james hansen

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This week the organisation known as GLOBE met in London and launched its biannual review of national climate legislation. The GLOBE Climate Legislation Study is up to its third edition and covers the ongoing efforts in 33 countries. Of these, GLOBE claims that 18 countries have made substantial progress, 14 have made limited progress and one country has been singled out for taking a backwards step.[read more]

A recent analysis shows how the distribution of summer temperatures has shifted in recent decades, to the extent that there has been a notable change in the frequency of what were extreme outlying events. This in turn led NASA to assert that “the recent bouts of extremely warm summers, including the intense heat wave afflicting the U.S. Midwest this year, very likely are the consequence of global warming”.[read more]

Christopher Kolaczan/Shutterstock

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, NASA climate scientist James Hansen again puts forward his very compelling argument for strong action on limiting global CO2 emissions. He argues that Canadian oil sands is illustrative of an ongoing global trend to extract or mine increasingly challenging reserves of oil, gas and coal and bring them to market, a behaviour that could mean "game over for the climate".[read more]

With a new report coming from the IPCC on managing the risks associated with extreme weather and continued weather phenomena attracting media attention, it is more important to attempt to get to grips with the science and statistics behind this rapidly emerging field of research. Work along such lines is starting to develop.[read more]

James Hansen, a climate scientist who certainly needs no introduction to regular readers of this site, has given a TED talk about what motivates him to activism on climate change. I beg you to find 18 consecutive distraction-free minutes to watch this video of his talk:     I wish we had many, many more people like...[read more]

James Hansen used to say he couldn't imagine a better person to head the DOE than Stephen Chu.  Both men entered political life to do something about getting civilization to respond to the evidence for climate change.   Yet the Keystone XL issue has them on opposing sides.  Hansen led those protesting the...[read more]

   What have you done lately about climate change? In the last two weeks, about 700 Americans – with more to come – have been arrested in front of the White House, calling on President Obama to block the construction of the $7 billion, 1700-mile Keystone pipeline project that will bring Canadian tar sands oil to largest...[read more]

Image via Wikipedia In a Treehugger interview on Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice, NASA’s James Hansen says it is very unfortunate that “a number of nations have indicated that they’re going to phase out nuclear power… The truth is, what we should do is use the more advanced nuclear power. Even the old nuclear power is much...[read more]

Perhaps in response to the initial findings of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project and the reported disappointment of some climate skeptics after the lead of the project testified before a Congressional committee, the Wall Street Journal Europe published an article on April 5th by former commodity market statistician Douglas Keenan which questions the significance, in statistical terms, of the warming of the planet over the last century.[read more]

The Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change, a draft of a new paper by James E. Hansen and Makiko Sato is available [PDF]. The paper’s abstract: Milankovic climate oscillations help define climate sensitivity and assess potential human-made climate effects. We conclude that Earth in the warmest interglacial periods was...[read more]

James Hansen has published a short piece, Scientific reticence and sea level rise [PDF], which I highly recommend. The abstract and some selected clips: I suggest that a ‘scientific reticence’ is inhibiting the communication of a threat of a potentially large sea level rise. Delay is dangerous because of system inertias that could create...[read more]

The “largest climate rally ever” is taking place on DC mall right now.  You can watch the live stream of everyone from James Hansen to James Cameron, from Sting to me, right here: I’m supposed to be on around 4:50 pm for 3 minutes, though severe weather could obviously change that. If someone can find a full schedule,...[read more]

Earth Day Network is organizing a huge event on the Mall in Washington DC on April 25. The goal is to demand tough, effective climate legislation and a swift transition away from 19th century energy sources. “So what?” you may be asking yourself. There have been a lot of climate rallies over the last 25 years and Congress still hasn’t...[read more]

The country’s top climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, writes in HuffPost: The predominant moral issue of the 21st century, almost surely, will be climate change, comparable to Nazism faced by Churchill in the 20th century and slavery faced by Lincoln in the 19th century. Our fossil fuel addiction, if unabated, threatens our children...[read more]

Tony Kevin, author of Crunch Time (refer to this BNC guest post), recently published a review of two climate-change-related books in The Age newspaper (Melbourne’s daily broadsheet). Unfortunately, the review only made the print edition — there is no permanent online record. As such, Tony asked me if I would reproduce them here on BNC,...[read more]