With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

greenhouse gases were causing the drought across the country—a claim that
would have been hard to substantiate. But everybody assumed he had.
Sixteen years later, Hansen was the senior U.S. government employee
who, seven days before the 2004 presidential election, began a public lecture
with the words "I have been told by a high government official that I should
not talk about dangerous anthropogenic interference with climate, because
we do not know how much humans are changing the earth's climate or how
much change is dangerous. Actually, we know quite a lot." And he went on to
describe what we know in some detail. Most of his fellow researchers
thought that would be the end for Hansen as a government employee. But a
year later this outwardly diffident man—who couldn't stop apologizing for
keeping me waiting when we met in his large, paper-strewn office—was still
at his post. To the astonishment of many of his colleagues. "He is saved by
his science; he is just too good to be fired," said one. "Also, he is one of the
good guys. He doesn't have enemies. If he needed saving, there are a lot of
people who would volunteer for the job."
And now Hansen says the world, or more particularly Greenland, is on a
slippery slope to hell. We had better listen.
The world's three great ice sheets—one over Greenland and the other two
over Antarctica—contain vast amounts of ice. Leftovers from the last ice age,
they are piles of compressed snow almost 2 miles high. Glaciologists divide
the sheets into two parts. On the high ground inland, where snowfall is
greatest and melting is least, they accumulate ice. But on the edges and on
lower ground, where snowfall is usually less and melting is greater, they lose
ice. The boundary between the two zones is known as the equilibrium line.