Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity

In STORMS OF MY GRANDCHILDREN, Dr. James Hansen, the nation's leading scientist on climate issues, speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: the planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although Hansen was Al Gore's science advisor for "An Inconvenient Truth," his recent data shows that our situation is even more dire today. But politicians haven't made the connection between the policy and the science. He shows why Gore's solution, cap and trade, won't work, why we must phase out all coal, and why 350 ppm of carbon is a goal we must achieve in the next two decades if our grandchildren are to avoid global meltdown and the storms of the book's title. This urgent manifesto bucks conventional wisdom (including the Kyoto Protocol) and is sure to stir controversy, but Hansen-whose climate predictions have come to pass again and again, beginning in the 1980s when he first warned Congress about global warming-is the single most credible voice on the subject worldwide.

Hansen paints a devastating but all-too-realistic picture of what will happen in the next year, and ten years from now if we follow the course we're on. But he is also an optimist, showing that there is still time to do what we need to do. Urgent, strong action is needed, and this book, released just before the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009, will be key in setting the agenda going forward to create a groundswell, a tipping point, to save humanity-and our grandchildren--from a dire fate more imminent than we had supposed.

Dr. James Hansen is perhaps best known for bringing global warming to the world’s attention in the 1980s, when he first testified before Congress. An adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and at Columbia’s Earth Institute, and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, he is frequently called to testify before Congress on climate issues. Dr. Hansen’s background in both space and earth sciences allows a broad perspective on the status and prospects of our home planet. This is his first book.