The truth about climate change?
Our worst scenarios are too optimistic
says new NASA report

[This is from our friends at China Dialogue, originally published in the Guardian.]

Fossil fuel-free in 20 years?
George Monbiot
July 12, 2007
Prospects for renewable power are promising. But it means nothing, argues George Monbiot, if the public interest is drowned by corporate power.

Reading a scientific paper on the train recently, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James Hansen at NASA, it suggests that the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could be absurdly optimistic.

The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59 centimetres this century. Hansen's paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets that the panel expects doesn't fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to between two and three degrees above today's level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimetres but by 25 metres. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature.

Read the rest here.

Labels: alternative energy, climate change, NASA, sustainable development