Climate Scientist James Hansen: Global Heating is Accelerating.

In a new research paper, posted last week, Dr. Hansen, who warned Congress about anthropogenic global warming in 1988, is taking on the mighty Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the first and last word on climate science. Hansen points out how the IPCC process tends to understate climate risk, including instances where they’ve missed the boat, allowing a “wait and see” attitude to prevail.

Hansen shows that Anthropogenic Global Warming (which The Guardian aptly calls “Global Heating“) is ACCELERATING.

That’s a new and dire observation. Though it was widely expected, given what we know about climate forcing feedbacks, including loss of ice albedo and increased methane bubbling up from arctic permafrost and released by unregulated fossil fuel drilling — especially fracking.

Until now, climate models have projected an essentially linear response to rising greenhouse gas levels. Hansen shows that in the past two decades global heating has started moving faster. Partly because we’re dumping more GHGs into the atmosphere, but perhaps even more alarmingly, because Earth’s climate system is measurably starting to feed back. That’s very bad news, and people whose livelihoods depend on pretending there’s a climate “solution” or that we can keep burning fossil fuels will not sit still for that.

He’s also saying that it’s still possible to stop that trend and even to reverse AGW. Even while admitting that Direct Air Capture and similar technologies cannot be scaled.

Hansen isn’t an expert on policy and economics, but he’s got the big picture. A carbon tax that can be globally harmonized is indeed still necessary. Hansen urges returning revenue through lump sum rebates, a policy choice that would forgo the vast benefits of reducing other burdensome taxes and replacing them with pollution taxes. Rep. John Larson, who may soon chair the House Ways & Means Committee, proposed exactly that in 2009.