James Hansen - No more conventional coal and carbon stabilisation below 350ppm

Beyond Zero Radio show spoke to James Hansen the world's leading
climate scientist about his call for CO2 emissions stabilisation at
300-350ppm, well below todays 385ppm.

Podcast available
Interview with James Hansen - Nasa Goddard Institute of Space Studies -
James Hansen on Coal, "pressure to in effect bulldoze those plants" on
today's level of carbon, "385ppm is really going to produce a
significantly different planet." Safe Greenhouse gas levels according
to Hansen are down "at least to the 350ppm level"

Scott Bilby: In the studio with me are Beyond Zero
team members Miwa, Matthew and special guest Philip Sutton from the
Greenleap Strategic Institute. This morning on Beyond Zero we'll be
interviewing James Hansen often described by many as the world's
leading climate scientist. He is the director of the Goddard Institute
of Space Studies at NASA and adjunct professor at earth and
environmental sciences at Columbia University. Wieslaw Maslowski has
recently said that Arctic ice could be free in summer by 2013. Dr
Hansen, are you there?

James Hansen: Yes I am. I hope you can hear me.

Scott Bilby: We certainly can hear you - As Wieslaw
Maslowski has said the Arctic could be free of ice in summer by 2013.
You've said that we need to keep to levels well below 350ppm. What do
humans have to do to get Arctic sea ice... to basically get it back
again?

James Hansen: Well, we will have to restore the
point of energy balance because as it stands now we will lose the
arctic sea ice without any more greenhouse gases, because there is
additional warming that's in the pipeline, because the planet is out of
energy balance, just because of the inertia of the system.

That means we would have to reduce the amount of CO2 at least to the
350ppm level, and we are already at 385. So, we've actually got to go
backwards and it's really too bad that we didn't realise this earlier.
We probably should have, based on the earth's history.

We can see that 385ppm is really going to produce a significantly
different planet. And also just looking at what's now happening, not
only in the Arctic, and the fact that the ice sheets are not stable
with the current CO2 amount, and the fact that the sub-tropical regions
have expanded noticeably by a few hundred kilometres, that's enough to
effect the southwest US, the Mediterranean, and Australia I should
point out.

So there's a lot of things, also coral reefs are another example. If
we want to reduce the stress on coral reefs, we have to both reduce CO2
and the warming of the ocean temperatures. So there are a number of
things like that which make it clear that we've already passed the
target level that we should be aiming for.

Philip Sutton: Jim, how would you actually make the earth cool or go backwards? How would you actually restore that Arctic ice?

James Hansen: Yes, yes, it's still possible. If we
get on the stick very promptly, it's still practical to do that in ways
that are quite natural. The most important thing is to have a
moratorium on new coal fired power plants that don't capture CO2 and
then to phase out the dirty coal use over the next 2-3 decades. If we
do that, you know that the system does still take up CO2, the ocean and
the soils and things, so that other things being equal, CO2 would only
go up to a bit more than 400 if we phase out coal use. But then we have
got to take at least 50ppm out of the atmosphere, and that is possible
with improved agricultural and forestry practices, things that we have
not being paying much attention to.

In fact the practices have been quite the opposite. They've actually
not encouraged the uptake of CO2 by the soils and by the biosphere.

Matthew Wright: And we have touched on that with
Professor Johannes Lehmann from Cornell University, and in terms of the
Australian political environment we've just had an interim report by
Professor Ross Garnaut - he's doing sort of a mini Stern Report and
he's just said basically that we need to stabilise global emissions
within two years, and I think we'd agree with him there. But he's
saying in a global carbon equity sense that Australia needs to go 90%
by 2050, to the shock of media and commentators.

James Hansen: One thing that is important to point
out, these goals for 2050 are not a sufficient way to look at it. We
actually have to realise that the carbon dioxide is put in the
atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, a good fraction of that will stay
in the air for a very long time, about a fifth of this stays in there
for about a thousand years. And we need to recognise the size of the
reservoirs of oil, gas and coal; with coal being by far the largest of
these and also it's the one which is potentially amenable to not
putting the CO2 into the air. It's very difficult to see how we can
prevent the oil from being used and the carbon getting in to the
atmosphere because it comes from vehicles, but in the case of coal if
we're going to use that, we could restrict it to power-plants and we
should say it can only be used there if you capture the CO2. That
becomes a practical way to look at this, and I think it's a better way
than saying lets reduce it 80% or 90% or 60% or any particular number
because we really can't let 40% or 20% of the coal to continue to be
used; that's the one source that we really need to cut off.

