There’s not a whole lot I can say about this, except that I’m looking forward to his retirement soon. Then, he can speak as a “private citizen” as much as he wants.
Here’s the full story.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/06/nasa-scientist-climate-change?newsfeed=true
Related articles
- Gore, Hansen, Trenberth to make Antarctic PR expedition (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Why I must speak out on climate change: James Hansen at TED2012 (junkscience.com)
- NASA’s Hansen tries to tell Slovenia not to build a power plant (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Hey Hansen! Where’s The Beef?
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observa says:
April 7, 2012 at 10:38 pm
…particularly as he appears to want to get out of the business of picking winners and interfering in our lives like so many of his brethren.
Oh?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/03/nasas-hansen-tries-to-tell-slovenia-not-to-build-a-power-plant/
How very unfortunate – that picture looks somewhat Chucky-esque to me.
Poor chap really does need a psych eval – paranoia and delusions of grandeur seem to be to the fore.
This smacks of panic. The pause in GW (before the Grand Global Cooling)
must be really getting to him and his Team …
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/9192494/Climate-scientists-are-losing-the-public-debate-on-global-warming.html
The artical is of little importance – but the comments are certainly interesting. Hope that someone at Edinburgh Uni is looking at them!
Except that CO2 doesn’t wash out of the atmosphere nearly as rapidly as pesticides
Every time it rains. All pure clean rain is carbonic acid, water vapour and carbon dioxide have this irresistable attraction for each other. Carbon dioxide is also heavier than than air, which means that it will always sink to the ground displacing air unless something works to change that.
In other words, carbon dioxide is fully part of the Water Cycle which cools the Earth – think deserts to imagine an Earth without any water.
If the “carbon” tax money is to be given back to the public, (surely he jests), then they would be able to afford the higher gas and electric prices and carry on purchasing. It is of course a good job-creation scheme, as another bureacracy would be created in the collecting and redistributing of it.
I confess I am worried about the future for my grandchildren, that it isn’t destroyed by Hansen, Gore, et al.
Marcella Twixt says:
April 7, 2012 at 3:56 pm
“Past publicly acknowledghed funding sources for CO2 Science have included ExxonMobil and the Western Fuels Association…. at present, though CO2 Science takes steps to ensure that the identities of its corporate donors remains strictly secret.
Has that answered your question, Lars?”
No Marcella it did not. The study says:
“any attempts to mitigate undesirable climatic changes using restrictive regulations are condemned to failure, because the global natural forces are at least 4-5 orders of magnitude greater than available human controls.”
which is different from what you imply.
Furthermore you answered only selectively to where you thought you were right. You need to face the whole question – what might be the consequences of our using fossil resources be.
Bill Tuttle points out that Hansen was opposed to a new proposed Lignite fuelled power station in Slovenia but I’d give him a pass on that given his stance on a switch to broad based CO2E taxing with offsetting income tax cuts. Hansen might naturally deduce such fuel would not get a guernsey under his preferred tax regime, similar to another warmist in Barry Brook from Adelaide Uni blogging here-http://bravenewclimate.com/
Barry believes CO2 warming is a problem but given what he knows about ‘reshiftable’ energy, he believes nuclear power is the only sensible solution and certainly that would fit comfortably with Hansen’s CO2E tax paradigm.
Then dennisambler notes- “If the “carbon” tax money is to be given back to the public, (surely he jests), then they would be able to afford the higher gas and electric prices and carry on purchasing.”
to which the answer is, the price effect if high enough could easily outweigh the income effect, or essentially you can protect income via econ0mising on fossil fuel use (or rather the marketplace will respond accordingly) As for jesting about giving back tax cuts for carbon taxing that is simply for the political process, sufficeth to say with a complete blanket opposition to CO2E taxing at present, we still get a mixture of that and the lunar quantitative controls to boot. It behoves us to partner sensible warmist approaches to environmentalism when we encounter it. After all we do agree on some CO2 induced warming and the friend of my adverasry on one account is not necessarily my adversary on another. The science and the economic arguments are somewhat separate issues unless skeptics are to be guilty of a head in the sand attitude by concatenating the two.
