James Hansen, the leading climate scientist, has an excellent new book for understanding the Climate Crisis.
The book’s poetic title “Storms of My Grandchildren” distills the crisis to it’s essence: our society’s failure to address the Climate Crisis creates a situation of “intergenerational remote tyranny” that force upon our descendents a terrible fate, while we blithely doze in a self-absorbed stupor from the intoxicating fumes of the oil age.
Hansen writes movingly about his grandchildren motivating him to make clear his ideas and step up to the fight. He has dropped his scientific autism and has drawn some agreeably radical conclusions: complete stop to burning coal, calling out greenwashing politicians, advocating for nonviolent resistance.
Hansen analyzes the Climate Crisis from the vantage point of scientist, policy advocate, Washington bureaucrat, activist, and the concerned grandfather. Hanson was the guy that Bill McKibben bugged to get the actual number (350 carbon parts per million) for humanity to shoot at, an interesting story for climate activists interested in a little bit of movement history of 350.org.
It is fascinating to follow in the wake of a great mind working at the top of their game with the motivation to save his grandchildren and life on Earth. This creates an energized tone to the writing: caring grandfather going over-the-Rubicon with a now-or-never attitude to speak truth to power.
The Climate Crisis issue is stuck mostly for politics, rather than the science, and so Hansen offers a very useful analysis of the political climate around climate change.
Hansen says that politicians pretend to be green but don’t really put out. ”Most politicians advertised themselves as being “green” but what I learned was that, invariably, it amounted to greenwash, demonstrating token environmental support while kowtowing to fossil fuel special interests.”
Hansen gives us an insider’s view of the underworld of Worshington’s Bushite climate denial. Like touring Dante’s inferno, we get to sit in at the Bush’s Climate Task Force, where he was given a whole 20 minutes and it turns out all the decisions had already been made to totally ignore the science and whore for the oil companies.
The book transmits to us a deeper understanding of the climate system mechanisms: oceans, gases, sunlight, and the carbon cycle. For example, Hansen explains that carbon stays in the air for a very long time. It doesn’t dissipate like a fart, but lingers, silent but deadly, for centuries as a near-permanent new addition to the thin, delicate sky.
Therefore, as one graph shows, though China emits more carbon annually than the US, the cumulative output is more important, because the carbon is still around, and the US is still #1 in this, at 27% of the cumulative carbon pumped into the atmosphere 1795-2008. USA! USA!
And so, energy efficiency is not really a solution, because it stands in the place of getting off fossil fuels entirely, which is what is really required. Hansen writes, “The problem is that the act of slowing down emissions, by itself, does almost no good. The reason is that the lifetime of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere-ocean system is millennia. So it doesn’t matter much whether the fossil fuel is burned this year or next year. Energy efficiency is certainly an essential part of the solution to global warming, but it must be part of a strategic approach that leaves most of the fossil fuels in the round. Yes, most of the fossil fuels must be left in the ground. That is the explicit message that the science provides.”
It is beautiful to get new ideas that allow our mind’s eye to see centuries of sky patterns, to see how clouds work, to see what our delicate sky is made of.
The sky seems tall and way up there, but it’s really the surface of an apple compared to the earth, a thin film of unusual gases that press against the planet amidst a vast airless space. It is beautiful to contemplate the tremendous complexity of this arrangement of sunlight, funny gases, and human life interacting with it all! Hansen deserves credit for making understandable the complexity of Climate science. May we have a world citizenry that arises in shared knowledge of how our sky works and how we can protect it.
Understanding the Climate Crisis is like walking into a dark room, hands in-front as we look for the light switch. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks of the wisdom of not knowing, of acceptance of the borders of our knowing and not getting uptight at our ignorance. This book is a good place to humbly not-know everything and be willing to learn, and travel behind this dedicated activist as he tries to turn on the lights for us.
