Save us Barack Obama, you are our only hope.
ornamentalmind wrote:
> guardian.co.uk
>
> President 'has four years to save Earth'
>
>
> US must take the lead to avert eco-disaster
> Robin McKie in New York The Observer, Sunday 18 January 2009
>
>
> Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark
> assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen
> who
> last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt
> the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially,
> that action will have to be taken within Obama's first
> administration,
> he added.
>
>
> Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and
> threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and
> major
> disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. "We cannot afford
> to put off change any longer," said Hansen. "We have to get on a new
> path within this new administration. We have only four years left for
> Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take
> the lead."
>
>
> Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too
> high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still
> rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.
>
>
> Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt
> the rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global
> warming
> posed any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to
> take a lead as the world's greatest carbon emitter and the planet's
> largest economy. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are
> bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a
> carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the
> same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn
> coal - the world's worst carbon emitter.
>
>
> Hansen - head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and winner of
> the WWF's top conservation award - first warned Earth was in danger
> from climate change in 1988 and has been the victim of several
> unsuccessful attempts by the White House administration of George
> Bush
> to silence his views.
>
>
> Hansen's institute monitors temperature fluctuations at thousands of
> sites round the world, data that has led him to conclude that most
> estimates of sea level rises triggered by rising atmospheric
> temperatures are too low and too conservative. For example, the
> Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says a rise of between 20cm
> and 60cm can be expected by the end of the century.
>
>
> However, Hansen said feedbacks in the climate system are already
> accelerating ice melt and are threatening to lead to the collapse of
> ice sheets. Sea-level rises will therefore be far greater - a claim
> backed last week by a group of British, Danish and Finnish scientists
> who said studies of past variations in climate indicate that a far
> more likely figure for sea-level rise will be about 1.4 metres,
> enough
> to cause devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and
> of low-lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations.
>
>
> As a result of his fears about sea-level rise, Hansen said he had
> pressed both Britain's Royal Society and the US National Academy of
> Sciences to carry out an urgent investigation of the state of the
> planet's ice-caps. However, nothing had come of his proposals. The
> first task of Obama's new climate office should therefore be to order
> such a probe "as a matter of urgency", Hansen added.
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