Thursday, June 21, 2007

Global warming threatens civilization says top six scientists

See first source for the full article.

Present knowledge does not permit accurate specification of the dangerous level of human-made GHGs. However, it is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades.

We conclude that a feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting GHGs from the air. Development of CO2 capture at power plants, with below-ground CO2 sequestration, may be a critical element. Injection of the CO2 well beneath the ocean floor assures its stability (House et al. 2006). If the power plant fuel is derived from biomass, such as cellulosic fibres grown without excessive fertilization that produces N2O or other offsetting GHG emissions, it will provide continuing drawdown of atmospheric CO2.

Climate change and trace gases

Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A

James Hansen1, *, Makiko Sato1, Pushker Kharecha1, Gary Russell1, David W. Lea2 & Mark Siddall3

Published online 18 May 2007

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

The researchers were led by James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming.


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1NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025, USA jhansen@giss.nasa.gov
2
Department of Earth Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
3
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964, USA

*Author for correspondence jhansen@giss.nasa.gov

1 comment:

DANIELBLOOM said...

a friend of mine in San Francisco, a poet there, said re glo war and my idea to plan and design and build polar cities for future survival, he said: "You are right, Glo war is the 1000 pound gorilla in the room nobody wantrs to talk about..."