Climate Craziness of the Week: James Hansen's human free vision of the future

When I was a kid, I’d watch cartoons with mad scientists running amok and causing trouble. As an adult, I observed that there actually aren’t any mad scientists. Now, after reading Dr. James Hansen’s latest essay, I’m not so sure anymore.

I have been told of specific well-respected people who have asserted that “Jim Hansen exaggerates” the magnitude and imminence of the climate threat. If only that were true, I would be happy…

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Climate effects are occurring already and are generally consistent with expectations. The perceptive person should notice that the climate dice are now loaded.

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CO2, the dominant climate forcing on the long run, will stay in the climate system for millennia…

I was recently at a meeting that included many of the top researchers in climate change. There was universal agreement about the urgency of the climate crisis…if we burn all the fossil fuels it is certain that sea level would eventually rise by tens of meters…Venus – like conditions in the sense of 90 bar surface pressure and surface temperature of several hundred degrees are only plausible on billion – year time scales…

One implication is that if we should “succeed” in digging up and burning all fossil fuels, some parts of the planet would become literally uninhabitable, with some time in the year having wet bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C. At such temperatures , for reasons of physiology and physics, humans cannot survive , because even under ideal conditions of rest and ventilation, it is physically impossible for the environment to carry away the 100 W of metabolic heat that a human body generates when it is at rest 14 . Thus even a person lying quietly naked in hurricane force winds would be unable to survive…

The picture that emerges for Earth sometime in the distant future, if we should dig up and burn every fossil fuel, is thus consistent with that depicted in “Storms” — an ice-free Antarctica and a desolate planet without human inhabitants. Although temperatures in the Himalayas may have become seductive, it is doubtful that the many would allow the wealthy few to appropriate this territory to themselves or that humans would survive with the extermination of most other species on the planet. At least one sentence in “Storms” will need to be corrected in the next edition: even with burning of all fossil fuels the tropical ocean does not “boil”. But it is not an exaggeration to suggest, based on best available scientific evidence, that burning all fossil fuels could result in the planet being not only ice – free but human-free.

Source: James Hansen’s latest non peer reviewed missive Making Things Clearer: Exaggeration, Jumping the Gun, and The Venus Syndrome

UPDATE: Over at Bishop Hill, they discuss Hansen’s other recent non peer reviewed paper:

James Hansen is also getting back into the climate sensitivity fray, posting up an Arxiv preprint that (surprise, surprise) comes up with a much more alarming figure than Lewis or Masters. The estimate is based on paleoclimate data, specifically δ¹⁸O data for foraminifera (a class of microscopic animals that got a mention in the Hockey Stick Illusion). However, as has often been noted in the past, these paleoestimates of climate sensitivity are fraught with difficulty as the quality of data on temperatures and forcings in the distant past is shaky indeed.

More and more I think the general alarm sounded by the team over what proxies tell them is based on shaky and inconsistent data. As we’ve seen with Marcott et al, they tend to mold the proxy data into their visions, rather than let the data tell the story honestly.