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james hansen
The Big Bang, Horrifying LA Fires, and Our Self-Destructive Species
What you can now quite easily see from space is the failure humanity is achieving down here on the ground.
Jan 09, 2025
What’s happening right now in Los Angeles is almost too painful to write about. I’ve spent much of the day writing and calling back and forth with friends and colleagues. All report: horror. And since it’s playing out against the most familiar backdrop on earth, the scene of more movies and tv shows than any place on our planet, I think it will be as iconic as Pompeii in our collective imagination. If, you know, people in Pompeii had had smartphones.
So let me pull back a minute and tell a broader story. Though I’ve spent most of my life in the mountains of the East, my early boyhood was in California—my earliest recollections are of our house in Altadena, the neighborhood currently being consumed by the Eaton fire. And the sharpest memories of those are of climbing the fire road to the observatory at Mt. Wilson, which you could see from our backyard. I guess those must have been the first hikes in a lifetime of hikes, the first time to see the world spread out below.
I didn’t know it at the time—I was five—but the telescopes at the observatory at the top of the road were the place where humankind first really saw the universe spread out above. Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch Hooker telescope, then the largest in the world, made a series of pivotal discoveries in the 1920s. First he showed that the Andromeda nebula was outside our galaxy, taking the universe past the Milky Way. And then, a few years later with Milton Humason, he demonstrated that those distant galaxies were receding from ours—that the universe was expanding. This was the crucial groundwork for the Big Bang theory.
The last time I was up there, you could press a button on a display and the reassuring voice of Hugh Downs would explain that “Hubble’s discoveries were the last great step in the Copernican revolution of thought concerning man’s place in the cosmos. Hubble showed that our galaxy is not the center of the universe. There is no center.”
These discoveries were of a piece with the other great revelations of the 20th century—things like the invention of the solar cell at Bell Labs in 1954, or Jim Hansen’s pathbreaking climate science at NASA’s labs in the 1980s. They were the product of the human instinct for observation, nurtured in America’s unprecedented complex of university, government, and commercial labs. Scripps Oceanographic, MIT, Caltech, JPL, on and on. These were the kind of institutions that took us to the moon, and that indeed just last month shot a spacecraft closer to the sun than ever before.
And it’s this kind of science that lets us understand what’s happening in LA today; the descendants of Hubble and Hansen have continued the kind of painstaking research that make clear the result when a climate-induced drought (it’s only rained 0.16 inches in LA since May) and climate-induced heatwaves (the LA basin had some of its hottest stretches ever this past summer) and perhaps the climate-induced increase in the intensity of Santa Ana winds combine to created a firestorm unlike any other. It’s both simple and complicated: here’s a remarkable paper from Nature explaining how the melt of Arctic sea ice, by affecting the jetstream, is making West Coast fires worse.
In some ways, all this human intelligence is still being put to good use. Sammy Roth has written powerful recent accounts of Los Angeles’s push to build solar farms on all its margins, en route to becoming one of the world’s most renewably powered cities.
But in other ways that legacy of highly developed human intelligence is starting to disappear. It’s not just the polio vaccine (RFK Jr. told reporters yesterday, by the way, that he was “very worried” about his LA mansion). It’s the web of climate science targeted by Project 2025, which envisions an end to federal support even for the web of thermometers that measures our descent into something like hell. That’s because they understand (correctly) that this science is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” As Marc Morano, perhaps the country’s most inedfatigable climate denier, put it on Fox yesterday when asked about climate researchers
You have to cut the funding. You have to cut the program. You have to fire the employees, or at the very least, since it is hard to fire people, reassign them.
And yesterday the incoming president published a particularly memorable rant on his Truth Social platform
Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!
That this is all nonsense should by now be taken for granted. His reference is to some effort half a decade ago to allot yet more water to California’s big corporate farms; there is no river of water that the governor could somehow have diverted to Los Angeles to fight the fires. (And if you look at the videos it’s painfully absurd to imagine that a phalanx of firemen with hoses were going to beat down this maelstrom). Elsewhere on social media MAGA aficonados (and U.S. Senators) have taken turns blaming DEI initiatives, the war in Ukraine, and so on.
The great casualties in California today are people and animals and buildings—homes, synagogues, schools, libraries. The great casualty in the month’s ahead may be the insurance system of the world’s fifth biggest economy, which is going to buckle under the strain of these losses. But the steady loss of intelligence in our nation and our world worries me the most. Even as the stakes grow higher, we’re losing our hard-won ability to understand the world around us.
