This really is abuse of Hansen’s position at NASA, what next? Meanwhile China keeps building coal plants, where’s your letter to them Jim? Of course China would tell Hansen to go suck rocks, and Hansen knows it, so he doesn’t try. – Anthony
Guest post by Kirtland Griffin
James Hansen, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, copied me on a letter to the President of Slovenia and their National Assembly. Don’t ask, it’s a long story. But suffice it to say, I got copied.
Seems the Assembly and the President are deciding whether to build a lignite powered electrical generation plant. The actual discussion is financial support. Yes, I mean ONE PLANT. To read this letter, you’d think the destiny of the planet depended upon this one plant. News flash! …. IT DOESN’T!
So how does a US private citizen tell a foreign government not to build a power plant? We are to believe Dr. Hansen is writing as a private citizen and not as a NASA Director. Otherwise it would not be within government policy. Got it?
The most outrageous piece from a quick glance has to be the global tempereature chart going from 1880 to 2012. It is an anomaly chart based on the average of a 40-year period just after the Little Ice Age was beginning to wane. You could not get a more biased chart. Think of measuring the amount of solar radiation received in a particular location as the Sun rose and then compare that to the solar radiation at noon. That should give you some idea.
One interesting piece is this:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1, 2) summarized broad-based assessments with a “burning embers” diagram, which indicated that major problems begin with global warming of 2-3°C. A probabilistic analysis (3), still partly subjective, found a median “dangerous” threshold of 2.8°C, with 95% confidence that the dangerous threshold was 1.5°C or higher.
OK, the beginning of the problem is 2 to 3°C, being partly subjective (fantasy?) So much for evidence.
Then he talks about Greenland and Antarctic ice loss that is accelerating. If he means it is accelerating in the growth direction, he may have something. That is not where he is going.
The facts that Antarctica and Greenland are losing mass at an accelerating rate (5, 6) and sea level is rising at a rate (+3m/millennium) much higher than during the past several thousand years provide strong evidence that the temperature in the past decade (+0.75°C relative to 1880-1920) exceeded the prior Holocene maximum.
Yes, he thows in rising sea levels which aren’t, and somehow this disputes all the evidence that the Holocene Maximum was warmer than now. Peter Pan has nothing on this story.
He then goes on a dissertation about the causes of radical changes in the distant past, which of course have nothing to do with the Sun and its variations. No, it’s all about CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Rule #1: Never admit the Sun changes anything.
Then he goes over the edge with a long discussion of CO2 and it’s predicted effects based on climate models which Phil Jones, Head of the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia, UK says, “none of them work”.
Go ahead and read the rest of the letter and keep in mind that all predictions are the result of models that do not work. When he talks about current temperatures and other climate data, go look on the Internet to see what is happening. Go to original sources, not what someone else says. The links in this article may help you get started. You will begin to wonder where this fellow gets his information.
As for Slovenia, go ahead and build your power plant. China is building more than one a week. Your contribution is a drop in the bucket, but a very important bucket for Slovenia. If your people need power, give it to them.
See Slovenia’s Energy Sources
75% of the population in India and China still cook and heat with charcoal, coal, wood, trash, stover etc.
Slovenia should file a formal inquiry with the US Embassy wanting to know why the US Government (NASA) is interfering in their internal affairs.
That might clip Hansen’s wings a bit.
I am just waiting for Hansen to do a “Kony Guy” and run screaming through the streets, shouting at the traffic and generally have a public psychotic episode. I am not being cruel and I hope it does not happen but I more than half expect it to happen. The guy is off his rocker IMHO.
Doug Proctor says:April 3, 2012 at 8:38 pm
I thought China was one coal fired power plant per month. The nuclear power plants – 4 per year for 6 years or something?
But note China is doing themselves, and probably everyone else a favour by building new, clean coal plants (and nuclear plants).
Because right now every man and his dog who needs energy is burning dirty, low grade, sometimes wet, coal in old, run down furnaces.
Get out in the countryside, and every hotel, factory, chicken or pig farm, etc, has its own little furnace, boiler and coal pile.
I rather suspect the same thing may be happening in Slovenia.
I think Andrew says it all. “America, what the hell were you thinking?”
But then again, coming from Australia where we made a mammologist our chief climate change fearmonger, I’m hardly in a position to cast the first (or second) stone. Oh, the shame …
+/- 0.1 degrees error at 1890 ! Nuts !!
It’s about time a statistician did some proper analysis.
It became clear to me sometime ago that Hansen values his agenda more than those inconvenient facts. In short, he believes his own press. The spotlight of the congressional hearings may have been too much for him. Now, more often than not he comes off like the consummate chicken little. Why is he still employed?
America, what the hell were you thinking?
