A Presentation to the IJC re climate justice
“The International Court of Justice is hearing from scores of nations before it issues an advisory opinion on the "Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change." The key issue is whether international law requires nations to phase out production, distribution and use of fossil fuels and otherwise pay damages to the most vulnerable and hardest-hit of nations.” This text is from Dr. James Hansen on December 9, 2024, making a presentation at the IJC in Den Haag, Nederland. Click the link to read the PDF of his presentation complete with graphs and charts. https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2024/ICJ.PressBriefing.09December2024.pdf Title: “Climate Change at the International Court of Justice” - James E. Hansen - 09 December 2024
Dr. James Hansen’s science of global warming reporting is exactly right, and all other climate scientists should pay full attention to what he is saying here. Many keep searching for other explanations, they are simply misinformed.
But the problem comes back to both his promotion of nuclear power and his constant support of a “carbon fee and dividend” approach to somehow reduce fossil fuels consumption. Ideally, carbon pricing would gradually lower energy usage and it is absolutely critical that the countries of the “rich North” drastically reduce their energy use by around 97%, since overall world-wide; a 40% reduction has been recommended and the rich countries consume around 30x the world average per-capita energy consumption. With that level of reduction overall, nuclear is neither needed nor desirable, its “carbon footprint” is vastly higher than its proponents admit and nuclear promoters always slough off the waste disposal issue as someone else’s problem. Nuclear has no place in this biosphere.
Dr. Hansen states: “The carbon fee can be set to rise at a rate that allows the fossil fuel industry time to invest in clean energies, carbon capture, or other alternatives. In this basic “carbon fee and dividend” system, no funds enter or leave a nation.” But fossil fuel companies HAVE had time to invest in “clean energies” but recently have been scaling those initiatives back to focus on producing more fossil fuels. Apparently “carrots” don’t do the trick, but a stick will not help; this population overshoot was enabled by fossil fuels (and their associated plastics and fertilizers) thus both population and fossil burning must be wound down in tandem. As for “no funds ever leave a nation” - well maybe, but the fuel exports sure do! Try to square that circle! So far, no country has been able to impose fuel taxes on airlines, they will just fill up elsewhere, same goes for shipping.
Scientists are by training specialists, they drill down on their specialty. I am a generalist and must look at the whole ballpark (and parking lot, und so weiter). I must address existential threats to humans in order of magnitude, they being nuclear war, plastics pollution disrupting all life processes including reproduction, and at some lower priority, human-exacerbated global warming. To fixate on a lower-priority issue while overlooking more immediate risks is inappropriate. Unless one proposes to initiate a mini-ice age for a few hundred years, it is not possible to hold sea levels at this or any other specified level; sea levels vary over around 300 feet and this was known well before much of the coastal developments were built. So people, sorry, you made an error. America has been in a speculative real estate boom for its entire history, starting with Benjamin Borden’s Great Tract in Virginia in the 1740s, if not earlier. Profit from land sales was always the prime concern. Starting in the Industrial Revolution and amping up exponentially after WW-II, humans have performed planetary-scale damage to every aspect of this planet, not just to the atmosphere. If humanity would get out of the oceans and stop our multitude of levels of harm to the oceans, this planet can easily clean itself up. What we should be acknowledging from the results that we observe, is that humanity MUST scale back its entire ecological impact, find a simpler life and live more in harmony with this planet, our only home, and stop behaving as a rogue species. This task is NOT accomplished by switching energy sources - consuming more energy from any source equates to higher economic through-put meaning more materials extracted from the planet, used briefly then sent to landfills. That system bypasses life rather than supporting it.
A “carbon fee” is yet another financialization of nature; it is not a “tradable” credit, it is built into the system by allowing the oil company to sell yet another barrel of oil. And the money flows back to the populace? What for? Vote-buying? In every jurisdiction in North America, by law, all money flowing into the government must go into General Revenue, it cannot be ear-marked for any specific purpose. And no money ever leaves a nation? How then are the commitments to the world’s funding for poor country’s mitigation and adaptation and loss paid? THAT is where the funds should go - there MUST be some pain for the countries with the highest historical emissions. Oxygen pricing would accommodate those measures, while carbon pricing is just bass ackwards. Every attempt to find financial solutions to environmental issues is a conflict of interest, the financial system, pouring money out on land to create debt, is a source not a cure for the problems. See REDD-Monitor. Remember, the problem is NOT the production of oil by the oil companies; it is a demand-side problem, it is your hand on the pump and your flights that drive the demand - end your demand for fuel and the supply will back up and stop.
The first steps to a livable planet must be (after removing War from the human toolkit)(yes, I know, that’s a whopper): setting strict limits to technological progress - no more Space adventurism, no more launches/re-entries, no thousands of Low-Earth-Orbit communications trash; strict limits to genetic engineering, and finding a way to impress upon the world’s population that “Normal” cannot go on - and the simplest way to do that while also addressing the largest of personal carbon emissions, is to close all airports - end commercial air travel. All these measures must begin, along a continuous pathway, to winding down this human enterprise to fit a planetary scale. Our main drive continues to be to push Nature out of our way and replace it with what is essentially a Space colony right here on Earth - a human camp or nest constructed specifically to meet human desires, while we expect Nature to continue on outside, absorbing our every waste. Does something sound unsustainable here? Our propensity for twisting Nature into something that it is not carries on, and will continue to carry on and exponentially expand, until we hit the wall, hit the boundaries of what Nature can support and absorb, or until we smarten up and set definitive limits to human “progress.”