One of the mysteries of Hubble’s universe is why we haven’t found other intelligent species. One explanation is that most civilizations do themselves in before they can reach out into space.
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The Most Important Thing That Happened This Year Was the Heat
And yet you really wouldn’t know it from reading the wrap-ups of the year’s news now appearing on one website after another.
Dec 28, 2023
The world—its politics, its economy, and its journalism—has trouble coping with the scale of the climate crisis. We can’t quite wrap our collective head around it, which has never been clearer to me than in these waning days of 2023.
Because the most important thing that happened this year was the heat. By far. It was hotter than it has been in at least 125,000 years on this planet. Every month since May was the hottest ever recorded. Ocean temperatures set a new all-time mark, over 100°F. Canada burned, filling the air above our cities with smoke.
And yet you really wouldn’t know it from reading the wrap-ups of the year’s news now appearing on one website after another.
We’re programmed—by evolution, doubtless, and in the case of journalism by counting clicks—to look for novelty and for conflict. Climate change seems inexorable, which is the opposite of how we think about news.
Earlier today, for instance, The New York Times published an essay by investment banker and Obama consigliere Steven Rattner on “ten charts that mattered in 2023.” That’s the most establishment voice imaginable, in the most establishment spot. And the global temperature curve did make the list—at #10, well behind graphs about the fall in inflation, the president’s approval levels, the number of Trump indictments, the surge in immigrants, and the speed with with the GOP defenestrated Kevin McCarthy.
Indeed, yesterday the Times and The Washington Post both published fine stories about 2023’s record temperatures, but they were odd: In each case, they centered on whether the year was enough to show that the climate crisis was “accelerating.” It’s an interesting question, drawing mainly on a powerful new paper by James Hansen (one that readers of this newsletter found out about last winter), but the premise of the reporting, if you take a step back, is kind of wild. Because the climate crisis is already crashing down on us. It doesn’t require “acceleration” to be the biggest—by orders of magnitude—dilemma facing our species.
In a sense, though, that’s the problem. Those stories in the Times and Post were a way to search for a new angle to a story that doesn’t change quite fast enough to count as news. (In geological terms, we’re warming at hellish pace; but that’s not how the 24/7 news cycle works.) It’s been record-global-hot every day for months now: The first few of those days got some coverage, but at a certain point editors, and then readers, begin to tune out. We’re programmed—by evolution, doubtless, and in the case of journalism by counting clicks—to look for novelty and for conflict. Climate change seems inexorable, which is the opposite of how we think about news.
The war in Gaza, by contrast, fits our definitions perfectly. It is an extraordinary tragedy, it changes day by day, and it is the definition of conflict. And perhaps there’s something we can do about it (which is why many of us have been trying to build support for a cease-fire). So, rightly, it commands our attention. But in a sense, it is the very familiarity of the war that makes it easy for us to focus on it; “Mideast conflict,” like “inflation” or “presidential elections,” is an easily-accessed template in our minds. The images of the horror make us, as they should, feel uncomfortable—but it’s a familiar discomfort. The despair, and the resolve, we feel are familiar too; even the subparts of the story fit into familiar grooves (a New York Times reader would be forgiven for thinking the main front of the war is being played out in Harvard Yard, between free speech advocates and cancel culture warriors). Next year seems likely to be another orgy of familiarity: Joe Biden and Donald Trump, yet again.
Climate change has its own familiar grooves—above all the fight with the fossil fuel industry, which played out again at COP28 in Dubai. But so much of the story is actually brand new: As this year showed, we’re literally in uncharted territory, dealing with temperatures no human society has ever dealt with before. And to head off the worst, we are going to require an industrial transition on a scale we’ve never seen before: There were signs this year that that transition has begun (by midsummer we were installing a gigawatt worth of solar panels a day), but it will have to go much much faster.
These changes—the physical ones, and the political and economic ones—are almost inconceivable to us. That’s my point; they don’t fit our easy templates.
And the point of my newsletter, now and in the years to come, is to try and explain the speed of our crisis, and explain what it dictates about the speed of our response. It’s a story I’ve been trying to put into perspective for 35 years now (The End of Nature was published in 1989, the first book about this crisis), and I’ll keep looking for new ways in. As the climate scientist Andrew Dessler put it in one year-end account, "The only really important question is, 'How many more years like this we have to have before the reality of how bad climate change is breaks into the public's consciousness?'"