Matthew Wright: Yes and if in somewhere like
Victoria, which uses lignite, brown coal, if there was the gas resource
available, which according to BHP Petroleum there is, to actually
switch away form coal in 3 years and cut our emissions by half; our
entire absolute emissions in Victoria by half. Would that be something
you would encourage our government to pursue?

James Hansen: Yes absolutely, that would be consistent with the strategy of terminating the coal source as soon as possible.

Matthew Wright: Also Professor Garnaut, it seems
like the government sort of started to distance themselves from him
even though they commissioned him to run the report, and they're
remaining committed to their 60% target. I guess a get out of gaol
guard for them is to claim their 60% target by 2050 but adopt a very
strong 40% by 2020 or something like that within that, if they're
politically manoeuvring. It seems that targets are they way that they
are going in terms of setting the cap in their 'cap and trade'. What do
you think would be the right approach? ?obviously capping global growth
in emissions within two years is a very good approach, but beyond that
what sort of approach would Australia require?

James Hansen: Well, I think that the target in
terms of percent when you're talking about a date which is quite a
distance in the future is just not very helpful. It's a way for
politicians to get out of doing something now, because they put off the
target to a date when they'll be out of office. So I have no objection
to that except that if it allows them to get away from taking actions
that need to be done now.

Philip Sutton: We have a bit of a sense that in
fact the government in Australia is beginning to gear itself up to take
climate change quite seriously, but they're obviously struggling to
come to terms with the seriousness of the real position on the ground.
Do you have a sense of how long it would take to get the arctic ice
back, presumably we'll lose it in a couple of years time; completely
during summer. But just interested to know how long you think it would
take to actually restore it if we could manage to trigger a cooling.

James Hansen: The Arctic sea ice is a very
different problem from the ice sheet, in the sense that the Arctic sea
ice is a reversible phenomenon on time scales that we can think about,
unlike the ice sheets. If we let those reach a point of no return so
they start to collapse then we're really in trouble, because it takes
many thousands of years to build an ice sheet.

But the Arctic sea ice, that would require that we get the planet
energy balance back in balance, and that is out of balance now by
something between half a watt and one watt, so it's a fairly steep
order to do that. It is the order of this 50ppm CO2 that we would need
to get.

It can be done with a combination of methane, black soot and other
pollutants [these] can contribute to the reduction in the forcing. So
it's something that could be done in a time scale of a few decades. Now
it's not certain that the Arctic summer sea ice is going to be gone in
a few years. Some people say it could be as soon as 5-10 years and
others think it could be a few decades. But to get it back is a time
scale of decades I think, that's minimum.

Philip Sutton: Do you have any estimates of how
much warming would actually be caused by the albedo flip itself. We've
sort of seen some rough
estimates of about a 1/3 of a degree. I was just wondering if that was
anything in the ball park of what you've been seeing or calculating
through your models.

James Hansen: If you want to look at it that way,
that's the right ball park. It's a positive feedback, an amplifying
feedback, which makes the change there go more rapidly, and to a
certain extent it will contribute to warming at other latitudes. But I
think it is the right order of magnitude. I haven't actually looked at
it and done a calculation in that sense, but that's the right order of
magnitude.

Philip Sutton: Right.

Matthew Wright: Matthew here again and just to let everyone know, that was Philip
Sutton who has been assisting me with questions, from the Greenleap
Strategic Institute, co-author of Climate Code Red which relies on a lot of material from Dr. James Hansen.

I noted that you had sent a draft letter the um? the U.K.?

Scott Bilby: Gordon Brown.

Matthew Wright: Gordon Brown, the UK Prime Minister
requesting that they don't build any new coal fired power plants
without carbon capture and storage, and a similar story where you've
been in hearings in I think it was Iowa to stop Coal Power Plants.

James Hansen: Yes.

Matthew Wright: We've got some proposals here unfortunately that don't involve
carbon capture and storage there's an HRL energy project in Victoria,
and in NSW Michael Costa is pretty bullish on building a new coal fired
power station. He sees no other option for them. What do you say to
these politicians who are really pushing this line?

James Hansen: Well, I think that it's going to
become very clear, I would say within a decade or so, that these coal
plants are simply not compatible with keeping a planet resembling the
one in which civilisation developed. And I think there is going to be
eventually pressure to in effect bulldoze those plants, so economically
they just don't make sense. You are not going to be able to leave them
there 50 years. It will become clear long before 50 years that we have
to get rid of those, so it doesn't make sense.

