Dr. James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the leading experts on climate change wrote a Sunday op-ed for The Observer.
The picture is not pretty - "our planet really is peril" he writes.
Are we going to heed his warning?
"Our global climate is nearing tipping points. Changes are beginning to appear, and there is a potential for explosive changes with effects that would be irreversible - if we do not rapidly slow fossil fuel emissions over the next few decades.""If we do not change course soon, we will hand our children a situation that is out of their control, as amplifying feedbacks drive the dynamics of the global system."
I hope you have an emotional reaction to this information. I did. I woke this morning thinking what more can I do?
While there are a number of individual actions I can and will take, I still believe the greatest leverage point occurs at the system/paradigm level. We must change our economic system to a sustainable system and we need to do it fairly quickly.
Dr. Hanson calls the trains carrying coal to power plants "death trains." "Coal-fired power plants are factories of death" he writes. Every product you buy or sell should make you think about the embedded carbon.
How might we get off the "death train?"
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