Read Online With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change by Fred Pearce - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Fred Pearce
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without polar bears and ice-dwelling seals, a world with no place for the Inuit way of life. And the influence of such a change would spread around the world. Without the reflective shield of ice, the whole world would warm several more degrees; ocean and air currents driven by temperature differences between the poles and the tropics would falter; on land, methane and other gases would break out of the melting permafrost, raising temperatures further; and as the ice caps on land melted, sea levels would rise so high that much of the world's population would have to move or drown. If the Arctic is especially sensitive to climate change, the whole planet is especially sensitive to changes in the Arctic.
7
ON THE SLIPPERY SLOPE
Greenland is slumping into the ocean
We are on "a slippery slope to hell." That is not the kind of language you expect to read in a learned scientific paper by one of the top climate scientists in the U.S., who is, moreover, the director of one of NASA's main science divisions, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York. Not even in a picture caption. But Jim Hansen, President George W. Bush's top in-house climate modeler, though personally modest and unassuming, calls it as he sees it.
I've followed Hansen's work for a long time. He began his career investigating the greenhouse effect on Venus, and was principal investigator for the Pioneer space probe to that planet in the 1970s. But he soon switched to planet Earth. He was the first person to get global warming onto the world's front pages, during the long, hot U.S. summer of 1988. Half the states in the country were on drought alert, and the mighty Mississippi had all but dried up. The Dust Bowl, it seemed to many, was returning. Hansen picked that moment to turn up at a hearing of the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee in Washington and tell the sweating senators: "It is time to stop waffling so much. We should say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here." He didn't quite say that greenhouse gases were causing the drought across the country-a claim that would have been hard to substantiate. But everybody assumed he had.
Sixteen years later, Hansen was the senior U.S. government employee who, seven days before the 2004 presidential election, began a public lecture with the words "I have been told by a high government official that I should not talk about dangerous anthropogenic interference with climate, because we do not know how much humans are changing the earth's climate or how much change is dangerous. Actually, we know quite a lot." And he went on to describe what we know in some detail. Most of his fellow researchers thought that would be the end for Hansen as a government employee. But a year later this outwardly diffident man-who couldn't stop apologizing for keeping me waiting when we met in his large, paper-strewn office-was still at his post. To the astonishment of many of his colleagues. "He is saved by his science; he is just too good to be fired," said one. "Also, he is one of the good guys. He doesn't have enemies. If he needed saving, there are a lot of people who would volunteer for the job."
And now Hansen says the world, or more particularly Greenland, is on a slippery slope to hell. We had better listen.
The world's three great ice sheets-one over Greenland and the other two over Antarctica-contain vast amounts of ice. Leftovers from the last ice age, they are piles of compressed snow almost 2 miles high. Glaciologists divide the sheets into two parts. On the high ground inland, where snowfall is greatest and melting is least, they accumulate ice. But on the edges and on lower ground, where snowfall is usually less and melting is greater, they lose ice. The boundary between the two zones is known as the equilibrium line.
For many centuries these great ice sheets have been in balance, with ice loss at the edges matched by accumulation in the centers, and the
7
ON THE SLIPPERY SLOPE
Greenland is slumping into the ocean
We are on "a slippery slope to hell." That is not the kind of language you expect to read in a learned scientific paper by one of the top climate scientists in the U.S., who is, moreover, the director of one of NASA's main science divisions, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York. Not even in a picture caption. But Jim Hansen, President George W. Bush's top in-house climate modeler, though personally modest and unassuming, calls it as he sees it.
I've followed Hansen's work for a long time. He began his career investigating the greenhouse effect on Venus, and was principal investigator for the Pioneer space probe to that planet in the 1970s. But he soon switched to planet Earth. He was the first person to get global warming onto the world's front pages, during the long, hot U.S. summer of 1988. Half the states in the country were on drought alert, and the mighty Mississippi had all but dried up. The Dust Bowl, it seemed to many, was returning. Hansen picked that moment to turn up at a hearing of the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee in Washington and tell the sweating senators: "It is time to stop waffling so much. We should say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here." He didn't quite say that greenhouse gases were causing the drought across the country-a claim that would have been hard to substantiate. But everybody assumed he had.
Sixteen years later, Hansen was the senior U.S. government employee who, seven days before the 2004 presidential election, began a public lecture with the words "I have been told by a high government official that I should not talk about dangerous anthropogenic interference with climate, because we do not know how much humans are changing the earth's climate or how much change is dangerous. Actually, we know quite a lot." And he went on to describe what we know in some detail. Most of his fellow researchers thought that would be the end for Hansen as a government employee. But a year later this outwardly diffident man-who couldn't stop apologizing for keeping me waiting when we met in his large, paper-strewn office-was still at his post. To the astonishment of many of his colleagues. "He is saved by his science; he is just too good to be fired," said one. "Also, he is one of the good guys. He doesn't have enemies. If he needed saving, there are a lot of people who would volunteer for the job."
And now Hansen says the world, or more particularly Greenland, is on a slippery slope to hell. We had better listen.
The world's three great ice sheets-one over Greenland and the other two over Antarctica-contain vast amounts of ice. Leftovers from the last ice age, they are piles of compressed snow almost 2 miles high. Glaciologists divide the sheets into two parts. On the high ground inland, where snowfall is greatest and melting is least, they accumulate ice. But on the edges and on lower ground, where snowfall is usually less and melting is greater, they lose ice. The boundary between the two zones is known as the equilibrium line.
For many centuries these great ice sheets have been in balance, with ice loss at the edges matched by accumulation in the centers, and the
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