Those were the words written today in the Huffington Post by Dr. James Hansen. Jim Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The outlook for humanity, or the U.S. Congress, to come to grips with the climate crisis is not good.
Thus
Science has exposed the climate threat and revealed this inconvenient truth: If we burn even half of Earth's remaining fossil fuels we will destroy the planet as humanity knows it. The added emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will set our Earth irreversibly onto a course toward an ice-free state, a course that will initiate a chain reaction of irreversible and catastrophic climate changes.
Dr. Hansen writes that the failure of the US Congress, the failure of the developing nation to follow a failing US, the failure of the Kyoto process, and the failure of societies may have doomed our planet.
The world's major industrial nations and emerging powers failed to agree Wednesday on significant cuts in heat-trapping gases by 2050, unraveling an effort to build a global consensus to fight climate change, according to people following the talks.
and
With a workable climate bill in his pocket, President Obama might have been able to begin building that global consensus in Italy. Instead, it looks as if the delegates from other nations may have done what 219 U.S. House members who voted up Waxman-Markey last month did not: critically read the 1,400-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and deduce that it's no more fit to rescue our climate than a V-2 rocket was to land a man on the moon.
We know that Inhofe and McConnel and Boenher are tragic to mankind by blocking progress on emissions, but in reality Homo sapiens is a tragic species...yet it is always hard to recognize it in oneself.