Co-Founder and Chief Investment Strategist For one of the Largest Asset Management Firms Pleads For the Planet. (November 19, 2012)

Jeremy Grantham, Co-founder and Chief Investment Strategist of GMO, a Boston-based asset management firm that has more than US $97 billion in assets under management as of December 2011, in a feature article in the November 15, 2012 issue of Nature argues that "It is crucial that scientists sound a more realistic, more desperate, note on global warming".

Some excerpts:

I have yet to meet a climate scientist who does not believe that global warming is a worse problem than they thought a few years ago... The scientific world carefully measures the speed with which we approach the cliff and will, no doubt, carefully measure our rate of fall. But it is not doing enough to stop it... the effects of climate change can only exacerbate the ecological trouble I see reflected in the financial markets — soaring commodity prices and impending shortages.

The price index of 33 important commodities declined by 70% over the 100 years up to 2002... since 2002, prices of almost all... tripled in six years; all without a world war and without much comment. Even if prices fell tomorrow by 20% they would still on average have doubled in 10 years.

This price surge is a response to global population growth and the explosion of capital spending in China. Especially dangerous to social stability and human well-being are food prices and food costs.

Then there is the impending shortage of two fertilizers: phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash)... What happens when these fertilizers run out is a question I can’t get satisfactorily answered and, believe me, I have tried. There seems to be only one conclusion: their use must be drastically reduced in the next 20–40 years or we will begin to starve.

Recognition of the facts [of climate change] is delayed by the frankly brilliant propaganda and obfuscation delivered by energy interests that virtually own the US Congress... We need oil producers to leave 80% of proven reserves untapped to achieve a stable climate. As a former oil analyst, I can easily calculate oil companies’ enthusiasm to leave 80% of their value in the ground — absolutely nil.

Scientists are understandably protective of the dignity of science and are horrified by publicity and overstatement. These fears, unfortunately, are not shared by their opponents, which makes for a rather painful one-sided battle. Overstatement may generally be dangerous in science (it certainly is for careers) but for climate change, uniquely, understatement is even riskier and therefore, arguably, unethical.

It is crucial that scientists take more career risks and sound a more realistic, more desperate, note on the global-warming problem. Younger scientists are obsessed by thoughts of tenure, so it is probably up to older, senior and retired scientists to do the heavy lifting. Be arrested if necessary. This is not only the crisis of your lives — it is also the crisis of our species’ existence. I implore you to be brave.

In 2011, [James]Hansen was arrested in Washington DC, alongside Gus Speth, the retired dean of Yale University’s environmental school; Bill McKibben, one of the earliest and most passionate environmentalists to warn about global warming; and my daughter-in-law, all for protesting over a pipeline planned to carry Canadian bitumen to refineries in the United States, bitumen so thick it needs masses of water even to move it. From his seat in jail, Speth said that he had held some important positions in Washington, but none more important than this one.