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Climate scientists should not blame themselves for not making the case for Climate Change clear enough to the public several decades ago. The public should blame themselves for not taking the trouble to listen intently enough about such a moral, scientific, and existential issue. Listening to James Hansen on Climate Change, Thirty Years Ago and Now  On June 23, 1988—a blisteringly hot day in Washington, D.C.—James Hansen told a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” At the time, Hansen was the head of nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and though his testimony was certainly not the first official warning about the “greenhouse effect”—a report to President Lyndon Johnson, in 1965, predicted “measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate” in the decades to follow—it was the first to receive national news coverage. The Times ran  the story  at the top of the front page, with a graph sho...

Governor Cuomo has some very ambitious green energy goals for New York State. This includes getting our state “Coal Free by 2020”: Governor Cuomo Announces New U.S. Climate Alliance Initiatives to Mark One-Year Anniversary of President Trump's Decision to Withdraw from the Global Paris Climate Accord U.S. Climate Alliance Initiatives Draw on New York State's Leadership in Combatting Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Reforming the Energy Vision Initiative, and Nation's Largest Green Bank New Commitments Include Reducing 'Super Pollutants,' Expanding Clean Energy Financing, Storing Carbon in Landscapes, and Softening the Negative Impact of Federal Solar Tariffs U.S. Climate Alliance States Remain on Track to Meet Their Share of U.S. Paris Agreement Target for at Least 25% Emissions Reductions by 2025 (June 1, 2018 GOVERNOR ANDREW M. CUOMO ) But this ambition is low on specifics. Also, New York State’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) #REV4NY is high on ambition and...

It won’t do humanity much good to increase renewable energy to address Climate Change and still back large fossil fuel projects. [See McKibben’s recent article in The Guardian “ Stop swooning over Justin Trudeau. The man is a disaster for the planet ”.  Our planet (any planet, really) only cares (responds) to how much greenhouse gases are in our climate system (our atmosphere and waters) to determine how much to heat up its surface. It’s physics. [See: “ How Global Warming Works ”.] Earth couldn’t care less about how much renewable energy we generate because renewable energy doesn’t trap the infrared light energy produced when the visible light energy from the sun bounces off the surface of our planet. It’s we who should care about renewable energy because we should like our planet to be habitable for quite a while longer. This is important to remember amidst all the articles on the rapid increase in renewable energy around the world and renewables’ dramatic drop in costs. At the e...