6 Gut Wrenching Quotes from James Hansen's Climate Justice Paper
Climate Change at the International Court of Justice
1) The scope of climate change, within the lifetime of a young person today, will be monumental and tragic, if governments are allowed to persist on a path of pretense and denial. Climate change is intergenerational injustice, as innocent young people and their children will suffer the most severe consequences.
2) Nations of the world meet at annual COP meetings (Conferences of the Parties), where they promise to reduce emissions to “net zero” at some distant date, an almost meaningless pledge. There is no plan to actually stabilize climate. Instead, there is dickering over potential payments to the most affected nations. Such illusory payments seem more immediate than long-term climate change, so they are dangled out front, like a carrot, as a bribe to continue business-as-usual.
3) Young people feel anxiety about climate change and their future. A survey of 10,000 16-to-25-year-olds in ten nations found that 60% were “very worried” or “extremely worried.” Two-thirds of them felt that governments are failing them, and, specifically, that governments are not acting according to science. They see growing wars, changing climate, suffering of innocent people, and governments that concoct only ineffectual responses.
4) Global temperature will decline a bit as the tropics goes into its La Nina phase, but we are now living in the +1.5°C world, averaged over the Nino cycle, and we are headed higher. An even more important implication is that climate sensitivity is not 3°C for doubled CO2, which has been IPCC’s best estimate. When aerosol effects are accounted for, observed global warming implies a climate sensitivity of 4-5°C for doubled CO2. This high climate sensitivity, combined with steady or declining aerosol cooling implies that global warming will accelerate more – unless the growth of greenhouse gas forcing declines rapidly.
5) A decade ago, IPCC concluded that we needed to follow a path close to RCP2.6, if we wanted to keep global warming under 2°C. But we have not reduced emissions growth at all; it is still almost half a watt per decade. The huge gap between reality and the 2°C scenario could be closed by drawing CO2 out of the air and sequestering it, but the annual cost of that has now reached $3.5-7 trillion.10 It will not happen. We are headed to global warming greater than 2°C.
6) Development of cheap renewable energies is useful, but not a panacea – it will not cause fossil fuels to go away any more than fossil fuels caused wood burning to go away. We are still burning as much wood and biomass as at any time in history.
