According to Dr. Zeke Hausfather, one of the world's leading climate scientists, based on the data we have so far and the analysis of that data by some 667 scientists evaluating global temperatures through some 14 different forecast models, not only is this year's El Niño likely to be the strongest ever recorded, it may even be the strongest by a truly "mind-blowing margins."
After all the scientists submit their models' estimates for what may happen during this year's El Niño event, the "multi-model" median stands at 3.6C, which is roughly 0.8C hotter than the prior world record of 2.75C. Previously, the largest jump up was only 0.5C. Thus, the models are, collectively, predicting weather outside of the bounds of anything previously ever observed with global temperatures. Which means that we are headed into entirely unknown territory as a planet, that even the scientists who have been watching the global temperature trends worsening for years and decade, have never seen in their lives.
What Dr. Hausfather finds remarkable is not just the magnitude of the projected heat level but also the trajectory of how quickly it is developing. What scientists are seeing in how 2026 global temperatures are progressing, as we enter the northern hemisphere's summer months, is that there is an explosive El Niño onset happening. As unusual as the present trajectory is towards El Niño intensity, in fact the 14 different models have unusually strong model prediction agreement. Given this, the models yield a ~91% chance of a record peak in the El Niño that make it highly likely to be the strongest El Niño ever observed.
This is all still a prediction but the patterns reported by the model are extremely disturbing and the signature of a climate pattern that is not good for humanity or the planet. We definitely need to be more organized around marshalling our response and preparing for a world with record high heat that impacts not just air temperature but also ocean warming. We can't respond fast enough to this threat and we are clearly going to miss the world's ambition to reduce emissions by 50% by 2030. But, even with our abject failure to meet our 2030 goals, the good news is that we might be able to meet our 2050 goals, if we can continue our current commercialization progress for next-generation nuclear, that can compete and win against fossil fuels.
For many, celebrating July 4th brings out patriotic sentiments, a sense of marvel at our country's founding, its multi-century endurance and appreciation for the clear articulation of rights made by our founders as to the underlying and undeniably humanist principals of our democracy.
Among those in the nuclear industry, we are also celebrating the successful achievements of several innovative nascent criticality events among other sector advancements, marking the impending arrival of a new generation of advanced reactor designs, which some have taken to calling the "Golden Era of Nuclear Power."
These technical achievements are truly inspiring but the moment is overlaid by record-breaking heat conditions, reminding us of the frightening reality that climate change is here. It is already dishing out scorching heat, strained energy systems, devasted agricultural and forest areas, declining wildlife, hotter and more acidic oceans, extreme weather events and increasingly taking lives and/or destroying livelihoods.
For those suffering from extreme heat this July 4th weekend, as millions in Europe and the eastern coast of the U.S. currently are, there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that if you can get somewhere where there is air conditioning, you won't die from the 100+ ∘ F heat. Probably you'll feel quite comfortable, so long as your power stays on and your air-conditioner continues to work—even though the energy powering your air-conditioner (with a few exceptions) is simultaneously making the planet hotter.
The bad news is that humans appreciate mechanical air-conditioners that cool a room or a building a lot more than they appreciate nature's most perfectly evolved biologic form of air conditioner: trees and forests. It turns out, if we want better protection from the extreme heat that our emissions are causing, we need to protect forests from senseless destruction. Their enormous and yet under-appreciated capabilities for regulating temperature, moisture, air pressure and wind have developed over millions of years and they use exactly the same physics to cool the earth as your A/C works, though on a vastly different scale and with other added benefits.
Tragically, we have continued to devalue the importance of trees and forests—even many environmentalists see them just as a form of carbon storage—and so we have been destroying them at record levels. This is extremely shortsighted but the result of the fact that so few actually understand how complex and critical the role forests play, especially in a climate stressed world. If forests had had a founder like Elon Musk to make the global pitch to investors on how incredible tree technology really is and demand trillions of dollars in valuation for their services keeping earth inhabitable, the story might be different.
We don't. For now, the closest we have is Dr. Anastassia Makarieva of the non-profit, the Biotic Pump Greening Group, which is making the scientific, academic and social media case to help people understand how and why forests are such an important part of ensuring the livability of our planet. Reading Dr. Makarieva's substack, Biotic Pump & Biotic Regulation, will blow your mind with the descriptions of the physics involved in the mechanisms by which forests control wind, make rain, and cool the earth. But, in honor of the July 4th holidays, I'll save you hours of reading by condensing some of Dr. Makarieva's key points and explain why you should think of forests as planet Earth's continent-scale air-conditioners and rain-makers. Once you understand that, it become easy to understand that the fewer we have left, the hotter and drier it will get.
