He’s got the whoooole woorld in his hands…
This troubling news from the Guardian, UK
“James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.
Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress – in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming – to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the “perfect storm” of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.
Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.”
I suspect he’ll be calling for the jailing of bloggers like myself next. I think Mr. Hansen has lost all sense of reason, and his last shred of credibility.
UPDATE: Apparently Mr. Hansen has made the claims above on live radio on the Dian Rehm show this morning, audio files of the interview will be up shortly here:
http://wamu.org/programs/dr/08/06/23.php#20635
When the audio file is up, I’ll post a direct link.
AUDIO CLIPS NOW AVAILABLE:
Listen to this segment
Joe D’Aleo created this graph this morning:
click for a larger image.
Satellite measured global temperature trend from the University of Alabama, Huntsville show sthat it is cooler now than when he made his testimony in 1988.
UPDATE2: See the reader poll on this issue here
Thank you for posting the monthly temp data – amazing so few bother to check Hansen’s predictions against the actual results.
More here:
http://tinyurl.com/6cms9f
For the record, I meant to type uranium, not plutonium. Why, you ask, is Uranium-based / nuclear power bad? Mainly, it’s byproducts are a diverse number of radioactive elements (fission doesn’t often split atoms in even twos), many that easily kill humans. Secondly, there is no good plan to store the radioactive waste (Yucca is a no go — unless you’re a fan of shipping it all cross country) and no good way to “label” it so 10,000 years from now humans will know not to mess with it. I still stand by my position — the energy must lead now on alternatives/renewables, or we’re all screwed by 2100.
Anthony, Hansen’s a scientist, not a legislator, prosecutor, judge or jury. So obviously his expressions are intended for political impact now.
While I don’t condone some of his language, it’s the unfortunate kind of stuff that is unavoidable when we have battles over resources that no one owns (and where resources users don’t bear the full costs of their activities) and so we have people with different economic interests and preferences fighting over how government is used. I’ve put up several comments on this at at my blog.
TT
[…] expect to hear about these four on the news—unless Obama wins and the government begins criminal prosecution of global warming skeptics and oil executives, as the evil James Hansen […]