Boiling Oceans and Burning Reputations with James Hansen

Hanson does not say what stops runaway green house and how someone may reverse green house on Venus. Geoffrey Landis does cover these in several publications. Plants cycle the CO2 out of the atmoshphere and Corals and other calcium shelled organisms store it perminantly as reefs, chalk, and limestone. If we could introduce organisms that did this into venuses upper atmosphere we could terraform the planet in about 300 years. The catch is they need to be flying plants or corals. Landis suggests airship based coloines flying at 50 km high, just above the nice sulfuric acid clouds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_habitats_and_floating_cities
A population of essentiall self replicating airships with plants in most would do the job. It wont happen in the 21st century but someone will have a go.
In other words Hansen is again ignoring the reason the earth is habitable. Natural negative feed back systems. We have life and that generates soluds phases of Carbon: wood and carbonates. Life also generates dimethyle sulphide the major cloud seeding agent.
The rest is just Lovelock’s daisy world. Its funny that the greens were so much into Gaia Hypothesis in the 1970’s and 80’s but now have totally discarded its key idea. Homeostasis via biologically moderated negative feed backs.

J. Philip Peterson says:
March 14, 2012 at 7:41 pm
“The new president should fire all the global warming kooks in the EPA, NASA, Energy Dept., ETC.”
This is a good time to remind all U.S. citizens to please VOTE appropriately in November so we can clean house at these government agencies…
Hansen, by the way, is no longer a scientist but in fact is just another eco-advocate.. Just read any of his journal papers – most are laced with inappropriate political language and commentary that apparently doesn’t seem to bother the reviewers at these journals.

@ur momisugly New Class Traitor says:
March 15, 2012 at 12:12 am
@ur momisuglycuriousgeorge: not ALL of the disaster-prepping is a waste of time and money. I’m thinking not of climate armageddon or something, but of much more mundane catastrophes like earthquakes, hurricanes, unseasonal weather causing week-long power outages,… all of which HAVE happened in the USA in recent memory.
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I’m quite aware that there are rational reasons to be reasonably prepared for common events. I live in Tornado country and have had more than one pass within 1/2 mile of my house. What I’m referring to is the paranoia that is associated with the TV shows I mentioned, and people like Al Gore, Hansen and others (both in and out of gov’t ) who prey upon, and feed, the irrational fears of individuals and a susceptible public.

GeneDoc says:

His TED talk is laughable. 400K atomic bombs per day?

What is laughable about this? His exact statement is that the amount of energy absorbed due to a power imbalance of 0.6 W/m^2 over the surface of the Earth each day is equal to the energy from exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. It is a simple exercise to verify that this is correct.
To calculate the energy absorbed in a day over the surface of the Earth:
Energy = (0.6 W/m^2) * (5.1 x 10^14 m^2) * (86000 sec / day) = 2.6 x 10^19 Joules
The energy released by the Hiroshima bomb is 50 to 63 x 10^12 J (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield )
If you divide the first number by the second, you get ~400,000 – 500,000 Hiroshima bombs. So, Hansen took the low end of that range.

Hansen better have word with the chaps at the IPCC.

May, 2004
IPCC Expert Meeting on The Science to Address UNFCCC Article 2 including Key Vulnerabilities
Thresholds of type II might be those that are linked directly to the key intrinsic processes of the climate system itself (often non-linear) and might be related to maintaining stability of those processes or some of the elements of the climate system discussed earlier. Some thresholds that all would consider dangerous have no support in the literature as having a non-negligible chance of occurring. For instance, a “runaway greenhouse effect”—analogous to Venus–appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities. So our focus will be on those events that the literature suggests have a non-negligible chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities.
http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc29352/m1/90/

@ur momisugly New Class Traitor says:
March 15, 2012 at 12:12 am
@ur momisuglycuriousgeorge: not ALL of the disaster-prepping is a waste of time and money. I’m thinking not of climate armageddon or something, but of much more mundane catastrophes like earthquakes, hurricanes, unseasonal weather causing week-long power outages,… all of which HAVE happened in the USA in recent memory.

Very little, however, of the ‘mitigation’ or pre-adaptation spending on putative global warming has any value whatsoever in the event of other disasters. And it is all very contra-survival in the (far more likely) event of global cooling. As much of the UK and Europe recently discovered/experienced.
King of the Hill is, of course, the “necessarily skyrocketing energy prices”. That’s outright deliberately murderous.