Dr. Makarieva has made the case that forests act as earth's biotic pump (which she describes as working a lot like a steam engine), helping to bring in warm air containing moisture that was evaporated from over the seas and help to wring the moisture out by causing clouds to form and stimulating pressure changes to allow rain to fall down while ejecting the heat out into the upper atmosphere, where the pressure differential causes the winds that push cold air out over the ocean again, where it sinks, warms, loads up on water and repeats the cycle again. Her concept of this atmospheric pumping action explains the essential physics underlying the processes that are actively controlled by the forests through transpiration, evaporation, condensation and other mechanisms, which run on the same core physics and principles — leveraging the physics of phase changes of water — to operate a form of planetary air-conditioning — at a wildly enormous scale.
An air conditioner is a form of reverse heat pump: refrigerant evaporates inside the unit, absorbing heat from room air (that's the cooling), then a compressor forces it to condense outside, dumping that heat outdoors. As a side effect, room air passing over the cold evaporator coil drops below its dew point, so water vapor condenses out and drains away — the air comes out both cooler and drier, which is why AC feels so much more comfortable than the same temperature at high humidity: dry air lets your sweat evaporate and carry heat away from your skin.
A forest does something structurally similar but runs as an open, self-powered loop rather than a closed mechanical one. Transpiration is the evaporator side: trees pump enormous volumes of water from soil to leaf and release it as vapor, and that phase change for the water absorbs latent heat right at the leaf/canopy surface — which is the literal, physical reason it's cooler under a tree, which is an evaporative-cooling effect (such as what an old-fashioned swamp cooler uses). The condenser side happens later and higher up: as that warm moist air rises and cools, the vapor condenses into clouds and rain, releasing the latent heat at altitude, where it's far easier for the planet to radiate it away to space.
In contrast, something Dr. Makarieva describes as the "Super Greenhouse Effect," explains why heat trapped near a humid surface can stop escaping altogether, thus generating truly staggering heat that the body cannot reject through sweat, and thus can often be fatal, such as the prolonged heat waves we are seeing now. Which is one of the many not well valued services provided by forests, which do the hard work of getting heat rising up and out into the upper atmosphere via cloud condensation, which explains why some regions are better protected from long, lingering heat waves and heat-related deaths than others.
Here's the elegant and magical part: what if a hightech founder told you that their technology required zero electricity to work and just pure solar energy? Would that make you want to invest? What if you could buy an air-conditioner whose refrigerant could keep circulating without needing any power? In Makarieva's biotic pump, condensation itself does that job. When water vapor condenses aloft, it removes molecules from the gas phase back to liquid, which falls as rain and causes local air pressure to quickly drop (a change we've all felt but didn't understand). That pressure drop is what then sucks in more moist and dense air horizontally from the ocean, which we experience as wind coming in from the ocean. This is what keeps the whole cycle running and keeps carrying moisture from the ocean inland. Forests don't need a compressor or electricity because the condensation event at large scale is the compressor — it's a self-sustaining engine powered by sunlight (as a source of heat), physics which makes warm air less dense, thus lighter, gravity (which makes cold dense air sink) and biology (in the form of healthy, natural and diverse forests, which have evolved a bag of tricks that we still barely understand but which can add extra transpiration moisture, spores or other particles into the air to juice the pressure and moisture content that ensures that rain happens overhead.
Forests don't just provide cool shade: they manage temperature like an airconditioner, but they also manage humidity and rain. An AC's whole comfort payoff comes from pulling heat out of a room, producing a little waste moisture in the process. A forest does the opposite at landscape scale: by keeping transpiration high, it keeps atmospheric moisture concentrated enough to fuel that condensation engine, which is precisely what lets it "trigger rain at the right time, in the right place, in the right quantity" (as Dr. Makarieva puts it) rather than just letting incoming moist wind pass over dry land with nothing to condense it. An AC discards the moisture it removes as waste. A forest's whole function is to control the moisture that keeps it alive and well, while maintaining enough moisture in the air that condensation and pressure differentials can keep the pump running.
