Here at the Tällberg Forum, both daylight and heady discussion about sustainability and global understanding seem to go on around the clock, but the show-stealer so far was the panel on climate change. “Rogue” NASA scientist James Hansen lead the panel off with a grim pronouncement, saying that there looms a “huge gap” between what is understood (by scientists) about global warming and what is known by the public. In short, Hansen says, the climate crisis is a far more dire and present danger than most of us like to think. “We are closer to a level of dangerous, human-made interference with the climate than we realize. … We are about to leave the Holocene” Hansen is particularly concerned about the timeframe within which we must act. There is increasing evidence that we are rapidly approaching a series of climate tipping points, where feedback loops in the environment (the march of forests pole-wards and melting glaciers and sea ice, meaning the Earth’s darkening surface retains more of the sun’s heat; melting tundra releasing increasing amounts of methane as it thaws; etc.) began to contribute to a galloping greenhouse effect brought on by our actions. (For a particularly elegant discussion of… (more)
(Posted by Alex Steffen in Climate Change at 3:16 AM)
