By Robert Bradley Jr. — November 17, 2025
“[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake…. It’s just worthless words.” ( – James Hansen, below)
COP30, a CO2-fest of sorts, is failing. Major emitters have not shown up. Virtually all nations and regions are in serious noncompliance with their Paris Agreement goals according to Climate Tracker, and the gap is widening. The new pitch is less about emissions as about the fantasy of cheap wind and solar and batteries heralding a new energy era. Yet the energy transition has been demoted to energy addition (Daniel Yergin) and now energy duplication. Think rising energy prices from climate policy….
Hansen on Paris
James Hansen is a realist when it comes to the United Nations’ global warming negotiations; wind and solar energies; and the lobbying frenzy surrounding the issue. His statements should be remembered as the Paris Climate Agreement, the successor to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, turns ten years old this month.
In an interview with The Guardian in late 2015, the father of the climate alarm startled the rejoicing Progressive Left with this verdict post-COP21:
[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: “We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.” It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.
Continue with these pronouncements from Hansen in the same year:
Watch what happens in Paris carefully to see if all that the leaders do is sign off on the pap that UN bureaucrats are putting together, indulgences and promises to reduce future emissions, and then clap each other on the back and declare success.
Big Green consists of several ‘environmental’ organizations, including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), each with $100+M budgets, each springing from high-minded useful beginnings, each with more high-priced lawyers than you can shake a stick at. EDF …was chief architect of the disastrous Kyoto lemon. NRDC proudly claims credit for Obama’s EPA strategy and foolishly allows it to migrate to Paris.
Other Hansen Views
In previous posts, I have noted Hansen’s recalcitrance toward cap-and-trade, whether federal, state (California), or in another country (Australia or Quebec/Ontario). He lambasted Copenhagen (COP20) for its interest in cap-and-trade too. Ditto for the Paris agreement, Obama’s signature climate achievement.
Hansen wants a global CO2 tax, complete with ‘border adjustments’ (tariffs per country) to prevent ‘leakage’. Fat chance. He knows wind and solar are too problematic and not scalable as are nuclear fission plants (which he supports). As he stated: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”
Hansen’s Doomism
The father of the climate alarm will not back down from his outlier, all-bad predictions of the human influence on climate. CO2 fertilization is neglected, and anthropogenic warming is not divided into positive, benign, and negative to reveal a real-world metric.
To Hansen, the world is on fire from the enhanced greenhouse effect (what Michael “Climategate” Mann calls Doomerism). In 2006, Hansen gave this ultimatum:
We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.
Well, a decade later, the die is surely cast where adaptation is the order of the day. But no…. Consider this update from Hansen in 2023 in The Guardian [“‘We are Damned fools’: Scientist Who Sounded Climate Alarm in 80s Warns of Worse to Come,” (July 19, 2023). Oliver Milman began:
The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because “we are damned fools” for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s.
Hansen is then quoted:
There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts. These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality – we knew it was coming…. It means we are damned fools. We have to taste it to believe it.
And continuing:
Things will get worse before they get better. This does not mean that the extreme heat at a particular place this year will recur and grow each year. Weather fluctuations move things around. But the global average temperature will go up and the climate dice will be more and more loaded, including more extreme events.
And the doomism dance continues….
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Of course.
The planet has hundreds, thousands of separate climates, all which do their own thing in their own chaotic ways.
“Average Global Climate” is bullshit.
Consider for a moment or two that there is a reality of a Global Climate. We know there isn’t but humor the thought.
Exactly what is the Optimum Global Climate?
What metrics can be established to measure where the planet is in relationship to that Optimum?
How do we know it is getting worse and not getting better without a benchmark, established optimum?
Now for reality.
1850 to 1880 is the initialization point for most of the graphs.
Is that the optimum?
Publish the data and how the data were measured.
Those decades had some of the coldest weather and lowest CO2 levels in the 19th century.
It is suspicious given oil wells were starting to be developed in 1850. Coincidence?
Proof. Not models, conjectures, consensus, opinions, or rhetoric. Proof.
In clear and no uncertain terms that anyone can test and measure.
There have been periods in human history identified as “climate optimums”. They occurred in the post glacial period during the NH warming phase.
Similar optimums are now about 100kyr in the future because the current warming in the NH will take the NH back into glaciation. Greenland is already gaining altitude.