Solving climate change is not a simple process. To stop increasing the forced warming of the atmospher, we must urgently transition away from carbon-emitting energy sources (both fossil fuels and biofuels), which is why the world is now working towards tripling or quadrupling nuclear power. But, because we already have too many large molecules in the atmosphere, we should try to prevent atmospheric warming where possible, by increasing global albedo (expanding areas that reflect solar photons back into space rather than allowing them to be absorbed (such as white roofs, grass, trees, forests and snowcover). Additionally, we must begin to remove the excess carbon and methane from the atmosphere and ocean, through direct air capture, carbon dioxide removal, and other methods that will lead to reduce GHGs that serve as atmospheric warming elements. That work must also be done by energy sources that don't emit carbon, which is another reason to support the expansion of nuclear power.
Which is why so many of us are celebrating the achievements of the last year in nuclear, which have brought the emerging generation of Gen IV nuclear designs to a new level of readiness. But between now and when we have seen substantial progress towards the above goals, we are in for increasing levels of heat and discomfort. We must work collaboratively to protect what's left of the earth's natural forests — now down to just about 8% of available land — and even begin to regenerate them as the planet's only source of live-saving natural air-conditioning. Without these forests, we'll experience the worst effects of the heating that our emissions have caused as if we were standing out in the field on a hot, sunny day without the protection of the shade of a tree.
By Valerie Gardner, Founder and Managing Partner of Nucleation Capital and life-long tree hugger.
Columbia University, Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions,"Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?, published in Taylor & Francis, February 3, 2025 by James E. Hansen, Pushker Kharecha, Makiko Sato, George Tselioudis, Joseph Kelly, Susanne E. Bauer, Reto Ruedy, Eunbi Jeong, Qinjian Jin, Eric Rignot, Isabella Velicogna, Mark R. Schoeberl, Karina von Schuckmann, Joshua Amponsem, Junji Cao, Anton Keskinen, Jing Li, and Anni Pokela
Biotic Pump Greening Group, explaining the technological marvels that are trees and working to restore degraded forests to make sure that they and their functionality is repaired.
Compounding the loss of old-growth tropical forests in 2024 (estimated to have covered an area as large as Ireland) and the release of their carbon stores, is the loss of the moisture and climate systems maintained by those forest ecosystems, which previously provided localized cooling effects, produced cloud cover and contributed to the atmospheric moisture necessary for rain. These had also helped to brighten the earth, thereby reflecting more of the sunlight that otherwise would cause heating. This moisture and water cycle activity gets destroyed along with the trees, plants and animal life. This climatic loss to broad areas may be having more of a negative feedback effective on the planet's overall warming than has previously been recognized.
Global Surface Temperature Change (published 2/3/25)
This news add yet more data to the alarming report published in February by Dr. James Hansen, Dr. Pushker Kharecha and a team of sixteen other climate scientists plainly titled "Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed? In it, Dr. Hansen's team explains that global temperatures have leaped up more than a half degree (0.7°F or 0.4°C) over the last 2 years, with a total average temperature rise of +1.6°C relative to the temperature at the beginning of last century (the 1880-1920 average). This reflects a temperature rise over the +1.5°C (or 2.7°F) level that we set as our goal for maximum increase. As of the last year, we've already exceeded that level.
These increases have, according to Hansen, baffled Earth scientists, as the increase's magnitude was literally off the charts. There were multiple explanations presented as to what could have caused such a big increase. Declining aerosol pollution was seen as a key contributor, by reducing nuclei that aided cloud formation and thus reflection of sunlight, thereby effectively darkening earth and allowing more heat to be absorbed. These are very troubling and portentious changes that may, in fact, show that feedback effects are already accelerating the heating impacts of our CO2 emissions, such that they no longer follow a direct relationship.
Dr. Hansen's report received considerable criticism both because it departed scientifically from the mainstream's more conservative consensus of a lower rate of warming and climate "sensitivity," as determined by the IPCC, and because it called for "a complement to the IPCC approach" to "avoid handing young people a dire situation that is out of their control." In a response to some of that criticism, Drs. Hansen and Karecha decried the ad hoc opinions, ad hominem attacks and sense that the media has gravitated towards reporting the opinions of just a small handful of scientists, rather than covering the total community and range of analyses, including their own.
