Truly amazing....

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-
obamahttp://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama

President 'has four years to save Earth'
US must take the lead to avert eco-disaster

Robin McKie in New York 
The Observer, Sunday 18 January 2009 
Article history

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark 
assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who 
last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the 
devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that 
action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he 
added.

Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and 
threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major 
disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. "We cannot afford to 
put off change any longer," said Hansen. "We have to get on a new path 
within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama 
to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."

Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too 
high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still 
rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.

Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the 
rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global warming posed 
any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to take a lead 
as the world's greatest carbon emitter and the planet's largest economy. 
Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, 
have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will 
imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must 
be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal - the world's worst 
carbon emitter. 

Hansen - head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and winner of 
the WWF's top conservation award - first warned Earth was in danger from 
climate change in 1988 and has been the victim of several unsuccessful 
attempts by the White House administration of George Bush to silence his 
views.

Hansen's institute monitors temperature fluctuations at thousands of 
sites round the world, data that has led him to conclude that most 
estimates of sea level rises triggered by rising atmospheric 
temperatures are too low and too conservative. For example, the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says a rise of between 20cm 
and 60cm can be expected by the end of the century. 

However, Hansen said feedbacks in the climate system are already 
accelerating ice melt and are threatening to lead to the collapse of ice 
sheets. Sea-level rises will therefore be far greater - a claim backed 
last week by a group of British, Danish and Finnish scientists who said 
studies of past variations in climate indicate that a far more likely 
figure for sea-level rise will be about 1.4 metres, enough to cause 
devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and of low-
lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations.

As a result of his fears about sea-level rise, Hansen said he had 
pressed both Britain's Royal Society and the US National Academy of 
Sciences to carry out an urgent investigation of the state of the 
planet's ice-caps. However, nothing had come of his proposals. The first 
task of Obama's new climate office should therefore be to order such a 
probe "as a matter of urgency", Hansen added.

CMPQwk 1.42-21 9999 
Progressive taxation is slavery for those who succeed .....

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