This year will have above trend snowfall and there are already new daily snowfall records. UK is getting a dose now:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm276jn0y11o
The onset of glaciation will be more apparent within 200 years with permafrost advancing down slope and eventually south. I am not able to predict if sea level will be falling this millennium but, if not, then certainly in the next millennium. And I am aware that prediction cannot be falsified.
Rick,
You and I are on the same page. Those past eras were called optima, but for different reasons. One can conclude from those that the planet is currently sub-optimal and slowly moving towards an optimum, which is the point of my post.
In reality, it is the sun, orbital mechanics, celestial influences that drive changes in the earth energy systems.
I am not into predictions. Seems you have a clue on that point, too.
As is the belief that 1850 was the year of perfect weather and not burning fossil fuels will get the human race back to that perfect weather.
You take out the highs, then you take out the lows and there you are, you have the global climate. What’s wrong with that? 😀
Dr. Hansen sees himself as a maverick. Everyone else sees him as a [THE END IS NEAR] sandwich board wearing caricature akin to Harold Camping. He is now reduced to laughing stock.
Hard core Evangelical Millenarians seem to have higher standards than Greens.
Even worse, here is the actual truth about Dr. Hansen:
Because of “Acid Rain and Health concerns, Clean Air” legislation was introduced in the U S and Europe in the 1970’s to reduce the amount of industrial SO2 aerosol pollution in the troposphere.
Their amount peaked at~141million tons 1n 1979, then finally began falling in 1980, and temperatures began rising because the less polluted air increased the intensity of the solar radiation striking the Earth’s surface.
By 1988, they had fallen to 138 million tons, and temperatures risen by 0.28 Deg C (per HadCRUT5.0).
In June 1988, Dr. Hansen gave his speech to a committee of the United States Senate, where he said that temperatures then (+) 0.28 Deg. C) were higher than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements, which was about 100 years.
He then attributed the temperature rise to rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere (the “greenhouse effect”) , which was accepted by nearly everyone, when in fact, it was actually due to falling levels of SO2 aerosol pollution.in the air.
Because of his ERROR, trillions of dollars have been wasted in trying to control the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and millions of people are suffering from the draconian measures being taken to achieve that useless end.
“Two-thirds of the global warming since 2001 is sulphur dioxide reduction rather than carbon dioxide increases.”
-Peter Cox, Professor of Climate System Dynamics at the University of Exeter
Largely from the adoption and mandating of Ultra Low Sulphur Diesel Fuel for vehicles and heavy equipment, and Very Low Sulphur Fuel Oil for ships.
I can remember when diesel fuel was less expensive than gasoline. The transition to ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) began in June 2006 {2010 for WA State}. The price premium has reversed.
GeorgeinSanDiego:
And to what does he attribute the other third of the warming??
The actual control knob of Earth’s climate is simply the amount of SO2 aerosol pollution in our atmosphere, to a large extent due to VEI4 and larger volcanic eruptions (or to the lack hereof), and to changing levels of industrial activity.
Since both are unknowable, it is impossible to model what lies in our future, catastrophic warming, descent into another ice age, or something in between. However, temperature extremes could be alleviated by careful geo-engineering.
Hansen’s education (Univ. of Iowa) would seem to have inoculated him against tossing science aside and going for the CO2 control knob hypothesis of climate. It would be interesting to know when and why his going of the rails started.
Local interests in cleaning up the air began long before the more broadly aspect of acid rain. In the USA “clean air” legislation followed the 1948 Donora Smog, while in the UK the “Clean Air Act of ’56” , followed the Great Smog of 1952. A dated list of UK actions is here:
Air Quality | History of Air Pollution in the UK
Internet quirk: searching for “London Fog” will take you in unintended ways – – clothing and hot tea-based drink.
“in June 1988, Dr. Hansen gave his speech to a committee of the United States Senate, where he said that temperatures then (+) 0.28 Deg. C) were higher than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements, which was about 100 years.”
Hansen said that 1934, was hotter than 1998, and he said this up to about 2007, when NASA made this particular webpage disappear and Hansen changed his tune about 1934. Unfortunately for Hansen, Hansen has a colleague who emailed Hansen and told Hansen that his figures agreed with the colleagues and 1934, was 0.5C warmer than 1998. All this was detailed in the Climategate emails. So Hansen has changed his tune but as far as I know, his colleague has not.
