James Hansen visited MIT on April 15 and April 16 and gave two public talks.  One was for Fossil Free MIT (http://www.fossilfreemit.org), a new student group concerned with divestment, on the politics of climate change, “Combatting the Climate Crisis:  the Path from Science to Action,” and the other was for the climate science community on “Ice Sheet Melt, Sea Level and Storms,” the subject of a paper he is now working on.

The good news is that, according to Hansen, we do not have to worry about catastrophic methane releases from the tundra or ocean clathrates as the paleoclimate record shows there were no such releases in higher temperature periods.

The bad news is that, according to a paper Hansen is now working on, we do have to worry about the effects of ice sheet melt on ocean currents and thermoclines as well as the possibility of dramatic wind intensity increases in storms.  Again, based upon the paleoclimate and geologic record.