That headline is NOT a typo, that’s what they say:
If there was even any doubt about Hansen changing from scientist to advocate, that doubt is now shattered.
Meanwhile, amazingly, James Hansen has agreed to a debate. Hansen is going to debate with Don Blankenship of Massey coal company.
This just in, from NASA climate scientist James Hansen, in response to Massey Energy President Don Blankenship’s challenge to debate global warming, the coal industry and the West Virginia economy. I received this note from Dr. Hansen, who asked that I forward the information on to Blankenship.
This is going to become ground zero for the issue. Word has it the people of WV are becoming quite energized.
Hansen has a new commentary on Yale’s Environment 360 blog called “A Plea to President Obama: End Mountaintop Removal.”
Stay tuned. This is going to escalate most likely.
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Ray (12:19:51) :
Opps, sorry Charles the moderator… English is not my first language and at times, one can slip out.
Reply: Nothing to apologize for. I normally am unconcerned with grammar and spelling. However, the misuse of insure is one of my personal pet peeves, and to misuse and misspell at the same time just “pushed my buttons” ~ charles the overly sensitive and sometimes ridiculously pedantic moderator.
timetochooseagain (12:09:03) :
Thanks. So am I getting this right: a 3C rise in the example above, would more likely trend to the (10C->14 C and 20C-> 22C) scenario rather than the (10C-> 12C and 20C->24C) picture.
Your explanation makes a lot of sense. If we had a summer of cloud then this would make the nights warmer and the days cooler. I recognise that kind of summer!
So our nights will be less chilly and our days a bit warmer. Doesn’t sound too catastrophic to me.
Your note about possible UHI contamination of lows being a bigger issue than highs was most thought provoking. It certainly adds a new dimension for me as to why the surface station project is so important.
I don’t think he should debate global warming with Hansen, he should concentrate on why we should all be sceptics.
The failure of peer review.
Predefined outcomes, rather than letting the science lead you where it goes.
The bias of funding.
The appalling secrecy of the climate community.
The general lack of debate and claims that ‘the science is settled’.
The divergence of real data from models and lack of acknowledgement or explanation.
The attempts to completely cover up the warm periods in the past.
The admitted exaggerations.
Trumpeting global warming catastrophe claims and then quietly withdrawing them.
Allowing the public to confuse fact from fiction (movies).
The biased reporting.
The failure of the precautionary principle to consider alternative disadvantages.
Ignoring completely the benefits of global warming.
Our very real need for energy.
The total lack of reliable alternatives (esp when the Green community are against nuclear too)
The huge amounts of money already wasted on vanity power production.
The inability of climate change proponents to live up to their ideals.
Carbon credits – using your wealth to buy someone else’s CO2 allowance rather than actually cutting back.
How can you trust anyone who supports that mess?
“rosalind (10:20:17) :
Can’t I be against mountain top removal, a hideous insult to the environment, and also be a climate skeptic?”
Well this time Jimbo has got the sceptics running scared, hasn’t he? Nobody likes the idea of mountain top removal, nor of ripping up Wyoming earth with open cast mining. I see this as Hansen’s trump card up his sleeve on the eve of the EPA deadline, and a sign he’s losing the argument.
Can we take some comfort here? http://www.climaticoanalysis.org/post/security-trumps-environment-as-obama-gives-green-light-to-us-consumption-of-alberta’s-oil/
Never forget that Obama is first and foremost a politician. As such he cannot afford to turn a deaf ear to Hansen, neither can he afford to wreck the economy.
I for one am not downhearted yet.
Debates like this remind of the old chestnut about wresting with a pig. You both get dirty but the pig likes it. Hansen and his ilk have abandoned reasoned discourse but love publicity. Did anyone catch The Goracle’s smug expression when speaking to congress? He laughed off any real questions and ignored the holes in his theory confident that the main stream media would cover his warts and he was correct for vast majority of the media. I am just not sure about going into a debate where “being correct” counts for very little.
West Virginia has Zero long-term warming. Using the IPCC-favored start date of the 1970s shows warming, but using the long-term data since 1895 there has been ZERO.
See: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/WestVirginia.htm for graphs of WV annual and summer temperatures
Gino Danno Bruno,
When the AGW extremists turn off the coal, the locals willjust warm up a few more meth labs.
The survivors will move out and move on.
Hank (11:51:31) :
MTR ?!? Do we really need an acronym for mountain top removal?
I’m with you. I was wondering what ‘MTR’ was.
I come from a small town called Aberfeldy in Perthshire, Scotland. There is a huge barite deposit in the mountains to the north which has been mined for about 30 years now and is nearing exhaustion. (Barite is used primarily in the oil drilling industry as an additive to drilling muds.) There is an even larger deposit of barite a few miles to the east for which permission to mine has not been granted because of ‘the damage the mining will do to the environment’. Note that in the 30 years since mining started at Aberfeldy have been absolutely no environmental problems.
The green powers that are would rather the mining be done in somewhere like Morocco (there are huge barite deposits there for example), where there are no controls on environmental issues, than in the UK where the controls are extremely strict.
I think that ‘NIMBY’ is the appropriate term.
