The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 by Freeman Dyson

Author:Freeman Dyson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Literary Collections, Nature, Science, General, Technical Writing, American, Natural History, American Essays, Essays
ISBN: 9780547327846
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2010-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

ELIZABETH KOLBERT The Catastrophist

FROM The New Yorker

A FEW MONTHS AGO, James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in Manhattan, took a day off from work to join a protest in Washington, D.C. The immediate target of the protest was the Capitol Power Plant, which supplies steam and chilled water to congressional offices, but more generally its object was coal, which is the world's leading source of greenhouse-gas emissions. As it happened, on the day of the protest it snowed. Hansen was wearing a trench coat and a wide-brimmed canvas boater. He had forgotten to bring gloves. His sister, who lives in D.C. and had come along to watch over him, told him that he looked like Indiana Jones.

The march to the power plant was to begin on Capitol Hill, at the Spirit of Justice Park. By the time Hansen arrived, thousands of protesters were already milling around, wearing green hard hats and carrying posters with messages like POWER PAST COAL and CLEAN COAL IS LIKE DRY WATER. Hansen was immediately surrounded by TV cameras.

"You are one of the preeminent climatologists in the world," one television reporter said. "How does this square with your science?"

"I'm trying to make clear what the connection is between the science and the policy," Hansen responded. "Somebody has to do it."

The reporter wasn't satisfied. "Civil disobedience?" he asked, in a tone of mock incredulity. Hansen said that he couldn't let young people put themselves on the line "and then I stand back behind them."

The reporter still hadn't got what he wanted: "We've heard that you all are planning, even hoping, to get arrested today. Is that true?"

"I wouldn't hope," Hansen said. "But I do want to draw attention to the issue, whatever is necessary to do that."

Hansen, who is sixty-eight, has greenish eyes, sparse brown hair, and the distracted manner of a man who's just lost his wallet. (In fact, he frequently misplaces things, including, on occasion, his car.) Thirty years ago, he created one of the world's first climate models, nicknamed Model Zero, which he used to predict most of what has happened to the climate since. Sometimes he is referred to as the "father of global warming," and sometimes as the grandfather.

Hansen has now concluded, partly on the basis of his latest modeling efforts and partly on the basis of observations made by other scientists, that the threat of global warming is far greater than even he had suspected. Carbon dioxide isn't just approaching dangerous levels; it is already there. Unless immediate action is taken—including the shutdown of all the world's coal plants within the next two decades—the planet will be committed to change on a scale society won't be able to cope with. "This particular problem has become an emergency," Hansen said.

Hansen's revised calculations have prompted him to engage in activities—like marching on Washington—that aging government scientists don't usually go in for. Last September, he traveled to England to testify on behalf of anticoal activists who were arrested while climbing the smokestack of a power station to spray-paint a message to the prime minister.

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