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
LOL!
How much closer are we to Hansen’s climate Armegeddon since his famous 1988 spreech?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1988
I rest my case. Thank you.
Joe McCarthy’s critical flaw was he didn’t know when to shut up. Hansen is following the same pattern.
HILARIOUS!
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1988
Global GISS temperature anomaly in 1988: + 0.50°C
Global GISS temperature anomaly in 2008: + 0.35°C
0.15°C COOLER today !!
Hansen’s own graph shows it’s cooler today then when he made his idiot speech in 88!!!!
Can anyone possibly find a way to make an ass and laughing stock of oneself any faster and more effectively than that?
LOL!
He’s contradicted by his own bleeping data!!!!
Hansen has staked his entire legacy on AGW. He senses he is about to be ground under by the his own models not performing as advertised. This could be his last attempt to save himself for the history books. Unfortunately, as stated previously, the dumbest folks in the crowd are the ones who have been elected to govern us.
“A little rebellion now and then…is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, 1787”
Do I smell tea in the harbor?
[…] settled in this area, and there are no other possible explanations for recent warming. It may even lead to convictions! At least then it would go before people who separate evidence from assertion and […]
Sounds like Hitler in the bunker. He calls for the destruction of his enemies, while he commits professional suicide.
A Scientist??? HAHAHA
The quoted text says “will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial….” Had he said he would file suit, then the pretrial discovery process would force him to open up all his data and procedures behind his claims.
Assuming the government doesn’t file charges (congress is more inclined to make new laws), then perhaps 350.org or Gore’s group would. That would make it somewhat more difficult to gain access, especially if Hansen doesn’t testify.
Of course, scientific policy and the Freedom of Information Act should make all this moot.
I think I can find a little time to send notes to my congresscritters this morning.
James Hansen is a federal employee subject to the Hatch Act, which prohibits people from political activities while in a duty status, i.e., when working or in a capacity that indicates he is representing the government. If he made this speech in that capacity (where he talks about going after specific politicians during this election cycle) , then I don’t see how he could possibly not be in violation of that Act.
I’m a federal employee and the Hatch Act is taken VERY seriously, especially in Presidential Election years. It is one of the few things that can cause you to lose your job. If I were to have made a similar speech I would no doubt be standing in front of my General Counsel trying to explain why I shouldn’t lose my job, but Hansen (“Look, Look, I’m being repressed”) is apparently special.
The transition from pocket protector geek to C02 superstar appears to have inflated his ego a bit (ok, more than a bit)
This has all the marks of nothing more than a publicity stunt, but one which it seems that he’s daring the current administration to fire him. IANAL, so I have to ask, under what statute could oil execs be tried for “crimes against humanity and nature?” I wonder if he isn’t hoping to be fired so that Obama can use that as an election issue, and imagine that he’ll be given a position of even greater glory and honor in an Obama administration? If I were a member of Congress and had this jackass spouting this stuff under oath, in a hearing before a committee I belonged to, I’d ask him what I just asked, about under what statute he imagines this could be done, so as to reveal it as nothing more than a publicity stunt.
Oh – another thing for anyone considering writing a politician. Consider sending http://wermenh.com/climate/science.html as background material. I designed it to be as neutral as I could and simple enough to just concentrate on key hypotheses that friends, journalists, teachers, and politicians can understand. (And also a few scientists who’ve forgotten what scientific method is and why it’s important.)
It’s not the sort of page that people who need to read it will stumble across, so I appreciate any help in passing it out.
Unfortunately, this is only Hansen’s most recent outrageous statement. His most repulsive statement (in my opinion) was made last year in testemony to the Iowa Utilities Board (in opposition, of course, to the construction of a new coal-fired power plant):
“… If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species …”
To even make a suggestion that the supposed loss of animal species due to global warming was equivalent to the holocaust was beyond the pale for me. I lost ** all ** respect for him after that…
Frank
I suspect a lot of this is posturing (see SLAPP suits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation), but large portions probably lie in the psychological projection and hubris categories. Should it go that far, the defense will have an opportunity to subpoena lots of so-far hidden things such as the GISTEMP code and special agreements that let a public employee perhaps illegally and certainly unethically do political work on the job. “Pride goes before a fall, and a haughty spirit before destruction.” We may be seeing a re-enactment of a Greek tragedy here.
James Hansen is the one guilty of spreading lies, and should be brought up on crimes against humanity, and on being a traitor. Let the Grand Inquisitor himself be stripped of his job and put in jail.
