Storms of My Grandchildren - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Storms of My Grandchildren is climate scientist James Hansen

James Hansen

James E. Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a part of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He has held this position since 1981...

's first book, published by Bloomsbury Press in 2009. The book is about threats to people and habitability for life on earth from global warming

Global warming

Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...

Themes

In the book, Hansen argues that burning of fossil fuel

Fossil fuel

Fossil fuels are fuels formed by natural processes such as anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms. The age of the organisms and their resulting fossil fuels is typically millions of years, and sometimes exceeds 650 million years...

s is changing our climate and that the Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

is in "imminent peril". He suggests that millions of species, and humanity itself, are threatened. The title of the book, Storms of My Grandchildren, refers to the ferocious and extreme weather events "that will greet the next generation if the unmitigated use of fossil fuels continues".

In Hansen's evaluation, the response of politician

Politician

A politician, political leader, or political figure is an individual who is involved in influencing public policy and decision making...

s to this crisis has mainly been "greenwashing", where their proposals sound good but amount to little. Hansen states that we immediately need to "reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to at most 350 ppm

Parts-per notation

In science and engineering, the parts-per notation is a set of pseudo units to describe small values of miscellaneous dimensionless quantities, e.g. mole fraction or mass fraction. Since these fractions are quantity-per-quantity measures, they are pure numbers with no associated units of measurement...

in order to avoid disasters for coming generations". He advocates prompt phaseout of coal plant emissions, plus improved forestry and agricultural practices. Hansen supports a carbon tax

Carbon tax

A carbon tax is an environmental tax levied on the carbon content of fuels. It is a form of carbon pricing. Carbon is present in every hydrocarbon fuel and is released as carbon dioxide when they are burnt. In contrast, non-combustion energy sources—wind, sunlight, hydropower, and nuclear—do not...

returned to citizens as a dividend and rejects cap and trade

Emissions trading

Emissions trading is a market-based approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants....

. He also supports nuclear power

Nuclear power

Nuclear power is the use of sustained nuclear fission to generate heat and electricity. Nuclear power plants provide about 6% of the world's energy and 13–14% of the world's electricity, with the U.S., France, and Japan together accounting for about 50% of nuclear generated electricity...

and rejects geoengineering

Geoengineering

The concept of Geoengineering refers to the deliberate large-scale engineering and manipulation of the planetary environment to combat or counteract anthropogenic changes in atmospheric chemistry The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2007 that geoengineering options, such...

Reception

Storms of My Grandchildren has been reviewed in Nature, the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

, Science
Science (magazine)
Science was a general science magazine published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science . It was intended to "bridge the distance between science and citizen", aimed at a technically literate audience who may not work professionally in the sciences...

, and Cosmos
Cosmos (magazine)
Cosmos is an Australian popular science magazine that is published six times a year. It is subtitled "the science of everything" and is described as "a magazine of ideas, science, society and the future"....

. An excerpt from the book appeared in The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...

in 2009.

Author

James Hansen is director of the NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

Goddard Institute for Space Studies

The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies , at Columbia University in New York City, is a component laboratory of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Earth-Sun Exploration Division and a unit of The Earth Institute at Columbia University...

and is often called the "father of global warming

Global warming

Themes

Reception

Author

See also