Guest post: Storms of my Grandchildren, review by Erwin Dreessen

I recently read Jim Hansen’s “Storms of my Grandchildren” (2009) which has the rather dramatic subtitle “The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.” As most of you will know, Hansen is Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (CHECK) (part of NASA) and no flake or sensationalist.

Unfortunately, the book’s content fully justifies the subtitle. The work sets out solid scientific arguments supporting his conclusions, while also being quite personal – his quest to impress decision makers (frustratingly unsuccessful), his worries for the future of his grandchildren and, in the end, his plea to young people to take his message to heart.

His bottom lines are fairly straightforward:

- We must get atmospheric CO2 content to below 350 parts per million – a limit arrived at through geophysical analysis.
- At the top of the “danger” list are melting of the Western Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, and species extinction. Both are non-linear problems: If a tipping point is passed, rapid changes are out of humanity’s control.
- Coal-fired power plants must be phased out. Capture-and-storage will never be implemented on a large scale.
- Unconventional fossil fuels (tar sands, shale oil, methane hydrates) must be left in the ground.
- Nuclear power will be needed to provide base load electric energy. We must resume the path to fast (fourth generation) reactors, which will also largely do away with the nuclear waste problem.
- Carbon must be priced at source, without exception. Cap-and-trade will not work; offsets are largely a fraud.
- Support Bill McKibben and his www.350.org .

I found the information and argumentation in the book so compelling that I decided, for my own elucidation, to make extensive notes capturing the most salient points. I offer these for your consideration (a number of illuminating Figures are at the end). Let these not be a disincentive to read the book. The notes rarely capture the tone nor, of course, the details of his reasoning. The personal viewpoint from which the book is written also hardly ever comes through.

See: Hansen-Storms.pdf