees. A good explanation of the evidence for this is in James Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren. People have long thought the threshold to be around 2 degrees C, but now some are thinking it's more like 1.5. The CO2 level everybody agreed was safe was 350 ppm.
on “Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter” ↗…not to see whether climate change from CO2 emissions is a real thing. That's well established by physics and geological history. A good presentation of this evidence is in a couple chapters of Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren.
on “Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why” ↗A good place to start is the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, which has references to hundreds of papers. Also Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren has several chapters on the geological history.
on “It’s cheaper to stop emitting now than to pull carbon from the air later” ↗…he had any explanation for cloud cover increasing over the past few decades. It's really pretty silly the way people assume climatologists are complete idiots. My suggestion: read James Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren. He goes into the actual science in depth.
on “Whoops CO2 has almost nothing to do with global warming” ↗…drying out and burning down, permafrost melting and releasing CO2 and methane, undersea methane ice destabilizing, etc. A great book that covers the geological evidence in detail, written for laymen, is Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen.
on “How to Dial Down the Earth’s Thermostat” ↗…planet would warm up, because physics. Then we emitted lots more CO2 and lo and behold, the planet's warming up. That doesn't strike you as a bit too much coincidence? For more detail see Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren, which describes: - The physics of the greenhouse effect - The contributions to global warming from CO2, methane, black soot, etc - The geological record that shows how the planet responded, when things…
on “97% environmentalist” ↗…hydrate destabilization, permafrost melt releasing CO2 and methane, forest fires caused by drought, and CO2 release from dried-out topsoil and peat bogs. A good introduction to all this is in Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren. It's true that the past couple million years have been relatively stable. For at least the past 800,000 years CO2 never went higher than 280ppm. But the last time CO2 was as high as now, the planet…
on “Cloud brightening experiment tests tool to slow climate change” ↗…the risk. Many scientists worry that somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 degrees, positive feedbacks will kick in and take the planet several degrees further even if we stop emissions entirely. Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren has a good account of the geological evidence for that.
on “Nations Approve Landmark Climate Accord in Paris” ↗Indeed it is. James Hansen discussed it at length in his book Storms of My Grandchildren. You may have heard that in the geological record, warming often begins before CO2 rises. The wobbling is the reason for that. It causes a little warming, the warming causes some CO2 to be released,…
The book is Storms of My Grandchildren, I mis-remembered the title. It's written by James Hansen a NASA scientist. So, don't dismiss it as mass market rubbish. The book does address each and every point that you've made in this discussion.…
…will be out of our hands; the planet will keep warming even if we stop our own emissions entirely. A great introductory source on the geological history of climate, and the evidence for it, is Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren.
on “Ancient life awakens amid thawing ice caps and permafrost” ↗