Alan Cheetham (12:53:52) :
Looks like West-Virginia is situated at the Nexus of climate change. Maybe we should move all those poor people threaten by AGW there.
I suspect a combination of Google journalism and politically-correct sub-editing.
“He also believed that there was a link between solar activity and the earth’s climate, although he never argued that there was an association with global warming.”
“It is now believed that solar activity has a real climatic effect, although smaller than that produced by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.”
Why that stuff needs weaving in there beats me. Bad show.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/science-obituaries/5595750/Jack-Eddy.html
I’ve just had a look at the link from the top of the post: ‘It’s getting hot in here’. I see it’s from the ‘Youth Climate Movement’.
Oh dear. Oh dearie dearie me.
I don’t know about you but I was a bit of a twat when I was a youth and I thought I could change the planet. At least then I didn’t have a blogosphere to air my adolescent and immature views and on which I would no doubt be looking back upon now with extreme embarrassment.
An interesting situation, this debate. The problem is is that the enviromental movement ascribes to nature an instrinsic value; that its pristine appearance is a value in itself, without defining the basis of ‘value’. At some point it comes down to this – the coal will be removed either through mine shafts or mountain top removal (with later restoration). In either case there will be subsistence.
[snip]
I hope the debate goes along the lines of showing where Hansen has been wrong and where there is significant doubt. Trying to promote any kind of alternate theory is fraught with it’s own set of doubts. The key is Hansen and his cronies are pushing an agenda driven, not by science, but by questionable models and questionable data.
Leon Brozyna (13:16:18) : Especially considering that the nature of “value” has been subject to many philosophical and economic debates. I subscribe to marginal utility personally but not even the “opposite” (Marx’s “labor theory”) side of the spectrum could justify the apparent green definition, which appears to be the logic of a small child…pretty=valuable.
Steve (Paris) (13:10:55) :
I suspect a combination of Google journalism and politically-correct sub-editing.
Political correctness offends me deeply.
Mr Blankenship should ensure the debate takes place in an enclosed, darkened auditorium, then at some point in the proceedings have the power disconnected.
That should demonstrate quite clearly the future without coal.
Who said rapid mountain “errosion” was bad for life? Cutting down mountain tops is just a form of accelerated errosion, right?
Take a look at this article: Erosion of vast mountain range led to explosion of early life
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2204/erosion-vast-mountains-led-explosion-life
“Now experts have found evidence that this early evolutionary explosion came about because of rapid erosion led to a massive influx of nutrients into the ancient oceans.”
It might not be all that bad for life for coal companies to release all those minerals back in nature. Just like CO2, plants need minerals to grow, produce oxygen, fix CO2, etc.
Bring it on. Accountant? No problem/ They are used to making pitches to securities analysts and bankers. They also and I emphais9ize do NOY get allowance for forcasts and projections. it is against the law. Hansen will toss out all kinds of future numbers and an accountant can shred that tactic in a minute.
All Blankenship has to do is display how far Hansen past forecasts exhibited a variance from actual. Accountants are up there with psycholigists as baloney detectors. In fact, the total collapse of hansen can be done in the form of 3-4 questions that will take away all doubt that hansens arguments are emotions he twists facts to defend.
Hansen has it all to lose. All we have to do is look up his history and demand he defend why he was so far off the mark in a forecast.
Has Hansen ever made a forecast off by more than 8 degrees?? YUP
If he has, is he admitting he is known to err? Yep
So how can we believe his model has no error when his past forecasts always have various errors?
By the way, our planet is loaded with volcanos. They are mountain top removal events. God designed it that way.
The difference is the mass extent of the deposition of volcanic ash. Shall we declare volcanos illegal?
Ray-Can I give you my PayPal account? Move where is the question.
Seriously, Massey has done a fairly good job of restoring some of its “top mining” sites as well as their strip operations-it does take several years afterward to become “aesthetically pleasing”. Blankenship will probably have some slides of those and he seems to be pretty up to date on comparitive costs of wind/solar vs coal/Not gas.
nice comment at the end of the page 😉
http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2009/06/17/get-arrested-with-james-hansen-to-stop-mtr/
[snip – sorry, for your own good]
Hansens’ argument is that if there is a problem, shut everything down.
Don’t allow anyone to do something different, change the way they do business.
Like they did to our forests after fires. No salvage logging. All the fuel left kept acting like kindling to take even more sustainable yield forest off the market.
Nobody is allowed to do anything but go to green rallies and pretend they got there without producing any Toxic CO2.
No solutions allowed.
“We must just inssure that there will be people from both sides of the issue in the room.
Reply: Gak! ~ ensure~ charles the “button just got pushed” moderator”
If they’re both going to be in the same room, a little insurance might be in order….
Reply: Noted ~ charles the moderator
You can’t throw whole mountaintops into streamsbeds any more than the Hydraulic Mines filled California’s rivers with debris and got eventually shut down. W.Virginia needs a coal industry for it’s economy, but it doesn’t need coal mining totally shut down in hard times.
Which is no doubt Hansen’s aim.
And the people of W. Virginia will be stuck both with a crippled economy and a mess that won’t get taken care of because the operators will simply leave.
Joe Appalachia is the one who will get hurt.
Hansen and the Greenies won’t be sticking around to help out after the coal operators are gone.