Speaking of Venus, as many were, there’s been a sudden (~20 yr) slowdown in its rotation, by about 6½ minutes a day, out of about 243 days (actual retrograde rotation period; the sun appears to circle the planet every 117 days because the year is 225 days; got that?? 🙂 ). Whether it is due to planetary interaction or circulation changes in the dense atmosphere or internal sub-crustal changes is unknown.

Michael W says:
March 14, 2012 at 7:58 pm
When I was a government employee, one arrest would have resulted in a suspension, and two would have resulted in dismissal. How many times has this guy been arrested? Why is he still a government employee?
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As seems appropriate I am going to use WIKI as a source (snicker)
From Quigley’s one-volume history of the twentieth century entitled “Tragedy and Hope” (1966}

“….There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the Radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other group, and frequently does so. I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records…..
….It was this group of people, whose wealth and influence so exceeded their experience and understanding, who provided much of the framework of influence which the Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers took over in the United States in the 1930s. It must be recognized that the power of these energetic Left wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the power of the international financial coterie…..
….The Eighty-third Congress set up in 1953 a Special Reece Committee to investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. It soon became clear that people of immense wealth would be unhappy if the investigation went too far and that the “most respected” newspapers in the country, closely allied with these men of wealth, would not get excited enough about any revelations to make the publicity worthwhile. An interesting report showing the Left-wing associations of interlocking nexus of tax-exempt foundations was issued in 1954 rather quietly. Four years later, the Reece Committee’s general counsel, Rene A Wormser, wrote a shocked, but not shocking, book on the subject called “Foundations: Their Power and Influence”.
….The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole….. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds’ central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups….” Tragedy and Hope 1966 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley

None of us here should be surpised there is a major “Money Influence” element to our politics. See JoNova’s Website ~ Climate Coup — The Politics: How the regulating class is using bogus claims about climate change to entrench and extend their economic privileges and political control.
Guest Post: Dr David M.W. Evans http://joannenova.com.au/2012/03/climate-coup-the-politics/#comment-1014902

Markon says:

Greens have already managed to wipe 50,000,000 from the planet with the ban on DDT.

This is a complete falsehood. For one thing, DDT was never banned globally. It was banned in the U.S. where malaria was eradicated.
Secondly, one can’t blame the malaria deaths on countries choosing not to use DDT or even being discouraged from using DDT. In fact, in many places DDT became ineffective against mosquitoes for exactly the sort of reasons that Rachel Carson warned about: Its indiscriminate use in agriculture caused the mosquitoes to develop resistance to it in a textbook example of evolution in action. In India, for example, it is documented in a Nature article that the number of malarial cases skyrocketed at a time when DDT use there was very high and increasing.
There are many reasons why malaria has not been eradicated. To blame these deaths on some supposed worldwide ban on DDT that never existed is a complete fiction. And, to ignore the fact that it was the indiscriminate outdoor use of DDT in agriculture that led both to the largest environmental concerns and very real problems with mosquitoes developing resistance is just to engage in ideological propaganda.

Joel
Laughable due to the “over the top” nature of the scaremongering. I don’t doubt the math. But what does it mean in context? Sure sounds terrible! What’s the total number of Hiroshima bombs’ worth of energy received by Earth every day? And what is the delta due to this “power imbalance”? Let’s see, solar constant is around 1360 W/m2… Less than 0.05%? Or maybe we should use the 1/4 value to represent what reaches Earth? So 4x more: 0.2%? So we typically set off 200 million or so Hiroshima bombs a day? What’s another half million?
And the trillion dollar question still remains: Can we measure it? If not why not? Is it a tragedy that we can’t? Gosh, half a million Hiroshima bombs! Surely we can measure that!
It’s theater, not science, and I try to laugh so I’m not completely disgusted by it.

Is there any evidence that Venus ever had oceans? And there is way way way more CO2 (96.5%) in the atmosphere than water vapor (20 ppm). The atmosphere on Venus is simply in no way comparable to any conceivable atmosphere on Earth.

James Paggett says:

I disagree. They are extremely similar – an almost exact paraphrase.
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Perhaps both he and wikipedia used the same source – that seems highly implausible, but if true you still have the problem of appropriating another source’s words and passing them off as your own.

You are not using Occam’s razor. You are just being ridiculous. How is one possibly supposed to describe the phenomenon of a runaway greenhouse effect due to water vapor feedback without using several words in common? By your standard, one would conclude that every physics textbook has “appropriat[ed] another source’s words” on a wide range of topics. In fact, you would find that practically every scientist in the world was a plagiarist.
I also doubt that one couldn’t find statements from Hansen describing the runaway greenhouse effect with many of the same words or phrases that predate the Wikipedia, but frankly it is not worth my time to check this because you argument is so ridiculous on the face of it.