Dr. Anatassia Makarieva, an atmospheric physicist, responded to this debate with a substack post titled "On the scientific essense of Dr. James Hansen's recent appeal." In it she agreed with Drs. Hansen and Karecha that many scientists were understating the degree of climate forcing but also shared her sense that many of the climate models in use, including Dr. Hansen's, erroneously ignored the major role of the biosphere in the climate destabilization that we are now experiencing. Which may, she argued, partially explain why none of the models predicted the heat anomaly of the 2023 - 2024 time period. Dr. Makarieva writes:
Why is this [i.e. accurate climate models] so important? Unless external causes of this recent temperature anomaly are identified, we may be dealing with a self-reinforcing process — for example, of reduced cloud cover causing more warming, this warming causing even less clouds and so forth until something truly ugly happens to our planet. But, if so, such a process could be started by many factors and does not necessarily need CO2 to kick off. For example, deforestation-induced reduction of evapotranspiration in the Amazon is associated with extreme heat events. This alone could trigger the warming that could then self-amplify via cloud (or some other) feedbacks.
Whether or not we have permanent self-reinforcing amplification happening with the climate now is being debated, partially thanks to new voices like Dr. Makarieva's, entering the field. What is clear, however, is that the fewer clouds, aerosols, snow cover, sea ice and also more invisible sources of water vapor (such produced by tropical forests and other natural ecosystems) the darker the earth is and the more sunlight gets through and heats the ground, the oceans and the air. This heating further impacts existing vegetation, ice sheets, permafrost and bodies of water negatively, which then also contribute more CO2, more fires, and further darkening of earth's surface. Earth's climate has been in a state of equilibrium for eons. Given what is happening with the climate now, it appears that it is leaving that state of equilibrium.
According to some reports, the Earth has "dimmed" by 0.5% in the past 25 years. We've known this and scientists have been able to track decreases in sea ice at the poles, a major factor in global warming. We're now seeing the climate effects of reductions in aerosols (due to the shipping industry trying to clean up their act and emit less aerosols), and we're seeing reduced cloud cover. The bottom line is that even just looking at cloud feedbacks, the more the climate warms, the fewer the clouds. The fewer the clouds, the more the planet warms. This feedback loop is enough to take us into very dangerous territory. Which is yet another reason why we want to prevent the loss of tropical forests, not just because of the CO2 impacts but because of the cloud and water vapor impacts. This feedback loop could explain why the rate of heating of the planet has increased beyond what was expected, even by scientists like Zeke Hausfather and James Hansen.
Dr. Hansen continues to urge immediate action and has proposed that "a multitude of actions are required within less than a decade to reduce and even reverse Earth’s energy imbalance for the sake of minimizing the enormous ongoing geoengineering of the planet; specifically, we will need to cool the planet to avoid consequences for young people that all people would find unconscionable."
Columbia University, Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions,"Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?, published in Taylor & Francis, February 3, 2025 by James E. Hansen, Pushker Kharecha, Makiko Sato, George Tselioudis, Joseph Kelly, Susanne E. Bauer, Reto Ruedy, Eunbi Jeong, Qinjian Jin, Eric Rignot, Isabella Velicogna, Mark R. Schoeberl, Karina von Schuckmann, Joshua Amponsem, Junji Cao, Anton Keskinen, Jing Li, and Anni Pokela
Global temperature leaped more than 0.4°C (0.7°F) during the past two years, the 12-month average peaking in August 2024 at +1.6°C relative to the temperature at the beginning of last century (the 1880-1920 average). Polar climate change has the greatest long-term effect on humanity, with impacts accelerated by the jump in global temperature. We find that polar ice melt and freshwater injection onto the North Atlantic Ocean exceed prior estimates and, because of accelerated global warming, the melt will increase. As a result, shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is likely within the next 20-30 years, unless actions are taken to reduce global warming – in contradiction to conclusions of IPCC. If AMOC is allowed to shut down, it will lock in major problems including sea level rise of several meters – thus, we describe AMOC shutdown as the “point of no return.”
Dr. James Hansen's year-end update contains an admonishment right in the title, "A Miracle Will Occur" Is Not Sensible Climate Policy." Those who have followed his work and his typically well-tempered writing will recognize this as a very strong indictment of what we've not done to date to address climate change. This is, for this mild-mannered scientist, the equivalent of "Hey Guys, Get your S _ _ T together!"
Dr. Hansen proceeds to call "bunk" on the assertions from both the COP 28 Chairman and the UN Secretary General who imply that the goal of keeping temperature rise to below 1.5°C is still feasible. According to Dr. Hansen, the already banked warming will take us beyond 2.0°C "if policy is limited to emission reductions and plausible CO2 removal." In other words, he makes it clear that this is now merely wishful thinking and does not reflect a realistic understanding of the way that emissions released create future warming, which he calls "Global Warming in the Pipeline"and describes in the linked paper.
