On this day, 15 years ago, the now defunct newspaper the Independent, ran a front page interview with famed climate scientist James Hansen.
This came with climate change already high on the agenda – the previous year had seen the first “Camp for Climate Action” and the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. New Conservative Party leader David Cameron had decided environmentalism was a leading way to detoxify the Tory brand, and in April 2006 had travelled to the Arctic to ‘hug a huskie’. More generally, humanity was going through its second big “something must be done” moment on climate (and its third on environmental matters more broadly – see “issue attention cycles” in the concepts page of this site).
In the interview Hansen, famous for his efforts to raise public awareness and concern, predating his iconic June 23 1988 testimony in front of a Senate committee (which we will return to later) said
““If we go another 10 years, by 2015, at the current rate of growth of Co2 emissions, which is about 2 per cent per year, the emissions in 2015 will be 35 per cent larger than they were in 2000. But if we want to get on a scenario that keeps global temperature in the range that it’s been in for the last million years we would need to decrease the emissions by something of the order of 25 per cent by the middle of the century and by something like 75 per cent by the end of the century“
Hansen is usually out in front on these matters. Events have overtaken him on this one, and there is now scientific consensus around much much steeper cuts in emissions. There is an alleged political consensus around “zero carbon” by 2050.
So, an ignored warning from the past. So what? This matters because there will still be people who tell you ‘”we’ve only just become aware of the problem, we need to give technology time to work”.
What happened next? We kept burning the fossil fuels – (we’ve burnt more between 1991 and 2019 than we did from 1751 to 1990). Hansen wrote a book (see further reading), and, well, Groundhog Day has kept on coming around again…
References
Connor, J. (2007) ‘If we fail to act, we will end up with a different planet’. The Independent, 01 January, p.1
Further reading
Hansen, J. (2009) The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. Bloomsbury Press
Millman, O. (2018) Ex-Nasa scientist: 30 years on, world is failing ‘miserably’ to address climate change. The Guardian, 19 June.