The year 1998 was hotter than 1988, so I don’t know why Hansen would say 1988 was hotter than any recorded record in 100 years. That’s the first time I heard a claim that Hansen claimed 1988 was hotter than any previous year.
I have the Wayback Machine copy of this 2007 webpage which shows a U.S.regional chart next to a bogus Hockey Stick global chart, and Hansen is trying to explain why the United States was hotter in the Early Twentieth Century that it is today, while the bogus Hockey Stick chart shows nothing of the kind. Hansen said the Unite States and the world took different temperature paths.
For some reason, after NASA deleted this webpage, the Wayback Machine made a copy but they separated the graphics from the text.
Here is the text link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050112211708/http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/
Here is the link to the graphics:
And here is evidence of Hansen doctoring the temperature record:
https://climateaudit.org/2007/02/15/ushcn-versions/
Hansen was preaching CO2 doom for years and when 1998 came around, he thought he was being vindicated and thought the temperatures would continue to rise because more CO2 was going into the air every day, but a funny thing happened after 1998, the temperatures started to cool a lot! (see UAH chart below) so in order to keep the hoax going, Hansen started fiddling with the temperature records and started downplaying the warmth of 1934.
And Hansen also mannipulated the yearly temperature record to make it appear that as many as 10 years between 1998 and 2015, were what he called “the hottest year evah!”. Hansen bastardized the temperature record to keep the CO2 fraud going.
Look at the UAH chart below. From 1998 (the hottest year since 1934) to 2015, Hansen and NASA found 10 years that they claimed were “the hottest years evah!”, they even went so far as to bastardize the data so they could claim each successive year after 1998 was hotter than the previous year (by a hundredth of a degree).
But the UAH chart puts the lie to James Hansen’s fraud. See how many years on the UAH chart between 1998 and 2015 were hotter than 1998. The answer is NO years between 1998 and 2015 were hotter than 1998. NASA and James Hansen were lying to us. “They played on our fears!!” as Al Gore would say (in a different context).
So a fall in 7 (not 3) million tons SO2 increases the temp by 0.28 Deg., but a fall of 17 million tons (from 1999 – 2015) did not effect the temperature (per UAH) at all?
Your theory may be valid but is incomplete.
Burl’s theory doesn’t account for the fact that since the end of the Little Ice Age, the temperatures have warmed and cooled three times with no correlation to SO2.
Burl’s theory cannot explain the cyclical nature of the Earth’s climate. Nor does any other theory you may have read.
Tom Abbott:
I am not sure which 3 periods you are referring to, but all changes can be correlated to changing concentrations of SO2 aerosol levels in the atmosphere..
Mike:
I have reviewed the latest CEDS Data, and you are roughly correct. There was a 6 million ton decrease in SO2 aerosol emissions, from 140 million tons in 1980, to 134 million tons in 1988.
You are also correct that there was a decrease of 17 million tons in emissions between 1999 and 2015.
However, the HadCRUT5.0 data set shows that temperatures increased by 0.46 Deg C, for that period, rather than having no effect at all, as shown by UAH.
BTW. what is the UAH temp increase shown for 1980-1988?
Once again, there is no single control knob.
These are contributing factors, yes, but attributing the whole to one factor is a pseudo science called attribution.
Sparta Nova 4
If temperatures change whenever SO2 aerosol pollution levels change, that is NOT a pseudo attribution.
“sandwich board wearing caricature”
Fake science and a fake crisis result in… a fake agreement?
Who would have thought?
I hope the Maledives don’t drown themselves after hearing this.
I clearly missed out on the guidebooks on how to get ahead in life with doomism. Or maybe that’s a very select group in a narrow field overlooked in career advancement.
Weird. If the whole climate scam hadn’t been ripe for the picking he would have just been a weird narcissistic crank that no one ever heard of.
“Crackpot” is another appropriate term.
I guess I think of crackpots as wobbly and loud individuals getting attention merely because they are eccentric and wrong. Not necessarily narcissistic behavior. I think JH craves the attention.
It was never about climate, it was about theft… “At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.
Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
I thought she said that in 2015. Maybe she thinks it’s a great statement and did say it again last week, I know I repeat myself
That’s what I thought after reading the post: She said this a long time ago.