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In a way Hansen is correct: AGW is as immoral as slavery. He and his fellow AGW believers wish to enslave humanity by forcing us under the yoke of their extreme demands and fear mongering.
Smokey
I don’t know the ins and out of your electoral system and I do agree your next president will be either Romney or the incumbent but isn’t there a larger emphasis on delegates rather then outright votes?
As I understand, some states like Florida use a ‘winner take all’ system, where Romney accrued all the delegates, but others are caucuses and some are non-binding.
I’m not sure why you say a vote for anyone else is a wasted vote? Is it because of the inevitability of Romney’s nomination?
You do know that if he wins POTUS, he will carry on the torch for Obama, just as Obama carried on the excessive bailouts and middle east conflict instituted by the Bush administration.
Fighting wars for NATO and legislating through the executive branch are merely precedents now.
-Party irrelevant.
Sam Geoghegan,
Most states have a winner takes all result. And any vote other than Romney or Obama is wasted because that selection cannot possibly win. Best to vote for the lesser of two evils, where the vote actually means something.
As for the rest, we do the best we can under the circumstances.
Hansen is delusional in his thoughts:
“Runaway” greenhouse effect. That never happened in the history of the Earth. Not even during the PETM 55 million years ago.
That sounds depressing. There is really only one winner every time- the system. The two party system is a subterfuge perpetrated upon the American people.
Australia is the same but with nowhere near as much at stake.
Hansen is projectng here.
Genesis 3:19 reads, “…by the sweat of thy brow, thou shalt earn thy bread…” and ever since civilization began, we’ve been doing all we can to avoid that sweat. Until the industrial revolution, when we started producing CO2 in large quantities, we had to rely on people power -result was widespread slavery. . It’s the CAGWers who are trying to put us back on people power which would automatically put us on a return to slavery.
Andrew says:
April 7, 2012 at 9:43 pm
I’ll take “random clumping” over “rampant corruption” any day.
James Hansen’s legacy has already been irrevocably imbedded into our general culture, to the dismay of CAGW acolytes.
I think his legacy, as a longtime leader of a major US government scientific institution, is clearly his creation of systematic biasing in climate science that inherently supports his own personal form of subjective pseudo-religious ideology.
Hansen would be the high spiritual leader in any alternate universes which totally endorse the Jerome Ravetz version of post-normal science.
John
“It’s the CAGWers who are trying to put us back on people power which would automatically put us on a return to slavery.”
Whilst you could argue the IR eventually freed the masses from drudgery it’s a bit of poetic licence to think my parents and grandparents were slaves with their per capita use of fossil fuels, or that somehow they lived much less fulfilling lives as a result. I’m quite sure there are plenty of left over green/hippy/ agrarian socialists (Pol Pottyists?) who have a somewhat delusional view of what the horse, wind and millstream could produce, but a warmist like Barry Brook is under no illusions and really when you boil off the rhetoric Hansen is just arguing to up the private cost of fossil fuels to better reflect a truer social cost.
There is no doubt in my mind that CAGW gained such traction because it hit a raw environmental nerve and there is no getting away from that for the market side of politics. Yes the usual suspects stuffed up the policy responses as we knew they inevitably would, but unless the overarching concern for the environment is addressed by our side of politics, they’ll be back pressing the environmental concern buttons and perpetually trying out their lunar quantitative controls. We need to appreciate that and look for rational and responsible allies among warmists and the environmentally concerned in general. We are after all scientific people and know what sort of economic environment that requires in order to flourish. Free and unfettered markets naturally but we need to be acutely aware that the very nature and impact of taxation will indelibly set the constitution of that marketplace and there are obvious signs our currently constituted one has serious problems. That’s where warmists gained such traction in the first place with such flimsy science.
Hansen is merely repeating what is apparently the “new mantra,” that AGW denial is equivalent to slavery. Figure it out. This has also been done recently by Norgaard as well. (see: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/30/climate_scepticism_racism_slavery_treatment/) They are attempting to link climate change denial and RAAAcism. It is a purely political maneuver. Hansen has even said as much, i.e. that the issue is a political rather than scientific one. As such, why should anyone take anything he says about science seriously?
