Mark Hertsgaard and James Hansen: Adapting to Climate Change Now

Global climate change has arrived, and it's more than a hundred years ahead of schedule. According to The Nation's Mark Hertsgaard, whose twenty years of climate reporting helped him craft his new book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, the only option left requires not only reducing carbon emissions, but also adapting to the effects of man-made global warming already underway.

At the Open Society Institute in New York City on Thursda, April 14, Hertsgaard joined renowned NASA climatologist Dr. James Hansen for a conversation on how we can best adapt to and confront climate change. One of the biggest hurdles to effectively dealing with our warming planet, the two agree, is the anti-science blockade the American right has set up against any and all carbon reducing policies.

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[Yolanda Garcia-Lemaitre]

Planet in peril? You better believe it! It's happening right now in front of our faces.

What to do? A lot! Start with stopping deforestation; Start Replanting the Planet; Stop Pollution in the ocean; Stop the emissions of carbon; Stop Coal Power Plants; Plant trees and help RESTORE the Rainforests of the Planet; And please what ever you do pass a Comprehensive Energy Bill and bring Renewal Energy to the table ASAP!



[whereismybailouttv]

Nice job by both of them.

[RicksPoker]

Hi Ca2C4.

We could do like France and reprocess it and burn it up? Scientists in general know that it is not a big problem. However, you should look up LFTR's on youTube. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors produce a fraction of the wastes, which are only radioactive for a small fraction of the time.

[Ca2C4]

Jim Hansen is always speaking in favor of nuclear power but never mentions final storage of the nuclear fuel rods, which is a huge unsolved problem as of today.

[rd264]

2100 is commonly deployed as a marker date partly because it implies that global boiling is not now, rather is way down the road several generations off. This suits our denier Congress and the vested fossil fuel interests just fine.

[David Lange]

So, why do the devotees of religion, academia, medicine, law, ethics, national defense, et al, sit mute while this preventable of all horrors unfolds. America has thousands of universities where thinking in the interest of society is supposed to take place, yet the elementary physics of climate change are ignored. The same derelictions infect the medical professions, too. Do no harm, but allow certain death and destruction? Professionals and amateur alike must act to stop this mass suicide. 

[David Lange]

Planet Earth, a sphere, sits in a bubble of atmosphere, a life support system encased in a mostly impermeable shell , an enclosed finite space. It is a chamber that hold the gases that give us life. By ceaselessly burning fossil fuels we are filling it with poisons that is collapsing the climate and puts us on the verge of self extermination. Test your personal climate for yourselves, operate your gasoline, or diesel, or coal burning, device in a garage, or tent. Tell the world your results.

[jackie castle]

every book written until we get our paper from some other source other then trees, contributes to the climate instability.

j

[jackie castle]

folks like you make folks like me, who want to stop the extinction of man want to extinct deniers

j

[rd264]

To whom did you refer as a troll? If you were speaking to "thereisnogod79", I second your comment.

[donmega054]

I'm not sure whether or not you're being serious, it's early, and it's the internet, but I think the move to terming it 'climate change' as opposed to 'global warming' was a shrewd move because, as you can rightly tell, it's not just the planet getting warmer, it's a case of more severe weather patterns. IE colder winters, hotter summers and according weather systems (hurricanes and other natural disasters such as flooding and ocean rising).