Storms of My Grandchildren The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity

by Hansen, James

• ISBN13: 9781608192007
• ISBN10: 1608192008
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-12-08
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Summary

An urgent and provocative call to action from the world's leading climate scientistspeaking out here for the first time with the full story of what we need to know about humanity's last chance to get off the path to a catastrophic global meltdown, and why we don't know the half of it.InStorms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansenthe nation's leading scientist on climate issuesspeaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: The planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although the threat of human-caused climate change is now widely recognized, politicians have failed to connect policy with the science, responding instead with ineffectual remedies dictated by special interests. Hansen shows why President Obama's solution, cap-and-trade, which Al Gore has signed on to, won't work; why we must phase out all coal, and why 350 ppm of carbon dioxide is a goal we must achieve if our children and grandchildren are to avoid global meltdown and the storms of the book's title. This urgent manifesto bucks conventional wisdom (including the Kyoto Protocol) and is sure to stir controversy, but Hansenwhose climate predictions have come to pass again and again, beginning in the 1980s when he first warned Congress about global warmingis the single most credible voice on the subject worldwide.Hansen paints a devastating but all-too-realistic picture of what will happen in the near future, mere years and decades from now, if we follow the course we're on. But he is also an optimist, showing that there is still time to do what we need to save the planet. Urgent, strong action is needed, and this book, released to coincide with the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009, will be key in setting the agenda going forward to create a groundswell, a tipping point, to save humanityand our grandchildrenfrom a dire fate more imminent than we had supposed.Learn more at www.stormsofmygrandchildren.com

Author Biography

Dr. James Hansen, perhaps best known for bringing global warming to the world’s attention in the 1980s when he first testified before Congress, is an adjunct professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and at Columbia’s Earth Institute, and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He has appeared on 60 Minutes, ABC News Tonight, Anderson Cooper, Charlie Rose; has been interviewed in the New York Times and profiled in the New Yorker; and has written for the Boston Globe, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and Scientific American. This is his first book.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
The Vice President's Climate Task Force	p. 1
The A-Team and the Secretary's Quandary	p. 17
A Visit to the White House	p. 28
Time Warp	p. 59
Dangerous Reticence: A Slippery Slope	p. 70
The Faustian Bargain: Humanity's Own Trap	p. 90
Is There Still Time? A Tribute to Charles David Keeling	p. 112
Target Carbon Dioxide: Where Should Humanity Aim?	p. 140
An Honest, Effective Path	p. 172
The Venus Syndrome	p. 223
Storms of My Grandchildren	p. 237
Afterword	p. 271
Acknowledgments	p. 278
Key Differences with Contrarians	p. 279
Global Climate Forcings and Radiative Feedbacks	p. 281
Selected Sources	p. 282
Index	p. 287
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