But, I guess there’s no rule that she can’t say it again. 🙂
Changing the economic development model for the world will be an impossible task for her and her cronies. One of these days they will see how wrong they were. And that day may not be far off. The CO2-phobes have “Cried Wolf!” too much. No wolf shows up, and the people begin to realize no wolf is going to show up, and then they move on to other things. That’s what the world is doing now.
She said that a decade ago. Good idea to state the date of important speeches?
Geoff S
It’s just worthless words.
I don’t know so much, those words – crisis, breakdown, catastrophe etc – could be argued to have cost us – in the Western world at least – a very great deal of money for absolutely no return. The UK government – of whatever stripe – is only too happy to throw the filthy lucre around. We’re still all in.
The equivalent of ten trillion USD, bare minimum.
The sole reason why those words were used was to justify the massive destruction of wealth,industry,infrastructure.
The war on our minds, just as the tactical use of words,intimidation,shaming,dogoodism,feminisation( feminised men dont resist,don’t hit back)
were part of a well planned and calculated strategy.
This patterns have also been used for open borders,cultural destruction etc etc.
The problem these people never face is that, when industrial production falters and poverty climbs, extreme groups with power will take over. And it’s never people like THEM who are going to rule. They are going to be pushed aside and the real fascists take over. As they always do.
The two greatest means to sway public opinion: fear and anger. Greed comes in a close 3rd but if you fail to follow through you are not reelected.
Only “superheated” is not the word, when it is a just mild interglacial.
Alarmists are known for re-defining and re-purposing pejorative words, riding on the coattails of the negative emotional impact with things like “ocean acidification.” The respected Stanford geochemist, Konrad Krauskopf, stated in his text book that the oceans were unlikely to ever even reach neutrality (pH 7), except in deep, stagnant pools enriched in hydrogen sulfide. Yet, oceanographers sympathetic to the alarmist climatology position have adopted “acidification” as part of their vocabulary to describe an end result, despite evidence provided by Krauskopf that carbonate/borate chemical buffering will prevent sea water from ever becoming acidic — a destination that more surely than Zeno’s Arrow, will never be reached.
That is just one of a long, long list of words being abused.
The problem is, those of us asking questions and challenging the pontifications (aka we the skeptics), then to use the language from the alarmist dictionary and in so doing give them unearned credibility.
Fossil fuels? No. Carbon-based fuels, ok. Hydrocarbons and coal, ok.
I’ll leave it at that. It’s too long a list to post here.
COrPse3O
Actually, he is wrong; it was DOA.
Just like AGW morphed into Climate Change which will now morph into Adaptation with emphasis still on reducing CO2 “to stop it at the source”.
First it was GW, then AGW, then CC, then ACC, then CAGW, with a mix of apocalyptic vocabulary tossed in for good measure.
Why no COP30 pictures on BBC TV? Because they would look ridiculous.
Hansen is a good physicist, writes well, and is wrong about the future.
Yes Roy.
Something that registered with me as I reached the 3rd period of my 3-score + 10 allotted years –
I started to observe that ‘educated’, ‘qualified’, ‘experts’ often get basic situations so wrong, they don’t even know what they don’t know.
That is, they clearly haven’t questioned their positions with something as basic as –
“can I be sure that what I’m espousing is factually correct, not in doubt, not debatable?”
There is an old Japanese saying that “It is rare to find a man who speaks well and and is trustworthy.” A man who writes well and is “wrong about the future” is a dangerous man. Whether he is a good physicist or not is unimportant, but is seems incongruent to consider him to be a good physicist if he is “wrong about the future.”
A good physicist or any good scientist for that matter will accept the level of uncertainty inherent in the system they are investigating. In regards to the climate it is large. Simply because of the elements, variables and interactions involved without a zero point of departure. The case for CO2 is weak if you consider all the important factors. The ones with a steady state and those w a variable state, the latter being the big majority. Slight differences in water vapour, clouds, solar irradiance etc and the whole projection tilts. And models are based on fixed values otherwise they would be meaningless.
So, what would a good physicist do? Make his case for x while accepting the right consensus which is seeing that the system itself hangs together on a series of questionable assertions and assumptions with no reliably equation to ‘solve’ the puzzle..
A good physicist would not be involved with making pseudo-scientific guesses about future climate when unable to explain the measured variability of past climate.
Geoff S (hard scientist).
I agree with Geoff. 🙂
Especially Hansen. He has seen all the historic temperature records. He knows he is mannipulating the numbers. He knows 1934 was hotter than 1998, yet he lies, when it suits his purposes and later claims 1998 was hotter than 1934.
