“We're setting the planet on a trajectory of very dramatic consequences within this century,” James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told an overflow crowd at the University of Montana.
Despite the bleak warning, Hansen said he was confident that clean replacements for coal, oil and natural gas can be found if people put enough pressure on their politicians and policymakers.
Hansen renewed his call for a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture and safely store their greenhouse gas emissions.
He said developed countries should ban new coal plants by 2012 and developing nations by 2022.
He also said all current coal plants should be phased out by 2050.
He said wind, solar, biofuels and other renewable power sources that don't generate carbon dioxide and other emissions should be developed.
Conserving energy and using oil, gas and other power sources more efficiently also are important, he said.
Hansen dismissed skeptics of global warming, noting the scientific consensus that temperatures are rising and that humans are the major cause.
He said the world faces a public health, economic and ecological crisis unless greenhouse emissions are drastically reduced.
Hansen was one of the first scientists to speak out about climate change, warning Congress in 1988 that greenhouse gas emissions were putting the planet on a dangerous course.
Today, the world is at a tipping point from which there will be no return unless heat-trapping gases are reduced, he said.
He said politicians are too reliant on campaign donations from the energy industry to come up with solutions.
“The answer has to come from the public,” he said.
Hansen said technological solutions to combat global warming are possible, such as putting giant “shades” in space to partially block the sun, but that such solutions are too expensive.
Hansen said core samples from glacial ice and ocean sediment show the planet's temperatures have fluctuated for hundreds of thousands of years.
But those natural changes, caused by changes in the Earth's orbit, volcanoes and other forces, are dwarfed by the temperature increases caused by humans since the Industrial Revolution, he said.
Hansen said greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants are causing 80 percent of the problem.
He said the United States, whose industries generate much of the world's greenhouse gases, should set an example.
He said phasing out the world's coal-fired electrical plants that don't capture their carbon dioxide output is not an insurmountable problem.
He called for a public effort on the scale of that created in World War II, when whole societies mobilized toward a common goal.
He said nuclear power produces less carbon dioxide than coal, oil and natural gas, but that storing nuclear waste creates its own problems.
Hansen said more resources should be devoted to carbon sequestration, or capturing carbon dioxide emissions and storing them in safe places, such as deep in the ocean floor.
Hansen and speakers at a “No New Coal” rally earlier in the night urged Montanans to tell their legislators they want clean energy.
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