Book Review: Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, by James Hansen, 2009
James Hansen is a true prophet of the new age for planet earth. He explains with great clarity the scientific and social problem of climate change, which he sums up by saying that “coal trains are death trains.” Against all the political hawing that seeks a negotiated solution, Hansen explains that the laws of physics do not compromise, and that we are placing our planet on an inexorable death track by our psychotic fixation on fossil fuels. His argument suggests that the evil corruption of our political systems by the big energy firms will kill all life on earth unless we transform global politics with a new energy paradigm.
As a leading spokesman for America’s NASA space agency, among the most authoritative scientific organisations in the world, Hansen’s views are guided by simple physics. Mars is very cold because it has no CO2 blanket, earth is liveable because our CO2 blanket is just the right thickness, and Venus is a 450 degree boiling hellhole because it has a CO2 atmosphere. CO2 lets light in but does not let heat out. Every step we make towards the Venus Syndrome is seriously poisonous for the earth. Coal is the main poison we are addicted to. We have to kick the habit of fossil fuels, which are more cancerous than nicotine. But like with other drugs of addiction, we talk all the time about cutting down on our use of fossil carbon, while in fact our use level is growing at an accelerating rate, like the tolerance of a heroin addict.
Towards the close of
Storms of My Grandchildren, Hansen sketches a beautifully poignant and terrifying science fiction story. Aliens living on an earth-like world 40 light years away discover our radio signals in the twentieth century, at a time when their own sun is swelling to cook them. They send a ship to colonise earth which arrives after 500 years. They are too late, and find a dead planet. Thick clouds swirl over boiling oceans. Continents that once supported abundant life are now desolate deserts. We killed our home.
Who killed Cock Robin? Not I say the energy barons, not I say the politicians, not I say the stupid environmentalist opponents of fast nuclear energy. But for Hansen all are judged as guilty, condemned for failure to comprehend the fragile complexity of our wonderful planetary biosystem and the urgent need for action to reverse global warming.
In the Bible, Jesus Christ tells us to beware of false prophets. Christians have sown confusion by their aggressive insistence that true prophets must express a magical supernatural message from God. Unlike the Christian tradition, all of Hansen’s prophecies are based solely on evidence. There is certainly a strongly Biblical apocalyptic tone in Hansen’s explanation of how our CO2 emissions are unleashing the
four horsemen of death, war, plague and famine. He fully expects catastrophic sea level rise this century. Yet there is nothing false in Hansen’s prophecies. They are the scientific reality, against which the popular indifference and denial is a mad sickness. Climate denial is worse than Holocaust denial. Hitler only killed millions – the coal kings will kill all life unless we stop them.
One of the most interesting aspects of
Storms of My Grandchildren is Hansen’s analysis of political tactics. He gets to meet national leaders, and despairs that the lobbying power of money is greater than the power of truth. In the three years since he wrote this book in 2009, the climate of political debate has only worsened, with arrogant denialists emboldened by their idiotic group-think, like a pack of Nazi thugs delighting in their freedom to intimidate and bully. Even as Hurricane Sandy showed everything Hansen predicted to be completely true as it devastated the US northeast, Obama expresses nothing but platitudes about protecting the planet, showing he is a weakling puppet of the evil despots who run the USA.
Hansen provides an excellent and highly readable scientific factual explanation of why the climate situation is dire. Everyone should read it. But his suggestion for how to solve the problem, focussed on building popular support for 350.org, is not the strongest part of the book. I don’t disagree that the goal of reducing CO2 to 350 parts per million in the air is needed. But the problem is that this worthy political strategy is far from enough to address the scale of the climate problem, failing to come to grips with the moral, psychological and spiritual foundations of the political and economic drivers of business as usual.
The great scientist Buckminster Fuller once said that it is more important to build the new than to fight the old. Hansen flags this view with his suggestion that perhaps a new technology, for example in algae biofuel, will save us. Such a change of our energy security paradigm could be implemented through a massive resource deployment, modelled on the Manhattan and Apollo Projects that produced the atom bomb and the moon landing. I think this is true, and agree with Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center that funding of research and development into ways to stabilise the global climate is the biggest human security problem of our day.
But Hansen puts far too much weight on the market mechanism of price signals through carbon tax. Tax is necessary but not sufficient. The urgent sound of the four horsemen of the climate apocalypse is bearing down upon us, like Tolkien’s ring-wraiths riding in black. We need dramatic sudden change or they will kill us. Tax reform did not stop Hitler, and nor will it stop the evil momentum of carbon extraction.
Despite his bold language, Hansen retains a scientific caution regarding moral argument. He expressed doubt about the merit of condemning his enemies as wicked. He does not describe global warming as an apocalyptic clash between the forces of good and evil, although that is precisely what it is. Evil must be named and fought. The evil vested interests of business as usual have poisoned the public mind so they can keep poisoning our air.
Good and evil are religious concepts. As a scientist, Hansen does not wish to express the moral certainty of a religious evangelist who preaches that the end of the world is nigh. He is no John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness with a message of forgiveness for the repentance of sin. But that is what we need. The world of fossil fuels is at an end, and we behold a new heaven and a new earth, a sustainable planetary ecology. The psychological mystery of how people can ignore the big story of planetary survival is essentially a religious problem, grounded in old deep concepts of human identity as spiritual rather than natural.
We need a new global natural spirituality, repenting of the false religion of the last age. The alienation of human spirituality from nature is at the core of the economic and political drivers of our present climate rampage.
The Bible tells us at
Revelation 11:18 that the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth. This little-known verse would surprise many if they pondered it, since it shows that God is with those who are working to sustain human life, not against us. Scientists are so used to seeing religion as an enemy that they have left the powerful resources of religion to the false prophets of supernatural redemption and their farcical magic stories of rapture. But as this verse from Revelation 11:18 shows, religion can itself be redeemed as a force for good against evil. A new Christian reformation can build on the observation that only a God can save us, recognising that God can only work through natural science.
We truly are lost and fallen, stumbling about stupidly in the dark, fouling our own nest with CO2 emissions that are a ticking time bomb. Rather than build a secular consensus, we need a global transformation of thinking for a new age, placing the mythical messianic stories of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ within the entirely scientific understanding of our real planetary fate. Hansen provides essential steps along this path.
Robert Tulip, 25 December 2012