Well I think some explanation is in order to explain how NASA could go wrong, but the short version goes like this…
It was the 70’s, and hippies were cool, and NASA hired like mad and some hippies were smart enough to get hired. The drugs hadn’t addled their brains all that much yet. (And yes this is kind of the funny haha short version….)
Or for the longer story of how it happened..
Dr. Hansen is just one of those leftovers from that era along with many others..
Remember, NASA over-hired during that time and happened to hire some losers among the many very good people it hired for the space program and some of those people festered and stuck around for many years.
The best of the crew jumped ship for more lucrative positions and/or retired and/or were happy being productive where they were, while hippies like Jimbo got promoted because in Government especially but its true anywhere that they over-promote in general and people tend to get over-promoted and people especially in academia are accredited not with as much with how smart they are but how much they publish no matter how bad it is.
In this case, Dr. Hansen has never been correct but he publishes a lot and gets grants and has friends in high places, so of course he is promoted and too much so. So he can be wrong in his science, but if his philosophy sounds good to his higher ups, he gets praise just because they think it sounds good. Think of it as an echo chamber and a bunch of people just agreeing with each other without any critical thinking or rational thought put into it at all.
The philosophy of the hippy era is still around here with the idea that man should be one with nature (or that man should have zero impact on nature) and the believers in this philosophy include many of Dr. Hansen’s contemporaries in politics who agree with his politics and how he spins his science. Its in this vein that he can get away with bad science that is not justified and like many like him from this era can have a completely incorrect picture of humanity and nature in general and everyone thinks its ok.
But by far, this is not an isolated instance, Dr. Hansen in general is just the most prevalant because of his high stature in NASA. This is probably why the green movement is so strong today, and its been said by many others countless times, but the ages of the politicians in their primes are at the ages where this philosophy is at its prime.
The next generation will take over at some point and some of this nonsense will go away hopefully. My generation makes fun of hippies in general and the idea of seperating man from nature at all is just so laughable and the idea of going green is getting to be so funny and stupid as to be a laugh riot.
As I tell my friends who were at one time somewhat worried about the environment:
Why worry about the small stuff like light bulbs, plastic bags and recycling when it makes no difference?
You can make more difference by simply convincing 100 hippies to live in yurts without electricity in the end as I proved to them, and these are the same idiots who are forcing the rest of us to pay more for light bulbs, mandatory recycling, and plastic bags because they believe everyone should pay in the end instead of it being a choice.
If you do not practice what you preach and instead try to force everyone else to sacrifice, you are nothing but a raving lunatic who deserves nothing but insults. And that goes especially for people like Dr. Hansen who make no effort to personally check their environmental impact personally and expect everyone else to do so.
So yes, blame the US for Hansen, but I think every nation has its own Hansen and we all have our own Gore. Its quite stupid that anyone takes them seriously after they have never been right and made careers about being wrong, but I guess some people just were not cut out to make money on the stock market or to work on actual space projects for NASA, and so NASA to be nice put them where they wouldn’t hurt the public too much. (or so we thought.)
One every 5 days. 6 per month, not 1.
markx says:
April 3, 2012 at 10:45 pm
Because right now every man and his dog [in China] who needs energy is burning dirty, low grade, sometimes wet, coal in old, run down furnaces.
Get out in the countryside, and every hotel, factory, chicken or pig farm, etc, has its own little furnace, boiler and coal pile.
I rather suspect the same thing may be happening in Slovenia.
Correct you are, Mark. There are seven Slovenian techies working on a project here (in Kabul) and one said that it it weren’t for coal, every household outside Ljubljana would be burning twigs for warmth.
@ur momisugly Tucci78 I asked one what “Shove that watermelon all the way up your dupa, Cargo Cultist?” was in Slovenian, and he’s still laughing hysterically…
Viet Nam plans 90 new coal-based power plants by 2025, investing US$83bn to add 106GW of coal-based capacity to the sector.
U.S. energy developer PHI Group has signed an agreement with Hoang Ngoc Joint Stock Company, a Vietnamese company, to build a coal-fired power plant in Viet Nam.
The 2,000-megawatt plant will be constructed in Vinh Hau Village, An Phu District, An Giang Province, Viet Nam. PHI Group intends to supply coal through its relationships in Southeast Asia, according to a company statement.
Last month PHI Group signed an agreement with Sao Nam Group in Viet Nam to build a 2,400- to 3,600-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Hai Khe Commune, Hai Lang District, Southeast Quang Tri Economic Zone.
Vietnamese specialists once came to a conclusion that the coal exploitation capability in Viet Nam would be some 60 million tons PA. However, the program which has been made public shows that the coal volume to be exploited would increase continuously, from 47 million tons in 2012 to 58 million tons by 2015, then to 65 million tons and 75 million tons by 2020 and 2030, respectively.
