One of modern climate science’s pioneers is warning that the world isn’t just steadily warming but is dangerously accelerating, according to a study that some other scientists call a bit overheated.
The work from former NASA top scientist James Hansen, who since leaving the space agency has become a prominent protester against the use of fossil fuels, which cause climate change, illustrates a recently surfaced division among scientists about whether global warming has kicked into a new and even more dangerous gear.
Hansen, who alerted much of the United States to the harms of climate change in dramatic congressional testimony in 1988, said Thursday that since 2010, the rate of warming has jumped by 50 percent. Hansen argues that since 2010 there is more sun energy in the atmosphere, and less of the particles that can reflect it back into space thanks to efforts to cut pollution. The loss of those particles means there’s less of the cooling effect that they can have.
Hansen said a key calculation used in figuring out how much the world will warm in response to carbon pollution shows much faster warming than the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates. He called the international goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times “deader than a doornail” and said a less stringent goal of 2 degrees Celsius is on its deathbed. That matters because increases in average global temperatures lead to more frequent and intense extreme weather events.
“The next few years will show that we indeed do have an acceleration in the global warming rate,” Hansen said in a press briefing. “And it’s based on simple good physics.”
“The planet is now out of (energy) balance by an incredible amount, more than it ever has been,” said Hansen, who has been nicknamed the Godfather of Global Warming.
Several climate scientists contacted by The Associated Press expressed skepticism about Hansen’s study, tinged with respect for his long-term work.
Hansen’s study in Thursday’s journal Oxford Open Climate Change is broad-ranging “but has little by way of analytical depth or consistency checks when making claims quite far outside the norm,” said Robin Lamboll, a climate scientist at the Imperial College of London. “It seems primarily aimed at convincing policymakers rather than scientists.”
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who insisted that since 1990 warming is steadily increasing but not accelerated, posted a rebuttal to Hansen’s claims and said climate change right now is bad enough and there’s no need to overstate the case. Mann said “it has always been risky to ignore (Hansen’s) warnings and admonitions” but when claims are made so out of the mainstream the standard for evidence is high, and he said Hansen hasn’t met them.
Yet a check of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data lends support to Hansen’s modeling.
Hansen’s study said from 1970 to 2010, the world warmed at a rate of 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade, but projected that would increase to a rate of at least 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade after 2010. NOAA data shows that 0.27 degrees is the rate since September 2010.
