{"id":65709,"date":"2023-08-31T04:45:57","date_gmt":"2023-08-31T09:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65709"},"modified":"2023-08-31T04:45:57","modified_gmt":"2023-08-31T09:45:57","slug":"we-are-damned-fools-scientist-who-sounded-climate-alarm-in-80s-warns-of-worse-to-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65709","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We are damned fools\u2019: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018We are damned fools\u2019: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come<\/a><\/h3>\n

James Hansen, who testified to Congress on global heating in 1988, says world is approaching a \u2018new climate frontier\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because \u201cwe are damned fools\u201d for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is cited as the first high-profile revelation of global heating, warned in a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0with two other scientists that the world was moving towards a \u201cnew climate frontier\u201d with temperatures higher than at any point over the past million years, bringing impacts such as stronger storms, heatwaves and droughts.<\/p>\n

The world has\u00a0already<\/a>\u00a0warmed by about 1.2C since mass industrialization, causing a 20% chance of having the sort of extreme summer temperatures currently seen in many parts of the northern hemisphere, up from a 1% chance 50 years ago, Hansen said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts,\u201d Hansen, who is 82, told the Guardian. \u201cThese superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality \u2013 we knew it was coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hansen was a Nasa climate scientist when he\u00a0warned<\/a>\u00a0lawmakers of growing global heating and has\u00a0since taken part in protests<\/a>\u00a0alongside activists to decry the lack of action to reduce planet-heating emissions in the decades since.<\/p>\n

He said the record heatwaves that have roiled the\u00a0US<\/a>,\u00a0Europe<\/a>,\u00a0China<\/a>\u00a0and elsewhere in recent weeks have heightened \u201ca sense of disappointment that we scientists did not communicate more clearly and that we did not elect leaders capable of a more intelligent response\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018We are damned fools\u2019: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come James Hansen, who testified to Congress on global heating in 1988, says world is approaching a \u2018new climate frontier\u2019 The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[140,141,386,6955,929,6917],"class_list":["post-65709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate","tag-climate-change","tag-greenhouse-gases","tag-james-hansen","tag-nasa","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65710,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65709\/revisions\/65710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}