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James Hanson is literally a rocket scientist because he works for NASA. In fact he is the director of the Goddard Space Flight Center. He is also one of the world's top climate scientists. Besides having written many papers on the topic, he also has some extra standing because a few years ago he stood up to the Bush administration and refused to let them water down one of his official reports on climate change. In essence becoming a whistleblower on the abuse of science to suit politial ends. So when James Hanson writes a scientific paper, you can be sure that the best minds in the world (who work in this field) have contributed to it or have reviewed it. The fact that he is unknown outside of this field is all you need to know about how screwed we really are. Which is why I call your attention to a recent report of his which calls for reductions in CO2 emissions of 6% every year. Starting now.

Let me just put that in context. Consider that economic growth is roughly equivalent to energy consumption: It takes energy to make the widget, energy to bring the widget to the store, energy for you to drive to the store and buy said widget, etc. All of that energy generates CO2. (Yes, I know that some energy can be generated by windmills and solar panels, but that's not really how we do things, is it? The world does not burn 90,000,000 barrels of oil per day just for fun. That's the real number, by the way.). So while we are all trying to figure out how to make more money in order to buy more stuff (which we call progress), some very smart people are saying that we're going to have to start doing a lot less of that. This is going to require an enormous re-adjustment of our society. In fact, the concept of earning 6% less every year is so unacceptable as to be heresy and is dismissed as the crazy talk of wierdo commies. I am personally not looking forward to using/earning/travelling 6% less every subsequent year.

However, that is exactly what the developing countries were asking of the developed countries at the climate-change talks that were held here in Bonn a few weeks ago. We are not talking Vanuatu or Tobago: the big countries like India and China want the rich countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by the year 2020 (that's only 8 years from now).  Although this was not a core part of the negotiations, it is an indication of the magnitude of sacrifices everyone is going to have to make very soon. In nine years you must take home half the salary you make today (or you can take home the same salary, but can only buy half the stuff you want).

The amazing thing is that the original Kyoto protocol, signed way back in the early 1990s, called for developed countries to reduce their CO2 emissions by 6% under 1990 levels by (I think) 2000. I don't know what the GDP of Canada was in 1990, but you can bet it was much less than it is today. So we were talking about a relatively small cut in today's terms. If we would have done that then we would be in a much better situation now. But of course nobody wanted to be the first to take a 6% cut in their standard of living back then. So here we are looking at much more drastic belt-tightening.

And if we do not start cutting our emissions right now (as Hanson et al. suggest), then how much of a cut in emissions/energy/economy do you think we will have to make in 9 years? The challenge will simply get bigger and bigger the longer we ignore it. Or we can simply go along and "not believe" in climate change.