Top research scholars lauded Tim DeChristopher on Monday night for his fraudulent bids at a federal lands auction in December and called for more students to rise up and shake the status quo.
The Office of Sustainability, the department of economics and local environmental action group Peaceful Uprising sponsored a lecture by James Hansen about the need to transform knowledge of climate change into action. Hansen is a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University and head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
David Chapman, dean of the Graduate School, set the tone for the lecture with a call to action.
“We need more courageous undergraduates like DeChristopher,” Chapman said.
Mario Capecchi, Nobel Prize laureate and U genetics researcher, introduced Hansen to the filled-to-capacity auditorium.
“One of the reasons why Jim is here again is to support Tim DeChristopher,” he said. “We need more people like him to take a stand for our future, for all the young people in the audience.”
During his lecture, Hansen was preaching to the choir. Hansen received several rounds of applause for his detailed explanations about the history of carbon dioxide increases and how he recommends people counteract climate change today.
“We do have an emergency,” Hansen said. “There continues to be a huge gap between rhetoric and reality. The emissions continue along an increasing path. But “greenwash’ seems to be winning out.”
Hansen described his work as a means to lessen the gap between what scientists and climatologists know and what the public knows.
He announced that ancient changes in climate and global temperatures have been slow compared to the present threat.
“The change caused by fossil fuel usage is 10,000 times more powerful than geological rate of change,” Hansen said.
Hansen said that in order for sea levels to remain stable, to remove coastal cities from threat, to prevent further melting of Antarctic glaciers and to prevent further extinction of polar and alpine animal and insect species, the atmospheric CO2 content needs to settle at maximum 350 parts per million, preferably lower.
The current measurement of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere is 385 ppm and growing.
“If we insist on getting every drop of oil out of the ground, CO2 will stay above 350 ppm for a few centuries,” he said. “Tim with his action seems to be saying we should leave that oil in Utah which isn’t very good anyway, in the ground.”
Capecchi said that Hansen is a controversial figure for his unwavering stance on the existence of climate change and the encroaching inevitability of its devastating effects, but defended the reliability of his research.
“He is a communicator extraordinaire for the environment. Though he is a controversial figure, science is not a controversial topic,” Capecchi said.
Hansen will also speak today at 11 a.m. at the Salt Lake City Public Library plaza at a rally for DeChristopher during his arraignment for his action taken at the Bureau of land Management auction.