Our drive to reconstruct the planet is entering a brave new world in which we try to grasp the levers of climate. People, using the exact same “thought” processes which have put all life in peril, now propose that we trust them to “save” the planet. But what needs saving here? This planet has been much warmer for most of its history. Why does any feature of pre-industrial times become a baseline? The solar system was in a cold part of the galaxy during the ice ages, it has been warming up. OK, we pushed it perhaps too far. Are there any risks to trying to lower CO2 levels? I have been extremely negative about geoengineering because I didn’t see any benefits outweighing the multiple risks, as well as issue of “termination shock.” And some of it is totally inappropriate, with people going off and employing these strategies with no prior consent from the larger population.
You can view one of these geoengineering projects, “Making Sunsets,” already in progress. And incredibly, you can even by “carbon offsets” from this geoengineering project, which magically allows your continued emissions to be offset by the supposed cooling effect of this geoengineering. People with more intelligence have said such methods should be a last resort, to mitigate emissions which are impossible to reduce, not as a measure for continuing “business as usual.” And promoters of these geoengineering projects are working from 20-year-old notions of how clouds work. I’ve been working on a whole article on water, but it keeps being buried under more urgent issues. One important item from that is a report on how light interacts with water, see this report in phys.org: “How light can vaporize water without the need for heat” (article written by David L. Chandler, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Anyone involved in climate research needs to understand what this study is revealing. This changes everything you thought you knew about cloud formation and weather systems.
"The finding of evaporation caused by light instead of heat provides new disruptive knowledge of light-water interaction," says Xiulin Ruan, professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, who was not involved in the study.
"It could help us gain new understanding of how sunlight interacts with cloud, fog, oceans, and other natural water bodies to affect weather and climate. It has significant potential practical applications such as high-performance water desalination driven by solar energy. This research is among the rare group of truly revolutionary discoveries which are not widely accepted by the community right away but take time, sometimes a long time, to be confirmed."
See the source study at Guangxin Lv, Yaodong Tu, James H. Zhang, and Gang Chen, “Photomolecular effect: Visible light interaction with air–water interface” PNAS 121(18)e2320844121 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2320844121
Other studies show the effects of isoprene on cloud formation and chemistry. A major land-based source is the Amazon rainforests, and what are we doing to that immensely important area? Let’s cut and burn the whole thing and see if we can make North America into a desert! The Southern Ocean being rich in life and nutrients is another major source. All these and other effects on cloud formation need more research.
In recent years, scientists have been looking at how various climate mitigation scenarios might affect crop production, clearly a survival indicator for all life. One such study published in Nature Food compared emissions reduction (ER) with stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), marine sky brightening (MSB) and cirrus cloud thinning (CCT). Emissions reductions (ER) resulted in continuously dropping crop yields (down 20% by end of century) due to the effect of lower CO2 levels lowering plant growth rates. That is a really big negative! Marine sky brightening (MSB) might give a more even overall result compared to ER or stratospheric aerosol injection or cirrus cloud thinning, without the effects of stratospheric injected substances descending on the polar regions. This indicates that we don't have an atmospheric CO2 problem (but do in oceans regarding acidification), however, continuing with business-as-usual results in almost 7 degree temp rise over the century above an 1850-1879 baseline, and that is not the plateau yet. Is that too hot? It would mean more arid areas. Marine sky brightening means promoting more cloud cover over the oceans, particularly tropic zones which seldom have clouds. Marine ship trails could be seen over the oceans before 3.5% sulfur bunker fuels were prohibited. We have seen the result from that with the extra warming in 2023 and 2024. That system should be re-instated or some other method to achieve a similar result in marine cloud formation. An issue with promoting marine cloud is what is the effect on photosynthesis in marine phytoplankton, which is crucially important. Can human thought processes manage these issues?
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References:
B. Langford, E. House, A. Valach, C. N. Hewitt, P. Artaxo, M. P. Barkley, J. Brito, E. Carnell, B. Davison, A. R. MacKenzie, E. A. Marais, M. J. Newland, A. R. Rickard, M. D. Shaw, A. M. Yáñez-Serrano and E. Nemitz, "Seasonality of isoprene emissions and oxidation products above the remote Amazon" Environ. Sci.: Atmos., 2022,2, 230-240 https://doi.org/10.1039/D1EA00057H
Valerio Ferracci, James Weber, Conor G. Bolas, Andrew D. Robinson, Fiona Tummon, Pablo Rodríguez-Ros, Pau Cortés-Greus, Andrea Baccarini, Roderic L. Jones, Martí Galí, Rafel Simó, Julia Schmale & Neil. R. P. Harris “Atmospheric isoprene measurements reveal larger-than-expected Southern Ocean emissions.” Nat Commun 15, 2571 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46744-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46744-4
Guangxin Lv, Yaodong Tu, James H. Zhang, and Gang Chen, “Photomolecular effect: Visible light interaction with air–water interface” PNAS 121(18)e2320844121 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2320844121
Climate Change at the International Court of Justice - James E. Hansen - 09 December 2024
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2024/ICJ.PressBriefing.09December2024.pdf
Yuanchao Fan, Jerry Tjiputra, Helene Muri, Danica Lombardozzi, Chang-Eui Park, Shengjun Wu and David Keith (2021) Solar geoengineering can alleviate climate change pressures on crop yields. Nature Food Vol 2, May 2021 p. 373–381 https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00278-w https://keith.seas.harvard.edu/files/tkg/files/fan_et_al_2021_nature_food.pdf?m=1622034220