James Hansen, Uncensored

Terry Gross interviewed NASA climate scientist James Hansen and author Mark Bowen about Bowen's new book Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming. Listen to the interview here.

Read the intro to the program below:

James Hansen, who's widely described as being NASA's leading climate scientists; he's been studying the topic for more than three decades, and he began speaking publicly about the threat of global warming almost 20 years ago.
Just over a year ago, he went public with a charge that made headlines around the world: The Bush administration, Hansen said, had been trying to silence his warnings about the urgency of the need to address global warming.
Now, writer and scientist Mark Bowen has literally written the book on the affair. It's called Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming.

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East Coast Heats Up

Salon published this AP story about a NASA study that says the Eastern United States is going to get hot. Real hot.

Previous and widely used global warming computer estimates predict too many rainy days, the study says. Because drier weather is hotter, they underestimate how warm it will be east of the Mississippi River, said atmospheric scientists Barry Lynn and Leonard Druyan of Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"Unless we take some strong action to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, it's going to get a lot hotter," said Lynn, now a scientist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "It's going to be a lot more dangerous for people who are not in the best of health."
The study got mixed reviews from other climate scientists, in part because the eastern United States has recently been wetter and cooler than forecast.
And that's just the eastern United States as a whole. For individual cities, the future looks even hotter.
But every now and then a summer will be drier than normal and that means even hotter days, Lynn said. So when Lynn's computer models spit out simulated results for July 2085 the forecasted temperatures sizzled past uncomfortable into painful. The study showed a map where the average high in the southeast neared 115 and pushed 100 in the northeast. Even Canada flirted with the low to mid 90s.

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From a Distance

In honor of Earth Day, some newspapers are printing what astronauts have to say about our home planet.


For Earth Day, the Associated Press asked space travelers to recall what it's like to see Earth from above:

"You can see what a small little atmosphere is protecting us. You realize there's not much protecting this planet, particularly when you see the view from the side."— SUNITA WILLIAMS, who has been living on the international space station since Dec. 11, 2006.

"I left Earth three times. I found no place else to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth."— WALLY SCHIRRA, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo in the 1960s

"You come back impressed, once you've been up there, with how thin our little atmosphere is that supports all life here on Earth. So if we foul it up, there's no coming back from something like that."— JOHN GLENN, first American in orbit (1962)

"It's something that many people take for granted when they're born and they grow up within the environment. But they don't realize what they have. And I didn't till I left it."— JIM LOVELL, Apollo 8 and 13

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My Planet. I Think I'll Keep It.

If some, er, creative thinkers have their way, we could be hearing that slogan soon to push the "Geritol Solution" to climate change, which involves dumping a tremendous amount of iron into the ocean. Only time will tell, but according to the Burlington (VT) Free Press, offbeat ideas like these are getting a second look from the US Government, which is apparently leaving no stone unturned in trying to solve the problem of climate change due to the Greenhouse Effect.

There's the man-made "volcano" that shoots gigatons of sulfur high into the air. The space "sun shade" made of trillions of little reflectors between Earth and sun, slightly lowering the planet's temperature. The forest of ugly artificial "trees" that suck carbon dioxide out of the air. And the "Geritol solution" in which iron dust is dumped into the ocean.

"Of course it's desperation," said Stanford University professor Stephen Schneider. "It's planetary methadone for our planetary heroin addiction. It does come out of the pessimism of any realist that says this planet can't be trusted to do the right thing."

NASA is putting the finishing touches on a report summing up some of these ideas and has spent $75,000 to map out rough details of the sun shade concept. One of the premier climate modeling centers in the United States, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has spent the last six weeks running computer simulations of the man-made volcano scenario and will soon turn its attention to the space umbrella idea.

And last month, billionaire Richard Branson offered a $25 million prize to the first feasible technology to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the air. Simon "Pete" Worden, who heads NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., says some of these proposals, which represent a field called geoengineering, have been characterized as anywhere from "great" to "idiotic."

As if to distance NASA from the issue a bit, Worden said the agency's report won't do much more than explain the range of possibilities.

Related Links:

The Earth Engineering Center of Columbia University

The National Center for Atmospheric Research

Planktos Inc. (of the Geritol Solution.)

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NASA Scientist Warns: Act on Climate Change or Face Disaster

In Sci-Tech Today, Scientist James Hansen warns that unless serious international action to reverse climate change begins within the next ten years, by the end of this century we will face mass extinction of species and a far less habitable planet.

"Humans now control global climate, for better or worse," Hansen said.

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It's Getting Hot in Here

US Scientists at NASA disagree with British weather officials and the World Meteorological Organization. NASA says 2006 is the fifth hottest year on record, while the other agencies put it at #6. With El Nino starting, 2007 is likely to be even hotter. The contiguous United States had its third warmest year since records began in 1880, as well as the worst fire season on record, with more than 9.5 million acres burned through early December. NASA said the five warmest years since the late 1880s were, in decreasing order, 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003, and 2006, assuming no major fluctuations take place in the next two weeks. Read about it in The New York Times.
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Climate change reduces Ocean food supply

Oceanic warming has reduced the amount of plankton, which has a negative effect on other ocean species, according to NASA. Read about it here.