Matthew Wright: In terms of what we've heard from
you and others, generally we've been pushing the line that we need to,
as soon as possible, get all our emissions down to near zero emissions,
so that could be a time frame of say 2020; halving our emissions in the
next 3 years locally here in Victoria and then concurrently developing,
you talked about soils, the agri-char process to draw down atmospheric
carbon. Will we require things like seeding the atmosphere with
sulphates in order to reflectlight away from the Arctic ice or will
that be sufficient, just the agri-char concurrently developed while
getting our emissions down near zero?

James Hansen: My comment on that would be, we don't
know, you know we're pushing the atmospheric composition beyond the
level which will give us a stable climate, so we're overshooting the
acceptable level. And we don't know how long we can stay in a state
where we've overshot that level. Obviously, if you overshoot for one
day, that's not going to cause a problem. It's a question of how many
years can you leave it at a level which is going to cause long term
unacceptable impacts, like instability of the ice sheets.

We just don't have a good way to make an accurate assessment. That's
because there has been no prior examples in the earth's history where
greenhouse gases have increased this rapidly. There have been fast
changes when negative forcings, when asteroids hit the planet or when
large volcano's go off, but we don't have any examples of large
positive warming forcings. So it's really a hard question to answer,
but I think that sensible actions, phasing out coal use where we don't
capture the CO2, and reducing non CO2 forcings may be able to get us
back on a track without unnatural geo-engineering type actions. But
that's my guess, I don't really have a good way to quantify that.

Philip Sutton: Yes, I think that question about the speed of bringing the system
back into a safe sort of configuration is a really key question because
when we looked at the recommendations from the Garnaut review, or the
interim recommendations, that came out yesterday. It was very clear
that they understood that things were much more serious than perhaps
the IPCC consensus view had indicated but when you read the
recommendations, it seemed like they felt we had a reasonable amount of
time to get things under control. Is there any work being done through
the scientific community to try and get a handle on that question of
how rapidly we'd need to get things back to a safe configuration.

James Hansen: That's the key question, but it's a
very hard one because the systems in question are non-linear.
Inherently it's very difficult to predict a point of collapse. Whether
you're talking about an ice sheet collapsing or whether you're talking
about an ecosystem collapsing because as some species go extinct, that
effects others because they're all connected. So it's just inherently a
very difficult non-linear problem, and the models are just not up-to
snuff as far as giving us the numbers for that. We can't simulate the
responses that are occurring right now in Greenland and West Antarctica.

Philip Sutton: Do you think its worth, I mean when I look at the issue I tend to
focus a fair bit on the arctic ice and then try to work out, I mean it
seems to be the most significant big flip that we've had so far, that
is very clearly under way?

James Hansen: Ok, that one is a little, a little
easier, and it's partly because we can see what is happening
empirically and because it is a reversible phenomenon. It's one where I
would argue you can base your estimates on the planet's energy balance
and we're not measuring that as well as we should. It requires good
measurements of ocean temperatures throughout the whole ocean,
including the deep ocean and the high latitudes. It is easier than
problems like the ice sheets.

Philip Sutton: Right, do you think we can have a safe climate without having the
Arctic ice restoration. In other words is that actually an essential??

James Hansen: You know that's a good question and
it's probably not, because I can't imagine that in the long run
Greenland would be stable if the
Arctic is ice free in the warm season. I think we do need to plan on
restoring sea ice in the Arctic, preventing a complete loss of sea ice
there if we want to assure that our shore lines are going to stay where
they are now.

Philip Sutton: Yes, it does seem me that because
that was a much more visible and obvious and estimable problem that if
in fact it turned out to be one of the critical links then even if we
don't know the answer on a number of other parts of the puzzle that
that may give us sufficient sort of policy guide in the short term to
drive a lot of public policy, then of course as we get better modelling
we can refine it in relation to other issues.

James Hansen: Yes I think that's a very sensible way to look at it.

Matthew Wright: On the solutions side, you said
that if clean coal came with carbon capture and storage (CCS) - but
we've actually got Australian scientists in the United States right
who've got a lot of venture capital behind them 50, 100 million
dollars, like Dr David Mills from Ausra. His technology uses Fresnel
flat plate collectors to mimic those Mojave desert concentrating solar
thermal plants. Wouldn't it be better for us to invest in that
basically demonstrated commercial technology rather than keep pursuing
coal carbon capture and storage, given that CCS with coal tends to be
advocated not as a retrofit option?

James Hansen: Well, I think we have to do both of those and a number of another
things. The problem is I don't think there is one silver bullet that is
going to solve this problem. We've been putting far too little into
research and development to find technological ways of addressing this.

