James Hansen Asks Young People to Get Involved

James Hansen came to Rochester, NY to give the keynote address at the Sierra Club’s Annual Forum. The title of his talk was “Climate Change and Energy: How Can Young People Take Ownership of Their Future?” It was the culmination of several talks he had given while in town.

Not surprisingly, Hansen began by talking about how last year was the warmest on record and how based on the data recorded so far, this year is well on its way to being warmer. He described the many sources of data corroborating the phenomenon like GRACE satellite data that shows Greenland and Antarctica rapidly losing mass, and the 3,200 Argo floats that have been sampling temperatures in the top 2 km of the ocean. These show the increase in ocean temperature. Though we have had a “pause,” for about a decade, in which the rate of cooling had declined, the recent data shows the resumption of the earlier trend. The pause has been explained by Drew Shindell (a former colleague of Hansen’s) as being due to the short term impact of aerosols, among the explanations that have been put forward.

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RP Siegel, author and inventor, shines a powerful light on numerous environmental and technological topics. He has been published in business and technical journals and has written three books. His third, co-authored with Roger Saillant, is Vapor Trails, an eco-thriller that is being adapted for the big screen. RP is a professional engineer – and a prolific inventor, with 50 patents, numerous awards, and several commercial products. He is president of Rain Mountain LLC and is an active environmental advocate in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y. In addition to Justmeans, he writes for Triple Pundit, ThomasNet News, and Energy Viewpoints, occasionally contributing to Mechanical Engineering, Strategy + Business, and Huffington Post.