I can’t believe that Hansen believes what he is saying about the climate, so that would make him a deliberate liar in my mind. I suppose it is possible that he has so deluded himself, that he believes what he says. But I don’t think so.
One reason I always use the Hansen 1999 U.S. temperature chart is after 1999, that was the time Hansen started fiddling with the temperature records. Compare the UAH satellite chart and Hansen’s NASA chart for the period from 1998 to 2016. The UAH chart shows no year in this time period that is warmer than 1998. The Hansen/NASA chart for this period shows about 10 years that are warmer than 1998, during this period. This is a bald-faced lie of a chart, mannipulated to keep the myth of CO2 warming going. It is pure Climate Change Propaganda..
The UAH satellite chart:
If we could extend the UAH chart back in time to the 1930’s, what you would see is that 1934, would be on the same horizontal line as the high point of 2024, because 1934 was just as hot as 2024. And if we went back even further, we would see that the 1880’s were just as warm as the 1930’s, and just as warm as 2024. So obviously, CO2 amounts have had no discernible effects on the Earth’s temperatures since the end of the Little Ice Age. James Hansen knows this! Yet he tells the Public a different story.
According to the honest James Hansen, 1934, was 0.5C warmer than 1998. You can see him saying it in the text of the link I provided above. Now he has changed his tune because the weather isn’t cooperating with his CO2 delusions.
Much better said than my insulting remarks about his status as a physicist.
When I arrived on the Iowa campus in 1967, the best computer was an IBM 360-65 – – in the ground floor of the Physics Building. I visited a few times but never met Hansen or Van Allen.
No he’s not. He came up with the “back-radiation”. rubbish – or at least claimed it. It is unphysical claptrap. Certainly not physics.
His legacy is the Climate Change™ scam. History will treat him badly as the whole pack of cards crumble.
He would have been far wiser putting his effort into understand the Sun and Earth’s relationship with the Sun than going down Manabe’s rabbit hole. Who could be so stupid to think parameterising clouds would produce meaningful climate models – utter garbage devoid of real physical processes.
He may have qualified as a physicists but he went downhill from there.
He’s ignorant and gullible because he believes that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter. Michael Mann has also received awards for “writing well”, and like Hansen, is also gullible and ignorant, along with being a faker, fraud, scofflaws and deadbeat.
However, I digress. You say Hansen is wrong about the future. Have you been speaking with God recently? Or your local fortune teller? As far as I know, the future has not occurred yet. Maybe the world can use your awesome ability to see into the future, but I don’t believe you can.
I note that like Willis, you declined to nominate anything specific that you believe Hansen will be “wrong” about in the future.
Sorry Roy, but appealing to your own authority does not convince me. Maybe you will have more luck convincing ignorant and gullible CAGW believers.
Who gives a damn what James Hansen thinks? I don’t.
Wasn’t Hansen the first (or one the first) to fiddle with the temperature record numbers?
(Then Gavin A. Schmidt stepped into his shoes.)
Well, Michael Mann and Phil Jones were the first mannipulators of the temperature numbers. Mann erased all the warm periods that occurred over the last few thousand years, and Phil Jones erased all the warmth in the instrumental record, and combined, produced the bogus, bastardized Hockey Stick Global Temperature chart.
Hansen and Schmidt just started fiddling with the numbers after the temperatures started cooling after the high temperature point of 1998. Their theory that CO2 causes warming of the atmosphere was not looking too good after 1998, because the temperatures started cooling instead of warming, as they expected, so to keep up the Climate Crisis Hysteria, NASA started mannipulating the temperature record to make it appear that after 1998, the temperatures kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter because of CO2.
The UAH satellite chart shows the complete opposite of what Hansen and NASA show. The UAH chart shows NO years between 1998 and 2015 that were hotter than 1998. Quite a drastic difference, wouldn’t you say? See for yourself, UAH satellite chart:
If Climate Alarmists didn’t have lies, they wouldn’t have anything at all.
Hansen is clearly a moron blinded by his own BS. No idea about climate drivers and limits. A life wasted. He locked himself into a position and kept digging a hole too deep to get out of.
He is now 84yo and will pass with a legacy of infamy for his part in turning natural climate change into the Climate Change™ scam.
Among the long list that will be Trump’s legacy is calling out this pitiful scam.
