(Night photo of coal-fired power plant in Ohio from Flickr and and photographer Daniel Shea
Washington Report: NASA scientist James Hansen, who first warned Congress about global warming exactly 20 years ago, testified Monday a new administration and Congress must make a “transformational” energy change next year or be plunged into catastrophic, unstoppable climate change.
The main points of his statement, published in advance in The Guardian in England:
• CO2 in the atmosphere must be reduced and kept below 350 parts per million to avoid climate change disaster (it is now at 385 ppm and the Lieberman-Warner bill targeted 450).
• The first requirement is to halt use of coal unless the CO2 is captured and stored. He called for a moratorium on new plants that don’t do that.
• A price on emissions is essential. A carbon tax, with all the money going back to the public in the form of a “dividend,” would be best, he said, with a full share to every adult and half-share to children.
• Fossil fuel CEOs have known about the damage CO2 was doing, but like the tobacco companies, encouraged doubt about a link to global warming. “In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”
• The next President must make a low-loss electricity grid a priority, so renewable energy can replace fossil fuels for power generation.
• Fossil fuel interests must be blocked from squeezing every last drop of oil from public lands, offshore and wilderness areas. It will only delay the real change that is needed to avoid a tipping point.
The tipping point has already been reached in the Arctic, Hansen said, and regardless of new emissions, summer sea ice will disappear. The risk now is passing a tipping point in West Antarctica and Greenland, which will rise the seas if they melt. Without a big change, he predicted a sea level increase of 2 meters (6 feet) by century’s end, which would bring constantly unstable shorelines and hundreds of millions of refugees.
Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Congress June 23, 1988, that the world was warming, that the cause was man-made, and that it would lead to erratic weather with floods, droughts and wildfires. Some call him a prophet and some have said he is “nuts.”
This week Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), R-Okla., said, "Hansen, Gore and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans are not buying it."
Hansen has suggested he might campaign against some of the obstructionists in Congress. Inhofe is facing a challenge this year from Democrat Andrew Rice in Oklahoma.
(Sources: The Guardian, ClimateWire,
EnvironmentalLeader.com, Associated Press)
2 comments:
Geez, Cindy! You should spend more time studying science and less time advocating for disastrous public policy!
“CO2 in the atmosphere must be reduced and kept below 350 parts per million to avoid climate change disaster”
That assertion would be hilarious if it was not such a threat to the future of all humanity. World Government bureaucrats at the IEA are now suggesting we must spend $45,000,000,000,000 in an utterly futile attempt to micromanage climate. I wonder how much of that bounty Dr. Hansen hopes to get. I wonder how much of the estimated $50,000,000,000 already spent on this nonsense has already landed in Hansen’s pockets.
About 550 million years ago, owing to volcanic activity, CO2 was about 22 times higher than today. Why did the earth not experience “runaway warming” then?
About 460 million years ago, CO2 was about 12 times higher than today (as the world plunged into one of the three coldest Ice Ages in the last 600 million years (much like the current Ice Age). If CO2 is such a calamitous warming factor, HOW could that happen?
Climate changes all the time. Among forcing factors driving Climate Change, CO2 is an extremely minor bit player of utterly inconsequential significance. Temperature primarily drives CO2, NOT the other way around. ALL the peer reviewed studies prove it!
Without an assumed water vapor feedback mechanism, IPCC computer models are unable to create even the minor concerns expressed in their latest report (7”-23” of sea level rise in the next 100 years). The latest peer reviewed science is proving the water vapor feedback assumption not only wrong, but upside down.
Examine the directly cited peer reviewed science here.
Listen to what IPCC Scientists have to say here.
Dr. Hansen predicted (in which year?):
“a sea level increase of 2 meters (6 feet) by century’s end”
The latest IPCC report predicts sea levels will rise 7” to 23” by 2100.
See Table 3.1 on page 45 of this IPCC link.
But, even that modest IPCC prediction depends upon an assumed water vapor feedback mechanism which latest peer reviewed science is proving not just wrong, but upside down.
Meantime, just over 14,000 years ago, according to this academic, during “Meltwater Pulse 1A”, sea levels rose an average of 4 meters (more than 12 FEET) every 100 years for 500 years.
Let’s summarize:
Hansen: 6 feet in 100 years
IPCC: 7” to 23” in 100 years (but only if they imagine a water vapor feedback fantasy)
Mother Nature: More than 12 feet EVERY 100 years for 500 years!
If you’re not going to study the science, try catching a clue from the late George Carlin.
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