25 metre rises in sea level, tropical temperatures in England, and widespread crop failures are only some of the predictions from Dr James Hansen. Here’s a selection of his predictions from the archives.
This one from 1986 on temperature increase in America:
Hansen said the average U.S. temperature had risen from one to two degrees since 1958 and is predicted to increase an additional 3 or 4 degrees sometime between 2010 and 2020.
Staying in 1986 for the moment, we have this unequivocal prediction:
“Within 15 years,” said Goddard Space Flight Honcho James Hansen, “global temperatures will rise to a level which hasn’t existed on earth for 100,000 years”.
Going back to 1982, we find Hansen arguing that if fossil fuel use was restricted, England might be a tropical paradise by 2050. If we carried on as normal, the world would be back in the sort of heat last seen in the age of the dinosaurs.
Hansen presented results of studies which indicated likely climate changes under different energy policies.
If there were slow growth in the use of hydrocarbon fuels, the world in the middle of the next century would be as warm as it was 125,000 years ago, when lions, elephants and other tropical animals roamed a balmy southern England.
Pursuing present plans for coal and oil, Hansen found, the climate in the middle of the 21st century “would approach the warmth of the age of the dinosaurs”
By 1989, far from toning it down, Hansen was starting to really turn up the heat, predicting totally unprecedented warming so far as mankind was concerned:
“By the year 2050 we’re going to have tremendous climate changes, far outside what man has ever experienced” said James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.
Computer models by Hansen and others suggest that by the middle of the next century earth’s average temperature may rise 4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, possibly altering storm patterns, making crops fail, and raising sea levels to flood low-lying coastal areas.
And in 2006, he was still going strong. Unabashed by the failure of the world to warm significantly, Hansen was still predicting massive temperature increases. Remember that in the interview below, with a British newspaper, he is talking in degrees Celsius for temperature, and in metres (one metre = 3 feet) for sea level rise:
“The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today – which is what we expect later this century – sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don’t act soon. None of the current climate and ice models predict this. But I prefer the evidence from the Earth’s history and my own eyes. I think sea-level rise is going to be the big issue soon, more even than warming itself.”
That’s a 25 metre – 75 feet – rise in sea level by the end of the century. So far, it doesn’t look like this one will fare any better than the rest.