It was the scientists turn at the COP21 climate conference in Paris on Thursday, which featured four prominent climate specialists who advocated for a major investment in nuclear power in order to for conference participants to limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius or less in the coming years.
The call for action was passionate. “There is a sense of urgency. We need to reduce carbon emissions now and cannot wait for something to appear in the near future. Nuclear power can be done safely, and with a relatively small environmental footprint,” said Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington D.C.
"We need to stop using the sky as a waste dump," the media quoted Caldeira as saying.
James Hansen, former head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told the conference that “the dangers of fossil fuels are staring us in the face. Nuclear, especially next-generation nuclear, has tremendous potential to be part of the solution to climate change.”
The two were joined by Tom Wigley, a climate scientist from the University of Adelaide in Australia and Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"We don't care whether it's nuclear, solar or hydro … the numbers don't add up unless you put nuclear in the mix," said Emanuel.
Wigley stressed that the group's findings were strictly academic in nature, but pointed to “unacceptable risks,” if climate change were to continue unchecked.
Hansen said it was “100 percent certain” that the planet was in trouble, adding, “for us to say we are not going to use all the tools that we have to try to solve [this] … is crazy.”
Hansen also pointed out that economic factors needed to be considered. Referring to emerging countries, he said, “You can't raise people out of poverty without energy.”
U.S. President Barack Obama this week referred to the scientific community as being all but unified in its concerns over climate change. On Tuesday, the president said “99.5 percent of scientists and 99 percent of world leaders” agreed that climate change “is really important.”
CNSNews.com pointed out that the last time Obama referred to a percentage of the scientific community regarding climate change was in May 2013, when he said in an online posting that 97 percent of scientists agreed climate change was “real, man-made and dangerous.”
“Everybody is taking climate change really seriously. They think it's a really big problem. It spans political parties,” he said in Paris this week.