An older power station at Kingsnorth. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

He's back!

Dr. James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently joined a protest against the construction of a new coal plants (The first one being Kingsnorth) in the UK.

In an interview with stop Kingsnorth, which you can watch right here, courtesy of YouTube, Hansen says that there really is no such thing right now as "clean" coal technology since only a small fraction of carbon dioxide is captured.

Hansen favors renewable and alternative energy and that trying to actually make coal technology "clean" would be too expensive anyway.

In the interview, Hansen talks about how some of the poorest nations would be impacted by global warming due to sea level rise and a reduction of fresh water due to glacier melt.

Speaking of sea level rise, Icecap posted a graph of sea level rise going back to 1993.

In a letter from July of 2007, Hansen wrote the following from NewScientist.........

As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting adds 1 centimetre to sea level for the decade 2005 to 2015, and that this doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by 2095.

Of course, I cannot prove that my choice of a 10-year doubling time is accurate but I'd bet $1000 to a doughnut that it provides a far better estimate of the ice sheet's contribution to sea level rise than a linear response. In my opinion, if the world warms by 2 °C to 3 °C, such massive sea level rise is inevitable, and a substantial fraction of the rise would occur within a century. Business-as-usual global warming would almost surely send the planet beyond a tipping point, guaranteeing a disastrous degree of sea level rise.

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From what I can tell, based on the graph, I do not see any indication of his 10-year doubling time showing up yet. It is is still early in the century though.