WWF award for NASA scientist who sounded climate alarm
HYPERLINK "http://environment.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329639221-121568,00.html" http://environment.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329639221-121568,00.html
James Randerson, science correspondent
Wednesday November 22, 2006
Guardian
A leading Nasa researcher who pioneered the case for tough action to combat climate change in the US has been awarded the WWF's top conservation award. James Hansen, whose testimony to the US senate on global warming is featured in Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, received the medal from the Duke of Edinburgh at a ceremony yesterday at St James's Palace in London.
"Dr Hansen was among the first to see the looming threat of climate change and to sound the alarm," said James Leape, WWF International's director general. "For more than two decades he has made huge contributions to scientific understanding of climate change and to raising awareness among decision makers and the public."
Accepting the award, which includes a gold medal and a Rolex watch, Prof Hansen said: "The rude scientific awakening to the threat of climate change has been sudden and profound. Only in recent years has the extent and immediacy of the threat become clear."
He said this had resulted in a big gap between the understanding of climate scientists and that of the public and policy makers. Dr Hansen is director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
"I am concerned about the burden that we will leave for our children and grandchildren, if we do not take a leadership role in addressing global warming," he went on.
Apart from the moral burden to act, he speculated that communities affected would seek compensation from polluting nations. "Will not people driven from their land seek reparation from countries most responsible? Science does not leave the opportunity for us to claim ignorance of the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions."
He also criticised adverts funded partly by ExxonMobil designed apparently to promote CO2. The tag line "They call it pollution, we call it life" would "bamboozle" the public, he said. "It is time to stop patronising that company," he added.
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INTERVIEW - World Has Under Decade to Act on Climate Crisis
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LONDON - The world has less than a decade to take decisive action in the battle to beat global warming or risk irreversible change that will tip the planet towards catastrophe, a leading US climate scientist said on Tuesday.
And the United States, the world' biggest polluter but major climate laggard, has a vital role to play in leading that fight, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Reuters on a visit to London.
"The biggest problem is that the United States is not taking an active leadership role -- quite the reverse," he said.
"We have to be on a fundamentally different path within a decade," said the man who earlier this year caused an outcry when he revealed that scientific warnings on the climate crisis were being rewritten by White House officials.
He said reliance on -- and growing use of -- fossil fuels like coal both in the United States and in boom economy China had to be stopped and reversed to avoid the planet's climate tipping into catastrophe with floods, droughts and famines.
Scientists say that unless action is taken to stop emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels for power and transport, global temperatures will rise by between two and six degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
But the United States under President George W. Bush has argued vehemently that such actions would cripple its economy and in 2001 turned its back on the Kyoto Protocol -- the only global pact on curbing carbon emissions.
However, a report last month by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said that while actions now to curb carbon emissions would cost one percent of world economic output, delay could push the price up to 20 percent.
"We need to be at 25 percent less CO2 emissions by mid-century," Hansen said. "If we begin now it can be much less painful and have possible economic, health and developmental gains."
"We need gradual, progressive change starting now not abrupt, drastic changes in a decade or so," he added.
Hansen was in London to receive the Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Medal, awarded annually by environmental group WWF for outstanding services to the environment.
He said there were signs of movement in the United States, particularly at state level, and rumours of imminent changes from the Bush administration. But so far these were just rumours.
With Bush having only two more years in office and with his Republican Party having lost control of both US houses of parliament in a voter rejection of the war in Iraq, there has been speculation Bush might make some move on the environment.
"The great danger is that they will take some minimal steps that give the appearance of doing good but in fact do very little or even some damage because they fool people into relaxing," Hansen said. "Cosmetic acts are no solution."
"On the other hand it would be good for Bush's legacy if he did take constructive action on the environment," he added.
Story by Jeremy Lovell
Story Date: 22/11/2006