Controversial Paper of James Hansen Now Open For Comment

James Hansen, a leading climate change activist and scientist, as well as world leaders, is warning everyone that it would be very risky if the temperature of the Earth rises 2 degrees Celsius. In the summit, world leaders aim to agree on a legal bind and universal agreement that limits greenhouse gas emissions that are responsible for today’s global warming.

“Humanity is rapidly extracting and burning fossil fuels without full understanding of the consequences”, he said in a statement. “Current assessments place emphasis on practical effects such as increasing extremes of heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall, floods, and encroaching seas”.

They examine events late in the last interglacial period warmer than today.

A leading scientist on climate has said that sea levels may rise by around ten feet during the next fifty years because of increasingly unsafe global warming. It is called Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5e in studies of ocean sediment cores, the Eemian period in European climate studies, and sometimes Sangamonian in American literature.

Furthermore, the study hypothesizes that rapid sea level rise resulting from melting of ice in Antarctica and Greenland, could lead to a number of climate change.

The new paper takes, as one of its starting points, evidence regarding accelerating ice loss from parts of the planet’s ice sheets, especially West Antarctica. By contrast, Hansen and colleagues note, the IPCC assumed more of a linear process, suggesting only about 1 meter of sea-level rise, at most, by 2100. In other words, a nonlinear process could be at work, triggering major sea-level rise in a time frame of 50 to 200 years.

Now Hansen – who retired in 2013 from his NASA post and is now an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute – is publishing what he says may be his most important paper.

Despite these warnings, global carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase as fossil fuels remain the primary energy source.

They predict that glaciers in the Antarctic and Greenland may melt ten times faster than predicted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which said that sea levels will only rise by a meter in this century.

Hansen and his co-authors conclude, “The economic and social cost of losing functionality of all coastal cities is practically incalculable”.