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.
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Where does he think all that fossil fuel came from?
Hansen says: “as you can see, I am running out of steam for this present communication.”
Ah, so you were just blowing steam, as I suspected. We all understand that it requires a lot of energy to work yourself into such a lather about literally, nothing. It must be exhausting. Perhaps you should take a vacation. Or, take your meds. Or both. We wouldn’t want you to explode, like your friends at 10:10, with their famous “No Pressure” video suggested those who doubt your view do.
Leo Danze, you asked why France was 80% nuclear. Simple: No coal, no oil, no gas, no choice! Though I’m not sure about the position with shale gas today.
John K. Sutherland.
As usual, there is a simple explanation for this. Jim is laying the groundwork for his inevitable insanity defense.
As usual there is a simple explanation for this. Jim is laying the groundwork for his inevitable insanity defense.
I, too have a vision: of Hansen, Mann, and those of their ilk in handcuffs, heads hanging in shame, doing the perp walk for all of humanity, whom they have harmed to see.
Well, I can dream, can’t I?
James “Saloth Sar” Hansen has spoken. The fields await.
@ur momisugly Bruce Cobb says:
April 18, 2013 at 8:45 am
I don’t think this is an idle dream. The damage, and effective slaughter, wrought by this has been catastrophic. And it is inextricably a part of structures and actions that are now starting to have a measureable effect on societies across the world.
Hansen: ” The perceptive person should notice that the climate dice are now loaded.”
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Perceptive people did notice Hansen “et al” loaded the dice some time ago that hot day in DC when they left the windows open the night before Hansen spoke before a Congressional committee.
0 ) All the carbon in fossil deposits was originally in the atmosphere locking all the O2 into CO2 yet the result was the creation of green life , not a Venus .
1 ) Straight forward computations of radiative balance show that for Venus to have a surface temperature 2.25 times that of a gray ball in its orbit , totally due to the energy it receives from the Sun , given its 0.9 albedo , it would have to be 10 times as reflective in the IR as aluminum foil . ( See http://cosy.com/Science/RadiativeBalanceGraphSummary.html . )
As is well known , CO2 is a good absorber of IR and therefore also a good emitter . Therefore it could not be the cause of Venus’s extreme surface temperature . In fact , I doubt there is any material that reflective . Thus Venus’s surface temperature must be due to internal heat trapped by an extremely insulative atmosphere .
How Hansen’s original Venus claims got past pal review shows the inevitable corruption of the process .
Despite their strident opposition to Enlightenment ideals on every front, Klimat Kultists are not nihilists but “thanatists”– those for whom death is the sole cure for “this disease called Life.”
Entirely too many, indeed an overwhelming super-majority, of kook-fringe “environmentalists” (which solar panels and wind-farms prove are no such thing) from Friends-of-the-Earth to Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund explicitly favor mass-extermination policies designed to eliminate near 100% of extant humankind. Not Zero Population Growth (ZPG) but zero population is their goal.
Whatever psychonomic labels apply here (recall the infamous “No Pressure” video), Luddite sociopaths of every stripe have already encompassed tens of millions of malaria deaths, advocated mass-starvation by opposing Norman Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” with its genetically-modified (GM) crops, embraced potential global epidemics by warring on pharmaceutical research as “capitalist enterprise.” Human socio-cultural suicide is these degraded creatures’ stock-in-trade, pressing towards “a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted Science” (Churchill).
Anyone unacquainted with the likes of Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Keith Farnish, Kentti Linkola, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, had best start introductions now. Stilettos poised, they wait for you to turn your back.
This kind of apocalyptic rhetoric somcan have real consequences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Communications_headquarters_hostage_crisis
Are they ever held accountable, though?