By EDIE LAU
On the heels of California passing landmark global-warming legislation, climate scientists gathered here this week still doubtful that the public is ready to do what it takes to minimize climate change.
"If we go down the path of business-as-usual, we will, as a result, be producing a different planet," NASA scientist James Hansen said during his keynote speech at the Climate Change Research Conference.
Later, in response to a question, he said the state's new law limiting greenhouse gases is a step in the right direction.
But, he added, "It's not as effective as it could be, since some businesses are likely to move out of the state. It's courageous that California is willing to take actions on its own."
Hansen is one of more than 300 people from science and environment circles in California and beyond to attend the state-sponsored conference. The meeting, which began Wednesday and continues through Friday, is the third such annual event, but the first since California's law was adopted last month.
The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 requires the state to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases to 1990 levels by the year 2020, a reduction of 25 percent from today's levels.
Advocates of state action on climate change have long argued that California has a responsibility to act because of its size.
Reiterating that point, California Energy Commissioner James Boyd said during opening remarks at the conference that the state is a gargantuan consumer of gasoline and diesel, second in the world only to the United States as a whole.
Hansen's keynote message was that unless people change their fossil-fuel-burning ways within 10 years, the Earth will be catastrophically altered for generations.
Asked after his speech if he thinks members of the public will be willing to change their behavior soon enough, Hansen was uncertain.
"It's not clear," he said. "We could be foolish."
A physicist with NASA for virtually all of his 40-year career, Hansen gained public attention and notoriety in the 1980s when he testified to Congress that human-induced climate change was already occurring.
Two decades later, that viewpoint has moved from the fringe to the mainstream.
Yet to Hansen, who said earlier this year that the Bush administration tried recently to censor his public comments, the growing acceptance of climate change as real may be too little, too late.
Because effects of global warming are only now becoming apparent _ through more severe storms, heat waves and droughts, through melting glaciers and the northward migration of plants and wildlife _ people do not understand that the need to act is urgent, he said.
The problem is that the atmosphere responds in a delayed fashion to greenhouse gas output. Because of that inertia, even if all emissions were stopped today, the Earth would continue to warm by about a half degree Celsius over the next several decades, Hansen said.
The global mean temperature already has risen 0.8 degrees C since the Industrial Revolution. Hansen said a rise of 2 degrees C or more would be catastrophic, causing rising sea levels to drown coastal cities and low-lying countries, and spurring mass extinctions.
Not wanting to be a doomsayer, Hansen offered this prescription for moderating global warming:
_ Limit the use of coal to power plants that capture and sequester their carbon dioxide exhaust.
_ Adopt a carbon tax that rises gradually to discourage the use of fossil fuels and to encourage the development of alternatives.
The specter of severe climate change aside, those measures would benefit society, Hansen said, ending his presentation with a slide that read: "What's so bad about clean air?"
(E-mail Edie Lau at elau(at)sacbee.com.)
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