The only realistic approach is to take true climate analysis that is informed by knowledge of the warming "forcing" effects and to use that to drive decisions about policy options. If we can possibly use the next several years to define and commence more effective policies and courses of action, then there is a modicum of a chance that we can still save the future for our young people. If this isn't a bomb of an alarm, it would be hard to say what else would be, especially because the IPCC has made it very clear that major ecosystems, starting with coral reefs and then, therefore, all marine life, will be threatened with substantial (90%) collapse by 1.5°C and with 100% by 2°C.
Unfortunately, climate science is complicated and most people don't have a good understanding of the "human-made forcings that are driving Earth's climate away from the relatively stable climate of the Holocene (approximately the past 10,000 years.)" Even if they could grasp the implications about climate science from the graphs that Dr. Hansen and his team provide, very few are even reading Hansen's work. These graphs are very scary but clearly they are not being used as the basis for policy discussions by either politicians, government agencies (like the EPA), or by leading environmental groups and that is likely the primary reason why many people are still arguing about renewables versus nuclear power, thinking they have a certain luxury of time, rather than saying "Renewables and nuclear, YES!"
For his part, Dr. Hansen doesn't make it as easy as he could for those with less expertise in climate science. He spends a lot of effort discussing two major climate forcings: greenhouse gases (GHGs) and aerosols (fine airborne particles), which in fact have opposing forcings. But then goes into detail on many other related forcings. This level of detail may provide a more scientifically accurate picture of what is going on but it makes for much sparser readership. Clearly, there are many different kinds of feedback loops, including how the aerosols impact cloud formation, albedo effects and also the way the ocean absorbs a considerable amount of the warming that is happening to our climate. It's important that he understands these effects but it takes considerable sifting work to get to the point that what it all adds up to is that there is much more warming that has occurred than what we are actually now experiencing, so in fact, the effect of warming will be accelerate and we're now seeing this.
Even for those of us who finding climate science fascinating, this 14-page paper is incredibly dense and gets relatively badly bogged down with details on things like cloud forcings, albedo changes, reviewing differences between expected temperatures and real world measurements, catching up with a 40-year old mystery having to do with the last glacial maximum and describing the impacts of an "experiment" that occurred when the International Maritime Organization limited sulfur content in ship fuel and the variability introduced by El Nino and La Nina events. The bottom line of quite extensive discussion that few will wade through, is that global warming is now accelerating. This is very important but definitely buried. The key graphic of the whole paper depicts this acceleration.
On page 7, we finally get to the implications of global warming acceleration. As shown in the above graph, were the warming happening at a steady rate, we'd be on the green dotted line. Instead, we are veering off into the yellow zone of accelerated warming, which means that we'll "exceed the 1.5°C mark within the next few months and reach a level far above 1.5C by May 2024."
Hansen, while recognizing that there could be some up and down based upon El Nino and La Nina effects, believes that the baked in energy imbalance already "in the pipeline" means that it does not serve anybody's interests to "wait a decade to declare that the 1.5°C limit has been breached." In summary, Hansen argues that, "unless purposeful actions are taken to reduce our present extraordinary planetary energy imbalance," the 2°C global warming limit will also be breached.
By its very nature of having a delayed, baked-in response, human-made climate change makes this an intergenerational issue. What we have done in the past is already having consequences but what we do today and going forward will mostly impact the next generation for better or worse.
To his credit, Hansen dives yet again into Climate Policy, unlike most other scientists. This has been long been a huge source of frustration for him and you can almost see him stomping on his own hat, in his anger and impatience with the political processes that have thwarted action. First he reviews just what makes solving cilmate extra hard, starting with the fact that the principal source of GHGs is fossil fuels, which are in his words "extremely beneficial to humanity." They have raised starndards of living worldwide and still provide 80% of the world's energy. "Fossil fuels are readily available, so the world will not give up their benefits without equal or better alternatives."Because of this conundrum, we are near a point of no return, where extreme consequences can spiral out of humanity's control.
Dr. Hansen has been a first-hand witness to humanity's failure to act over the last 35 years or so and his exasperation with that and his desperation to communicate to those in power about our increasingly limited options is abundantly clear. He's been advising governments around the world on possible approaches with little of the urgent response that is warranted. He delves into some of these details but then finally hones on in the three actions that are required to successfully address climate and achieve the bright future we desire for our children.
