The scientist who first alerted the world to the greenhouse effect has sounded a terrifying new warning about the Earth’s climate.
James Hansen says a “dangerous” burst of heating could soon be unleashed that will result in a key temperature threshold being breached as soon as this decade.
He said there was a huge amount of global heating “in the pipeline” because of the continued burning of fossil fuels and Earth being “very sensitive” to the impacts.
As such, the 1.5C threshold set out in the Paris Climate Agreement could be breached far sooner than expected, creating a world “less tolerable to humanity, with greater climate extremes”.
Hansen, a former Nasa scientist, issued a foundational warning about climate change to the US Congress back in the 1980s, and has now published a peer-reviewed update.
In it, he said: “We would be damned fools and bad scientists if we didn’t expect an acceleration of global warming.
“We are beginning to suffer the effect of our Faustian bargain. That is why the rate of global warming is accelerating.”
The question of whether the rate of global heating is accelerating has been keenly debated among scientists this year amid months of record-breaking temperatures.
Hansen points to an imbalance between the energy coming in from the sun versus outgoing energy from the Earth that has “notably increased”, almost doubling over the past decade.
This ramp-up, he cautioned, could result in disastrous sea level rise for the world’s coastal cities.
“We are in the early phase of a climate emergency,” the paper warns. “Such acceleration is dangerous in a climate system that is already far out of equilibrium.
“Reversing the trend is essential – we must cool the planet – for the sake of preserving shorelines and saving the world’s coastal cities.”
To deal with this crisis, Hansen and his colleagues advocate for a global carbon tax as well as, more controversially, efforts to intentionally spray sulphur into the atmosphere in order to deflect heat away from the planet and artificially lower the world’s temperature.
So-called “solar geoengineering” has been widely criticized for threatening potential knock-on harm to the environment, as well as over the risks of a whiplash heating effect should the injections of sulphur cease, but is backed by a minority of scientists who warn that the world is running out of time and options to avoid catastrophic temperature growth.
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