William Brangham:
That’s right.
There’s a new study out from climate scientist Jim Hansen. He was one of the first scientists to ring this alarm bell about climate back in the 1980s. He has a new paper out, which is a bit of an outlier, but he has been vindicated very often in the past.
His paper says that warming is accelerating faster than we anticipated, that the goal of the Paris accords to hold warming below two degrees Celsius compared to industrial times, that that is virtually out of reach, and that some of these more serious climate tipping points might be unavoidable.
Whether you dismiss his paper or not, his concern is affirmed by the vast majority of scientists, that our use of coal and oil and gas is changing this climate to a dangerous and unpredictable way.
We talked earlier with Chris Field at Stanford Woods Institute. Here’s how he describes it.
Chris Field, Director, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment: The evidence is — for climate change and the human role in causing the warming that we have seen in recent decades is really overwhelmingly clear. There are no Democratic or Republican thermometers.
Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away. It just means we have a more serious problem to deal with by the time we finally get serious about addressing it.