Ned Borh says:
April 7, 2012 at 8:07 am
He’s been screaming at the top of his lungs and walking the streets with a sandwich board warning of the end of the world for 30 years. How have his past doomsday predictions worked out? Everyone at this site already knows that answer.
If it weren’t for the taxpayer money he was wasting, I’d find him quite funny. Soon he’ll turn to performance art and show up at some lecture stark naked. No pictures please.
We have a moral obligation to protect our children from the government tax slavery Hansen wishes to impose.
So we see the following Hansen-ian logic:
Hansen observes => In modern freedom loving cultures it is a given that slavery is universally held to be wrong
Hansen assumes moral authority in climate science (authority derived implicitly from his role at NASA/GISS) => He has alluded that a sufficient core group of IPCC centric and CAGW supporting scientists exists; who claim to know unequivocally that anthropogenic CO2 from burning fossil fuel is profoundly immoral on a global scale
Hansen reasons illogically to make a smear job on CAGW critics => He has alluded that the critics of IPCC centric CAGW ‘science’ are the same in principle as pro-slavery advocates
CONCLUSION => Hansen is not a rational thinker. I recommend (as a tax paying US citizen) that he should be forced to retire from NASA/GISS for the sake of all respectable and reasonable environmentalists. In addition, he is hurting the reputation of science in our culture.
John
No, because RINO Romney, a Trojan Horse candidate, supports the Glocal Warming-Climate Change alarmism of Al Gore and Hansen. The Republican Party primary elections and caucuses are being manipulated by the Democrats who are voting as if they were Republicans in support of Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. In one county, there were more than 3,000 voters for the Democrat candidate in the 2008 general primary election, a little more than 400 such Democrat voters in the 2012 general primary election, and more than 3,000 more Republican voters in the 2012 general primary election. After they finish nominating a Democrat friendly Republican candidate in the primary and caucuses, the Democrats will then vote for the Democrat candidate in the 2012 General Election despite voting in the Republican primary election. Massive and systematic vote fraud ranging from graveyard zombie voter ballots to thousands of non-existant and fraudulent voter registratoins is subverting the U.S. electoral system, U.S. government, and the rule of law.
We’re still awaiting the arrest and indictment of Glieck in the matter of the Heartland Institute identity fraud.
What do you suppose the chances of Hansen being disciplined for illegal activity when the attorney generals of multiple states, including Virginia’s Cuccinelli, are unable to proceed with the prosecution of the many crimes they have now officially accused the Obama Administration of committing?
“As such, why should anyone take anything he says about science seriously?”
I’m not, only insofar as there is some anthropogenic effect and what exactly is he proposing to do about it here, given that I know these people are somewhat over-emotional about their pressing moral imperative, they somehow believe is akin to the past problem of slavery. The emotion I’ll discount and so will Joe Public if they get too far out there with all that , but as I pointed out there is some considerable merit in switching to reliance on CO2E taxing, particularly if it negates the need for ill conceived quantitative control measures. That is about economics not climate science.
As well as the many merits of a shift to carbon taxing I already outlined, there is the emerging problem of peak oil anyway, not to mention a serious balance of payments problem for the US in particular due to its heavy reliance on oil. There is no sound reason to assume the current pricing regime due to the current incidence of taxation is an optimal one and indeed forseeable market forces suggest it’s not. Hansen simply raises an interesting hypothetical question. What if we inherited a marketplace where there were no other forms of taxation but straight carbon taxing? What would that good society look like? It’s not an unreasonable question to ask and indeed it is intrinsically tied up with the notion that it is the cheap use of fossil fuels that allows us to turn so much of our natural environment to our wants in such a short time. That concerns a lot more people than very emotional warmists but the warmists are adept at pushing that hot button out there quite regularly.
Or to put it another way it may be the village idiot that cries ‘The Emperor’s got no clothes on!’ to which we all reply ‘Don’t be so ridiculous!….hmmm…but now you come to mention it WHY are we all turned out in our underpants?’