A couple of comments on the legal and policy status of US government employees:
All US government employees take the oath of office which includes “protecting and defending the constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
In earlier years US government employees were deemed to be acting as “agents of the government” and we immune from law suits in their private capacity. Changes in the last ten years have removed that “sovereign authority” defense and any US government employee can now be sued in their private capacity. Hence why I had to privately obtain at my own expense suitable insurance for myself when I was a senior government official. That personal liability possibility certainly weighed upon my mind when I was making decisions regarding public policy that could result in litigation against me.
Finally, I am astonished that the NASA permits him, as their employee, to make all of these statements to the public since he by doing so he is effectively making policy and potentially committing the US government to courses of action. That is why you are generally enjoined from making any statements to the public without submitting them to legal counsel and approval through the public affairs office. I think any reasonable defense attorney could clearly prove that Hansen was “communicating a threat” and “attempting to influence private behavior through the color of the office.” Those are both extremely serious charges and very difficult to defend yourself against when you have made public comments to that effect.
Lastly, the most serious legal jeporady that he is setting himself up for is for violation of the law known as the “Anti-deficiency Act.” That is essentially where a government employee has committed the government to a policy that requires the expenditure of money for which no legal appropriation or obligation has been approved. For instance, you tell a company or an individual to do something that requires them to spend money and when they attempt to bill the government for the cost they find out that the government employee who ordered/asked them to do that didn’t have authority to do so. That means the government employee could be required by a court to personally pay for their expenditures made in good faith. It is likely that several billion dollars in remediation expenditures that he would have to personally reimburse would certainly get his attention.
Very interesting actions on his part. If he were an employee in my department we would be having some very serious discussions with him in my office with my legal advisor present and an attorney at the Justice Department standing by to file charges against him.
Cheers
Hansen’s latest estimate for the climate sensitivity to CO2 of 6 degrees celsius is as far from the IPCC consensus of 3 degrees as the view that the sensitivity is zero. Yet he wants criminal charges against those holding the latter view.
I doubt that he appreciates the irony.
Here’s a link to Hansen’s infamous 1988 paper which he used to back-up his Congressional testimony and the only real paper from the global warming world which makes any kind of temperature prediction that can be tested.
The graph on page 9347 (it is a short paper not 9,000 pages long) shows the three Scenarios and the resulting temperature predictions. GHG Forcings ended up between Scenario B and C but the actual temps are well below his model predictions. Add in the latest drop in temps over the past year and he is way off.
http://runningpast.com/images/hansen_1988_chart.gif
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_etal.pdf
It is frightening that Hansen has still has any credibility. He still hasn’t explained how his “hockeystick” fails to show the Medieval Warm Period.
Whilst I feel that politics and science should be kept separate, it is worrying that false propoganda about AGW may cause our Governments to divert resources into meaningless costly policies at the expense of proper use of our taxes. The worst hit will of course be the poor. Already we see signs that biofuels induce inreases in the cost of basic foods.
The problem is that he has invested his whole life in global warming. He sees the cooling that is going on and believes it is temporary. Any belief otherwise would repudiate his whole life. As more and more people doubt the “true religion”, the more desperate he becomes.
The fact that he controls both the models and the measurements that validate the models makes him suspect. So does the fact that he founded the whole religion. He is a loose cannon at NASA, apparently subject to no control whatsoever. He should have been fired long ago.
This guy Hansen does seem to have gone a bit off the deep end, but, given enough rope, such people will hang themselves eventually. Nutty bureaucrats like Hansen are unfortunately inevitable.
Of course, the knee-jerk Gore bashers are ALSO distracted from the real issues – overuse of energy combined with rampant population growth.
Interesting note on projection bias, though. George W. and the Republicans have been the most excellent models of projection bias. I guess Hansen has learned from his superiors.
I do wonder who benefits from all this misdirection around climate change. If you follow the money, it’s those who make money from oil, followed by coal, etc. (A rise in cost of one commodity also pulls up the substitutes.)
Good luck to us all. We do need to keep level heads and stick to the science. I applaud Anthony for that.
(www.timprosserfuturing.wordpress.com)
I’m wondering about Mr. Hansen’s finances now myself. I’m wondering who is paying him to falsify the data and demand the immediate arrest of oil company execs?
Ah, show trials to distract the public.
He knows, you know; this is his last desparate attempt; the game is up.
Timo, this man has no credibility. Unfortuantely, he still has an audience.
Does anyone have a link to the transcript?