Thank you for being part of this ongoing effort to break into that consciouness, and—well, happy new year. It’s coming at us, we might as well make it count.
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We Underestimated the Speed and Scale of the Climate Crisis, Scientists Warn
“We need to hold governments to start to act sensibly now and reduce emissions,” one expert said.
Jul 21, 2023
As leading climate scientists watch the devastating, breakneck speed of unfolding climate disasters unfolding across the globe—from record soaring temperatures to catastrophic flooding—many are aghast at how rapidly their worst predictions are being now being played out in real-time.
Some are also now admitting that they might well have underestimated the speed and scale of our impending climate crisis and how bad things could get.
This is deeply ironic because, for years, those scientists who sounded the alarm over climate change were attacked by the oil industry or their funded front groups for exaggerating or playing “chicken little.”
“The research community must be brutally honest. We are on a pathway to 2-3°C, and probably closer to the upper end of that range.”
But now some of the most senior climate scientists on the planet are speaking out about their concerns.
Speaking to the BBC Thursday morning, Sir Bob Watson, who is currently emeritus professor of the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said, “I am very concerned. None of the observed changes so far (at +1.2°C) are surprising. But they are more severe than we predicted. We probably underestimated the consequences.”
He added “The research community must be brutally honest. We are on a pathway to 2-3°C, and probably closer to the upper end of that range. We are likely to pass 1.5°C in the mid-2030’s and 2°C around 2060. Current pledges and the policies needed them are totally inadequate.”
As the BBC notes, although Watson’s “comments are candid on the state of action on climate change, many of his colleagues will agree with his conclusion that we are on course for a temperature rise of 2.5°C or more.”
And Watson’s colleagues do concur. Ellen Thomas, a Yale University scientist who studies climate change told TheGuardian “It’s not just the magnitude of change, it’s the rate of change that’s an issue.”
Thomas added: “We have highways and railroads that are set in place, our infrastructure can’t move. Almost all my colleagues have said that, in hindsight, we have underestimated the consequences. Things are moving faster than we thought, which is not good.”
Other leading scientists agree too:
Meanwhile, others are being candid that nothing will change until we reduce our use of fossil fuels. “I’ve been expecting this for 20 years,” Professor Camille Parmesan, from the National Center for Scientific Research and an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report author, told Bloomberg. “This is just going to keep happening given that we’re not reducing emissions.”
Speaking to TheGuardian, James Hansen, often seen as the Godfather of climate science, warned we are hurtling towards a superheated climate because “we are damned fools” for not acting sooner. “We have to taste it to believe it.”
He told The Guardian: “There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts. These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality—we knew it was coming.”'
“The climate crisis is in the main a fossil fuel crisis.”
“This does not mean that the extreme heat at a particular place this year will recur and grow each year,” he continued. “Weather fluctuations move things around. But the global average temperature will go up and the climate dice will be more and more loaded, including more extreme events.”
In a so far unpeer-reviewed scientific paper, Hansen and colleagues said: “It seems that we are headed into a new frontier of global climate,” one not seen for millions of years.
They warn: “As long as more energy is coming in than going out, we must expect global warming to continue.”
Al Gore is another who is alarmed by what they are witnessing: “Everywhere you look in the world, the extremes have now seemingly reached a new level,” he told TheNew York Times in an interview. “The temperatures in the North Atlantic and the unprecedented decline of the Antarctic sea ice, both simultaneously. We see it in upstate New York, we see it in Vermont, we see it in southern Japan, we see it in India. We see it in the unprecedented drought in Uruguay and in Argentina.”
“The climate crisis is in the main a fossil fuel crisis,” Gore added. “If the world is not permitted to discuss the phasing down of fossil fuels because the fossil fuel companies don’t want the world to discuss it, that’s the sign of a very flawed process.”
But it’s not too late to act. As Watson said: “We need to hold governments to start to act sensibly now and reduce emissions.” And its not just governments. It’s the oil industry, too; as Gore points out, this is a fossil fuel crisis. Created by the fossil fuel industry. Because their decades-old public relations strategy of denying the evidence, spreading doubt, and delaying action is the reason our world is on fire right now.
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