[Update 3 pm: Several folks have emailed me comments from scientists and others suggesting that Hansen's paper is more advocacy than science. I've edited this post to reflect that.]
It's been a busy week in climate news, notes Keith Kloor at Discover. The National Academy of Sciences is out with a new report on abrupt climate impacts, some of which might be more abrupt than we'd hope. And the climate scientist James Hansen has published a new–and likewise frightening–paper in PL0S ONE. But the paper, says a finger-wagging Kloor, has not received the critical coverage it should have.
And I've received several emails with unpublished comments from scientists suggesting that Hansen's paper is interesting, but that it should have been described in news reports as a review, with a good dash of advocacy as well as science.
Kloor links to some of the reporting on the NAS report, by, among others, Science, NPR, and the AP.
Andrew Revkin covers the NAS report at Dot Earth, and John Rennie does the same at Scientific American for the Hansen paper.
And Hansen has a blog post of his own at CNN. He writes:
Our study, published in the prestigious peer-reviewed science journal PLoS ONE, was written in support of a lawsuit against the federal government. The plaintiffs are young people, those to whom we are handing an increasingly warmer and destabilized planet.
They argue that they have a constitutional right to a safe climate, that they have a right to receive from us a planet that supports all life, just as our forebears gave us. It is correctly a legal argument, but it relates to a fundamental moral question.
The good news, he writes, is that "we still have time to choose."
-Paul Raeburn
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