I am also a scientist aged 84. My main contribution to the progress of science to benefit humanity was the refinement and successful use of hard science in geochemistry to assist geology and geophysics in the discovery of new mines in Australia. This can be measured in money terms. The present day value of production from new mines I helped to discover is about $Aust 80,000 million.
For this colleagues and I have had the opposite of thanks, it now being trendy to mouth “Dirty Miners”.
I would be interested in an analysis of the costs and benefits of the efforts of Dr Hansen. Cannot be bothered to do it myself because of his over use if fantasy. Geoff S
I’ll ask my usual question regarding the issue of the impending climate catastrophe. If it’s so dire, why hasn’t the global population suffered adverse effects yet by declining and by experiencing shorter life expectancies? And why haven’t agricultural and general food production been dropping and triggering increasingly widespread famines. Could it be that there’s no climate crisis to begin with and that humans have learned to be increasingly resilient and resourceful to deal with any semblance of one? Or is that explanation too convenient for the alarmists who have been hoping to profit from what’s essentially a big exaggeration?
You are correct, Edward, there is no climate crisis.
It only exists in the fevered imaginations of Climate Alarmists.
But, but, but, we are on the precipice.
We have 10, 5, 2, 1 years to solve this.
Look over there. That storm, that hurricane, that tidal gage. Oh ignore the turbine panel on the beach.
It is always impending doom, not quite here yet, but soon. Every storm is a harbinger of what’s to come.
We’ve lived through 5 decades of impending doom. 2 full generations have been brainwashed into social psychosis.
I have to stop. I feel a rage rant coming. Cheers.
Lol.
Yeah, really! Ridiculous!
If he’s talking about random thermometers, the more energy used, the more heat is created, and of course thermometers, designed to respond to heat, respond by getting hotter – on average.
James Hansen is ignorant and gullible, believing that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter (instead of heat), and also that trains transporting fossilised organic matter (such as coal), are “death trains”! He also said “Coal-fired power plants are factories of death”. He might even be silly enough to believe the Earth was created at absolute zero, and has been warmed by the Sun to its present temperature! Some astrophysicists have weird ideas, and have only a tenuous grip on reality.
Oh well, it takes all types. If he’s completely delusional, that doesn’t say much for his supporters, does it?
I think James Hansen has too much information to be gullible. There’s some other reason for his Climate Crisis narrative.
Tom, I suspect Hansen may have believed people like Carl Sagan, who seemed oblivious to the apparent fact that the Earth was created in a molten state, and has cooled – resulting in a solid crust, liquid water and all that sort of stuff.
The climate nutters believe the surface is “hotter than it should be”, because they are completely ignorant of basic physics. They believe that the Earth has warmed from some fantasy “snowball Earth”, and have to create all sorts of bizarre explanations for things like liquid water, the increase of temperature with depth, and so on.
Additionally, they seem to believe that they can calculate the temperature of an object by virtue of the intensity of the radiation reaching it! Unfortunately, this is complete nonsense – a red hot iron ball and a block of ice in the Sun are obviously at different temperatures. Even the surface of the Earth experiences temperatures of around 90 C to -90 C – subject to the output of the same Sun.
Ignorant – and gullible for believing other delusional “scientists” who believe that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter!
How crazy is that?
Surely he can see his “doomerism” is not grounded in facts and experience. Rather like the weather he can be smart and dim at the same time.
“Surely he can see his “doomerism” is not grounded in facts and experience.”
One would think so.
Hansen has an important role. There always should be someone more unhinged, and the way the circus is shaped, that mob must be led by some preacher (which now is only eligible if called “scientist”). Without someone like Hansen to officially “bless” their talking points with approval of officially official Science™, various 10:10 types would not have a fig leaf to cover what they are: cowardly, opportunistic terrorists. In turn, if the COP types would not have that big unruly bugbear to threaten the non-compliant, they would be naturally appear the worst threat there is, rather than somehow “moderate”.
Climate Science™ is no different from Civil Rights™ or any other racket in the great American tradition of Puritan power grabs. And why would it be?
But hey, maybe it’s just a not good cop/bad cop act, but an actual consistent philosophy they uphold? Remember that one time Teh Guardian was agitating to appease moderate racist sexist fascists to prevent the hardcore racist sexist fascists from gaining more influence? It was in an issue from 32 Neverber. LMAO.