The first is a near-global carbon tax or fee. It is the sine qua non required to address the "tragedy of the commons" problem" wherein fossil fuels waste products can be dumpted in the atmosphere for free. There can be a range of approaches, yet something that penalizes those dumping GHGs is required to be enacted globally. A corollary to a carbon fee is a "clean energy portfolio standard," with government policies that are far more supportive of nuclear power.
The second major policy requirement, is the need for the West to cooperate with and support the clean energy needs of emerging and developing nations. There are economic imbalances with developed nations having caused the past emissions but emerging nations increasingly being the driver of future emissions:
The clear need is to replace the world’s huge fossil fuel energy system with clean energies,
which likely would include a combination of “renewables” and nuclear power. Even if the
renewables provide most of the energy, engineering and economic analyses indicate that
global nuclear power probably needs to increase by a factor of 2-4 to provide baseload power
to complement intermittent renewable energy, especially given growing demands of China,
India and other emerging economies. The scale of China’s energy needs makes it feasible to drive down the costs of renewables and nuclear power below the cost of fossil fuels.
Lastly, Dr. Hansen proposes that "a multitude of actions are required within less than a decade to reduce and even reverse Earth’s energy imbalance for the sake of minimizing the enormous ongoing geoengineering of the planet; specifically, we will need to cool the planet to avoid consequences for young people that all people would find unconscionable."
Those who receive Dr. James Hansen's occasional newsletter from his Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions team, will have seen some dire reports before. Still, nothing we have seen is quite as unimaginable or alarming as learning that global warming is happening at the equivalent of 750,000 exploding Hiroshima atomic bombs in our atmosphere per day, every day. From burning fossil fuels. That's a lot of warming . . . !
No one likes to think about nuclear bombs. Their very bad reputation already negatively impacts how people think about nuclear energy (even though bombs are designed to explode and nuclear energy is designed so it can't explode). But in this case, Hansen's comparison really helps. Not just as to the scale of the warming problem but as to level of threat.
Fig. 1: 12-month running-mean of Earth’s energy imbalance, based on CERES satellite data for EEI change normalized to 0.71 W/m2 mean for July 2005 – June 2015 based on in situ data.
In today's newsletter, Earth's Energy Imbalance and Climate Response Time, Hansen and team review findings recently detailed in a newly issued report called Global Warming in the Pipeline. From this report we learn that there is a lot more solar energy being absorbed by our planet than is being lost through heat radiation out into space. As they explain, the heat budget of our planet is badly out of wack. There is far more energy coming into our atmosphere than going out. As though we have put an "extra blanket" on the planet, our emissions trap heat and are causing excess warming. Dr. Hansen frames this massive experiment as “human-made geoengineering of Earth’s climate.” He writes:
Earth's Energy Imbalance (EEI) varies from year-to-year (Fig. 1), largely because global cloud amount varies with weather and ocean dynamics, but averaged over several years, EEI tells us what is needed to stabilize climate.[4] When [Dr. Hansen] gave a TED talk 10 years ago, EEI was about 0.6 W/m2, averaged over six years (that may not sound like much, but it equals the energy in 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day, every day). Now, it appears, EEI has approximately doubled, to more than 1 W/m2. [Emphasis added.] The reasons, discussed in our paper, mainly being increased growth rate of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and a reduction of human-made aerosols (fine particles in the air that reflect sunlight and cool the planet).
It appears that Dr. Hansen's 2012 TEDTalk, Why I must speak out about climate change, explained all these phenomena to us a full decade ago. So, in fact, his recent report is just providing us with an update on how little we have done to address the problem and thus how much worse things are. It is clear, we have not listened to him.
Dr. James Hansen's 2012 TEDTalk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWInyaMWBY8
In ten years, the amount of forced warming of our planet has nearly doubled and this is not a good thing.
So why has humanity failed to take the requisite actions to stabilize the climate? In characteristic understatement, we’re told it’s because of the climate’s delayed response. In other words, heat applied to oceans and ice sheets will still take a while to fully warm or melt them. Not only do the world’s oceans contain 270 times as much mass as the atmosphere, but water also needs 4 times as much energy as air to raise each unit of mass a degree in temperature. This provides a lag that allows global air temperatures to seem more normal than they really are. Without that lag, we’d likely have acted more aggressively to limit the heating. We’re just not fully experiencing how bad it really is. The good news: the climate’s delayed response gives us a little more time to take meaningful action, before we have so much disruption from our overheated world, that societies break down.
