Hansen writes faster than I can blog. He has posted a “talk given at Des Moines last Sunday, with description of Declaration of Stewardship slightly edited for clarity.” He talks about the “three major consequences of global warming, if we go down the
business-as-usual path, with fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions continuing to increase”:

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Hansen has posted some important thoughts about sea level rise on his website. In particular he has shortened his “Scientific reticence and sea level rise” paper and New Scientist has published it. The key conclusion:

[I]ce sheets will respond in a non-linear fashion to global warming — and are already beginning to do so. There is enough information now, in my opinion, to make it a near certainty that business-as-usual [emissions] scenarios will lead to disastrous multi-metre sea level rise on the century time scale.

This lead directly to his emissions strategy:

The global community must aim to restrict any further global warming to less than 1 °C above the temperature in 2000. This implies a CO2 limit of about 450 parts per million or less. Such scenarios require almost immediate changes to get energy and greenhouse gas emissions onto a fundamentally different path.

Hansen also offers some useful thoughts about recent research on Greenland and has been misunderstood by the media.

Western Wildfires Fan Flames Over Links Between Climate Change, Drought And Wildfires — Weather Channel blog. “Already more than four million acres have burned this season, about a million more than the 10-year average. This is especially alarming since in many areas the fire season hasn’t reached its traditional peak…. [R]ecent climate and wildfire research indicates that global warming likely is playing some part in exacerbating both drought and wildfire conditions in some areas and may exert a more heavy-handed influence in the near-future.

Into the Limelight, and the Politics of Global Warming – New York Times. This is a good feature on Heidi Cullen, “the only climatologist with a PhD in the country who has her own weekly show, Forecast Earth — airing Saturdays at 5:00 p.m. ET.” Heidi on the perils of blogging:

Last December, I wrote a blog about how reticent some broadcast meteorologists are about reporting on climate change. Meteorologists — they are the forecasters — have training in atmospheric science. Many are certified by the American Meteorological Society. I suggested there’s a disconnect when they use their A.M.S. seal for on-camera credibility and refuse to give viewers accurate information on climate. The society has a very clear statement saying that global warming is largely due to the burning of fossil fuels.

The next thing I knew, I was being denounced on the Web sites of Senator James Inhofe, Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh. The Weather Channel’s own Web site got about 4,000 e-mails in one day, mostly angry. Some went, ‘Listen here, weather girl, just give me my five-day forecast and shut up.’