If they need more coal Australia will be able to supply all the cheap coal Viet Nam will ever need.
Good news that, Viet Nam should build more coal fired power stations. It is the cheapest way to make power, the government is making a very good decision here. Wonderful stuff. looks like PHI will be building these very modern plants all over Vietnam.
So with these new plants coming on stream, Viet Nam should have plenty of cheap electricity. Hurrah!
Hansen toured New Zealand last year and at the end of his tour he sent a similar letter to a New Zealand newspaper. Throughout his tour he had been trying to discourage development of lignite and oil resources in New Zealand.
Whenever quoted in media articles, he was associated with NASA which carries a fair degree of prestige from New Zealand’s perspective.
Slovenia (together with Croatia) has an ageing, and not very safe, nuclear plant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kr%C5%A1ko_Nuclear_Power_Plant
which may need to close, so I wonder if Hansen could arrange subsidy from the NASA funds for the ever more costly Slovenia’s electricity imports.
Hansen hasn’t lost his marbles. It’s becoming glaringly clear that he never had any in the first place. So how does he continue to be employed, at public expense, as Director of GISS? And why aren’t more people in the US government asking that same question?
The anglo americans were doing this back in the 1970s with nuclear power – going to lengths to dissuade nations from using nuclear power for [i]environmental[/i] reasons.
The real reason is that cheap energy brings prosperity to a nation, and enables it to compete better internationally.
The Anglo americans have backed Chinese industry ( slave labour ), with all their factories there. They don’t want countries to compete with this.
It’s not complicated.
Hansen is a child of the 60’s that never grew up.
I wonder how Hansen’s “private citizen” routine would work for others:
Greetings,
I am Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America, also known as The Leader of The Free World.
I am writing to you as a private citizen to inform the leadership of your country that their pursuit of nuclear weapons will result in damage to the environment globally and your country specifically, and will also lead to severe lasting damage to your economy, which shall have a great and lasting impact on the health and longevity of those living in your country.
These are my personal views as a private citizen and should in no way be considered indicative of the official positions I may hold while serving in the federal government of the United States of America.
Yeah, I wouldn’t buy it either.
Other similar cases:
In December 2011, the Flemish Government refused to give a construction permit tot the German company ‘E.On’ to build a coal fired power station in Antwerp, Belgium. This power station would provide for 8% of the electricity needs of Belgium. Reasons of the refusal? Too much emission of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter. Also, the emission of CO2 was a problem.
In August 2011, a Dutch court annulled German utility RWE/Essent’s environmental permits for a coal-fired power plant in Eemshaven (The Netherlands). The cost price of this plant was 2.6 billion euro. Essent had already started work on the 1,560 megawatt hard coal/biomass unit and the construction was halfway. The plant was due to come online in 2013. (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/24/rwe-idUSL5E7JO28A20110824 )
I don’t say that Dr. Hansen wrote a letter to the governments of The Netherlands and Belgium!!
Andrew,
We don’t need Hansen being given BLUE pills – he’s rampant enough already.
Maybe he’s already taking green ones, though.
Tucci78 says:
April 3, 2012 at 8:31 pm
I think it might be something like: “potisk to lubenica vsi izvrsten vaš dupa”
Hansen has a strange obsession with the residence time of the plant’s CO2 in the atmosphere:
“The fact is that most CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels stays in the surface carbon/climate system for millennia.”
“This is a simple consequence of the long life of CO2 in the air …”
“… given the long life of CO2 in the air”
However, this paper suggests the residence time is 5-15 years
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2009/04/carbon-dioxide-in-atmosphere-5-15-years-only/
The oceans alone release and absorb 20 times as much CO2 as man, ensuring fast turnover.
I assume Hansen is trying to emotively link CO2 to the bad press of the longer residence time of flurocarbons (70 to 100 years).
Wan’t it Hansen who posited that it was the enormous sulphur aerosol emissions from Chinese power stations that was causing global warming to pause?
He’s just typical of a present day surplus of hypocritical, nosey-parkering and interfering bizzy-bodies. The poor old planet must be in really sad way if it can afford all these people, have they really got all the spare time and nothing else to do but tell everyone else how to live their lives? Putting on my sociologist’s hat and an oversized pair of dentures I might venture to suggest they’ve got Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and ‘need treatment’. But, that would just make me intolerant and hypocritical as them.
Live (and you do pretty well doncha Jimbo?) and let live.
Hansen is quite simply a fanatic. He can’t change his mind and he just can’t stop. It’s only a matter of time until he gets himself and “the cause” into a Gleickian mess.
Pointman