Dan Miller, a co-founder of the venture capital firm, Roda Group and a leading proponent of climate action, took time to review the entire 48 page Global Warming in the Pipeline paper submitted by Hansen and 14 co-authors. He summarized its findings as follows:
1. The Earth Climate Sensitivity (ECS) — the Earth’s short-term response to a CO2 doubling — is higher than previously assumed. Most scientists said it was ~3ºC, but Hansen et al now say it is 4ºC or more based on paleoclimate data. This means there is more warming “in the pipeline” than previously assumed. 2. While humans have increased atmospheric CO2 by 50% since the industrial revolution, the actual climate forcing from all the added greenhouse gases is now ~4W/m^2, which is equivalent to a doubling of CO2 (i.e., CO2e (including all greenhouse gases, not just CO2) is about 560 ppm). 3. Part of the current warming has been hidden by human-made particulate air pollution (aerosols), mainly sulfur. When North America and Europe started to reduce emissions after the introduction of clean air acts in the 1970's, regional and global warming became more pronounced. In the past decades China and global shipping slashed sulfur emissions through cleaner fuels and sulfur filter systems ('scrubbers'). There are clear signals from ground, ocean and satellite based observations that the rate of global warming has recently doubled, which needs to be taken into account in risk assessments. 4. Assuming today’s forcing (4 W/m^2) stabilizes and human-made aerosols are eliminated, when all feedbacks — including “long-term” feedbacks — play out, we are on track for about 10ºC warming and 6~7ºC if aerosols stay at today’s levels. This is a “scenario” and we still control our future, though we are on track to increase climate forcing from today’s 4 W/m^2. 5. If greenhouse gas forcings keeps growing at the current rate, it could match the levelPETM mass extinction within a century. We are increasing climate forcing 20X faster than in the PETM so “long-term” feedbacks won’t take as long as in the paleo record (though some feedbacks will still be much longer than a human lifetime). 6. The paper concludes that we must: (a) implement a carbon fee and border duty (Fee and Dividend); (b) "human-made geoengineering of Earth’s climate must be rapidly phased out,” i.e., we must stop emitting greenhouse gases, remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and research and implement safe solar radiation management to counter the massive geoengineering experiment we are currently running; and (c) we must improve international cooperation to allow the developing world to grow using clean energy. 7. A companion paper will be coming out that addresses the near-term shutdown of the AMOC and associated “multi-meter” sea level rise on a century timescale.
Dan Miller runs a Clubhouse group called Climate Chat. Following the release of Hansen's report, he interviewed Leon Simons, a co-author of the paper, about their findings and the implications. It was a 2.5 hour conversation. It's not a happy topic but Dan, at least, is willing to confront the hard truths, in this case, that we must act immediately to address the climate crisis.
Part of the hard truth that is increasingly unavoidable, has to do with solutions. Once again, Dr. Hansen recognized the dilemma we have with respect to our options for solutions quite a long time ago: namely that we cannot realistically let go of fossil fuels without finding good alternatives, and the “best candidate is nuclear energy." Here he is discussing this in a 2013 interview:
Even though nuclear energy could dramatically help us alleviate emissions from fossil fuels, many people, including many smart investors, find the idea of proactively supporting nuclear power uncomfortable. They fear and loathe nuclear bombs—rightfully so—and can't emotionally separate those feelings enough to accept that there are compelling benefits from energy achieved by a related technology. Some just love "renewables," which generate energy from free wind and free sun. The costs of installing these have come way down and they are extremely popular, so what's not to like?
Nuclear, in contrast, is very hard to like. It's so complicated and hard for people to understand, plus it's fraught with scary meltdown scenarios, exclusion zones and radioactive waste. Beside, we know that it's expensive and takes a long time to build, so with solid reasons like that to reject it, why risk putting one's own environmental credibility and "green" loyalty in question by supporting it, since it's already too unpopular to succeed, right?
This type of thinking has made nuclear power, quite likely the best solution we have for eliminating dependence on fossil fuels, easy to either ignore or outright reject. And this might have been the end of the story except for the inconvenient fact that wind and solar are not doing the job of reducing emissions.
It turns out that people not onlywantbut societies need and demand reliable energy. Even with cheap renewables, fossil fuel usage continues to expand. Because renewables are weather-dependent and the weather doesn't always cooperate. Which is, in turn, why more people are again revisiting the possibility of using nuclear power, because the alternative is natural gas. This spurred Dan Miller to invite Carl Page, founder of the Anthropocene Institute, into the Climate Chat Clubhouse to explore these issues and discuss why public support for nuclear power has dramatically increased.