Concentrated solar looks extremely promising but I wouldn't say
that's going to solve all the problems so I think we should look at as
many things as possible. And of course we would encourage that if we
would have a carbon price. It would bring out innovation - some things
that we can't even think of so we need to encourage technological
innovation.

Philip Sutton: That's definitely one of the strong
recommendations from the Garnaut review and the Australian government
has indicated that it will in fact move quite strongly on the carbon
cap and then generating a price from that.

James Hansen: I think that would be helpful.

Matthew Wright: Is there anything you can say to
those people, I think the remaining big excuse that's being kicked
around is that you've got your developing countries, you've heard it a
million times and they're not doing anything so why should we. How do
you frame the response around that? How do we put it to those people
we're endangering ourselves here?

James Hansen: Well, they aren't going to do
anything until we do, and they're not going to have the mechanisms for
fixing the problem if we don't develop them. You know, we've caused the
problem and we're going to have to help take the lead in developing the
solutions and we don't have any time to waste arguing about whether
developing countries will come along, I'm sure they will, we can't ask
them to take the lead. We certainly have to do that.

Matthew Wright: So if we are looking at such
dramatic cuts, the convergence is going to be clearly quite soon so
we're going to have to develop these renewable energy technologies and
other zero emission technologies and some people are even advocating
that we'd be paying places like China to close down their older
coal-fired power stations. Do you envisage that that would be the way?

James Hansen: We're going to have to help them with
the technology. It's analogous to the way we solved the ozone problem,
or at least that is on a direction which will solve it. We provide
technology and we provided some economic assistance in adopting that
technology, but China has as much to lose if not more than we do with
climate change, so I'm confident that they will come along and they
will be able to share the task of reducing the emissions, but we're at
least going to have to provide the technological help and we should
consider the technology that we develop to be for the global good and
not insist that they pay special prices to the people who invented them
because we're going to have to get them implemented pretty quickly.

Philip Sutton: Jim, I was just wondering going back
to December last year, you gave a presentation to the American
Geophysical Union Conference suggesting that the CO2 target might well
be somewhere in the range of 300 parts per million to 350. What sort of
reaction have you had from the scientific community and from the wider
community to that proposition?

James Hansen:There has been some concern that they
think this is unrealistic, and therefore they say, 'well, contrarians
will use this as an argument that we shouldn't do anything because it
looks like its too difficult'. Frankly, I don't agree with that. I
think an initial target of 350 is doable provided we phase out coal,
and although that sounds like a real tough job, in fact it's doable and
if we don't do it there is no question, if you look at the times in the
earth's history when there was that much CO2 in the atmosphere it was a
completely different planet. We have to do it and it is doable, if you
compare the difficulty of replacing coal-fired power with something
else which could include coal provided it has
CO2 capture. Well that's not that difficult, I mean if we compare it to
how much effort we put into World War II, it's a doable job and the
incentives are just as great as they were then. So I'm a little
surprised that some scientists are saying we have to make the target
something that is doable. I think we have to make the target whatever
is needed.

Philip Sutton: My sense is that the scientific
community, certainly the Australian community which I make some effort
to keep in touch with, has been encouraged if you like to be much more
focused on the science, from the very fact that you've been prepared to
speak out like that. So I think that one shouldn't underestimate the
long term effect on peoples' perception of the issue through taking
what was at the time obviously a very courageous position. You know the
feedback we're getting is a lot of people are now seeing that they can
actually, if you like, put more emphasis on the science because you've
done that yourself.

James Hansen: Well I'm glad to hear that.

Matthew Wright: Thank you very much Dr Hansen, we
appreciate you joining us on the Beyond Zero show and hopefully we can
speak to you again later in the year.

James Hansen: Ok great, it was my pleasure, thanks a lot.

Matthew Wright: You're on the Beyond Zero show with
Philip Sutton from the Greenleap Strategic Institute, Scott Bilby
campaigner with BZE and Miwa Tominaga - over to you Scott.

Scott Bilby: We've just been speaking with James
Hansen director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA and
you're listening to Beyond Zero and it's put on by Climate Change
awareness group called Beyond Zero Emissions. If you want to find out
more about Beyond Zero Emissions go to www.beyondzeroemissions.org The
time now is 8:58, and if you'd like to get a copy of Code Red, a
document released recently by Philip Sutton and David Spratt can you
tell us what the URL for that is?

PS: OK it's downloadable from, http://climatecodered.net/

Matthew Wright: Thank you Philip our special guest this morning from the Greenleap Strategic Institute

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