What if the transition to renewables fails? Last week we continued our multi-week review of the study by Hansen et al, Global Warming in the Pipeline, forecasting the course of climate change this century and added two other recent compendia of studies, both of which had concluded, ominously, that the…

Can we build out renewable energy fast enough to avoid some nasty tipping points? In my two previous posts, I looked at two aspects of the Hansen et al pre-print, Global Warming in the Pipeline, forecasting the course of climate change this century from paleoclimate record and atmospheric aerosols. I…

No one has solved the McPherson Paradox because it cannot be hacked. The only solution is doing something completely counterintuitive. In 1970, while I was busy moving into an artist’s loft in Noho, James Hansen was returning to Columbia University, on the upper East Side, from a six-month sabbatical in…

Cooking with firewood and domesticating plants and animals changed Earth’s climate Humans have biological and cultural inertia that keeps them from making quick changes that might upset gains from the past. That is entirely understandable and there is a genetic wisdom in that. Trouble is, genetic wisdom is garnered in…

The model proposed by Hansen reveals ten degrees of heating is already baked into Earth’s surface temperature, but has been masked by aerosol cooling James Hansen has always been a good climate scientist searching for an even better editor. Scientists, engineers, writers and poets all train differently and may even…

When you have two competing narratives, each hermetically sealed and intractable, about all you can do is live by your own best lights. In April 2019, when the Mueller Report dropped and PBS NewsHour/Frontline ran a one-hour special, I began calling Trump “President Cobblepot” because of the uncanny resemblance to…

Today, 90 percent of Earth’s animal biomass is in the eight billion people on the Earth and their cows, chickens, pigs, dogs, cats and goldfish. On December 1st, whale watchers near Maui spotted a female humpback they had not been hoping to see. The name given to her by British…

Biodiversity COP15 runs from December 7 to 19 in Montreal. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than…

We grab the tail of the evolutionary tiger at our peril. To me, the central questions that will have to be confronted — not so much by me as by my children and grandchildren — are whether and how they will escape early death and near-term human extinction from now-irrevocable…