It seems Russia's attack of Ukraine followed by energy scarcity elevated global appreciation of several critical facets of energy systems beyond mere price. People woke up to the fact that energy supply security, grid reliability, energy price stability, climate resilience and limiting carbon are all important. Europe's dependence on Russian natural gas and now a war-induced energy crisis has re-focused the world's spotlight on nuclear energy—the only energy solution that addresses all of these critical energy needs. Germany, a nation deeply committed to nuclear phase-out, chose to delay the closures of its last nuclear power plants, rather than risk worsening their energy crisis. California choose to extend the life of Diablo Canyon for similar reasons.
Well maybe not shutting down existing plants makes sense, you might be thinking. But isn't it true that building new nuclear is too expensive and takes too long? The answer is not necessarily. Although Gen III nuclear power plant construction experiences have been mixed, with many in that class greatly delayed and vastly over-budget, a few of these Gen III plants have been built on time and in budget and nearly all are finally being completed. These are newer, safer light water designs and the learning process on those new designs has begun. Which means that costs of new builds can come down, if they get proper support. The question now for the industry and the world, is whether we are going to build on that construction knowledge to improve on past performance or abandon it.
Additionally, there's been movement in a whole new direction for nuclear technology: that of innovation. Gen IV nuclear, or what many call advanced nuclear and next-generation nuclear, are innovative new designs on the cusp of commercialization. A new crop of developers are working to reimagine nuclear without water cooling. These designs largely rely on physics for cooling, rather than muscular engineering. This reduces the need for back-up safety systems and redefines how small and how quickly nuclear can be built.
Next-gen is now widely expected to be smaller, modular, manufactured and constructed in a period of months and will be well-suited for use by corporate and industrial sites, college campuses, data centers, district heating systems and remote villages around the world. These advanced fission designs are engineering evolutions of previously demonstrated technologies such as molten salt, high-temperature gas and liquid metal-cooled reactors that do not require scientific discovery or breakthroughs. Fusion, which is developing the potential of magnetic confinement, inertial confinement and even metallic lattice confinement (formerly called "cold fusion") to generate massive amounts of carbon-free energy, still requires significant scientific breakthroughs but they also seeing progress and are widely expected to be ready to serve energy needs by mid-century.
[Click image to learn more about why Dr. Hansen and other scientists are suing the EPA.]
The question now is, will this growing global support for nuclear energy and the efforts of innovators to redesign nuclear for the 21st century enable us to meet our urgent climate goals? Can we build nuclear faster while steadily reducing costs? Or will lingering antinuclear prejudice induce an investor delayed response that prevents construction of new Gen III designs and commercialization of a range of Gen IV designs?
The answer to that question will determine whether or not humanity meets or misses our very limited window to eliminate fossil fuels emissions by 2050. This is why we applaud the growing investor enthusiasm for building existing commercially-viable Gen III nuclear plants, as well as investing in the further development of innovative Gen IV designs, including fusion. We need them all if we are to have any hope of supplanting the 100 million barrels of oil burned every day and the 80% of electricity powered by coal and gas before it is too late.
According to Dr. Hansen, it is already very late and our climate situation is frighteningly dire. People need to act with urgency and purpose on climate: we can no longer afford delay. What we decide to do to move off the wrong path that we have been on up until now will set our course, perhaps permanently. We need good alternatives to fossil fuels. Nuclear power may not be environmentalists' or investors' first choice but it has decades of proven efficacy and safety. Best of all, current innovations hold the promise of being able to scale rapidly to serve the world's urgent energy needs.
Those who invest wisely into this risky "contrarian" area may ultimately reap the reward of seeing their investments succeed. If they do, it means they will have helped displace fossil fuel as the energy of choice and provided a compelling clean energy alternative. And for that, there could well be extraordinary returns. There are plenty of risks for sure but, as it looks now, the risks of not investing in the solutions that can reduce emissions could well be far worse.
Hansen and team have recently detailed new warnings and updated data in a newly issued report called Global Warming in the Pipeline, which has been submitted to Oxford Open Climate Change for publication. Read more of the history of Dr. James Hansen's research into the heating effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. In August 1981, the New York Times published Study finds warming trend that could raise Sea Level, a report by Walter Sullivan about the study Dr. Hansen and six colleagues wrote which revealed the risk of sea level rise from global warming.
