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‘Swiftboating’ Geophysical Reality

Bruce E. Johansen

During May 2007, after giving a commencement address to his high school in Denison, Iowa, James E. Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences in New York City, drove from Denison to Dunlap, where his parents are buried. “For most of the 20 miles,” he later told the Iowa Utilities Board, “there were trains parked, engine to caboose, half of the cars being filled with coal.” He had an epiphany at that point, and saw coal trains filled with extinct species: “If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains — no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.”

Within days, Hansen’s comments reached the eyes of Kraig R. Naasz, president and chief executive officer of the National Mining Association, at the lobbying organization’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Naasz shot off an indignant letter to Hansen, saying that the comparison of coal trains “carrying Powder River Basin coal to the box cars that carried Europeans to their deaths in crematoria” deeply distressed him. Naasz called Hansen’s remarks “repellant,” “preposterous” and “invidious,” charging that Hansen was trivializing the “systematic extermination of European Jewry.” How could one coal-fired power plant in Iowa make much difference, Naasz argued, while China “builds a new plant every week.” Naasz told Hansen he owed coal and rail workers an apology and that he should refrain from making similar comments in the future.

Hansen replied that use of coal for power generation was, indeed causing a degree of warming that, in coming years, will become “the predominant cause of extinction of species, many [of which are] already threatened by other humanmade stresses. The burning of coal is responsible for half the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Hansen took the case an extra step, saying that coal pollution was responsible for rising asthma rates and water pollution, that mountain-top removal to mine it should end. “There is nothing scientifically invalid” in what he had said, Hansen asserted. Addressing Naasz directly, Hansen said that if comparing coal trains to crematoria made Naasz uncomfortable, “perhaps it should.” Even so, Hansen said later, he had not meant to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Compassion for the Whole World

Knowing Jim Hansen is to acquaint oneself with a person who has a profound compassion and empathy for the human race as a whole, and all the animals that walk the Earth, as well as the physics of the atmosphere. Hansen’s compassion is infectious, as well, as more scientists pick up his sense of urgency that global warming is doing things to the atmosphere and all that breathe it which is very dangerous, and will take a great deal of time, effort, and suffering to reverse.

Hansen is concerned about “scientific reticence,” the reluctance of some scientists to engage public debate about the dangers of climate destabilization, and the necessity of changing public policy and individuals’ everyday conduct to minimize it. Generational inequity also concerns Hansen. “Those making the mess are not the ones who will pay — it is their children and grandchildren.” “Scientific reticence may be a consequence of the scientific method,” said Hansen. “Success in science depends on objective skepticism. Caution, if not reticence, has its merits. However, in a case such as ice sheet instability and sea-level rise, there is a danger in excessive caution. We may rue reticence, if it serves to lock in future disasters.”

Such a price Hansen has paid for his compassion. He has become one of the world’s best-known climate scientists not only for his expertise, which is profound, but also by resisting slime campaigns from the climatic right-wing. You won’t believe what they have tried to do to him, and how miserably these many ‘swift-boatings’ have failed. Come now and visit the files of a scientist who has been fighting distortion of geophysical reality since the days of Ronald Reagan. I have on my office door an editorial cartoon by Dan Wasserman of the Boston Globe that shows two burly White House operatives gagging Hansen, saying “We are reducing dangerous emissions.”

How They Lie

How arduously they lie about Hansen is an index of his effectiveness, as well as the increasing urgency of global warming. A decade or two more of routine emissions, Hansen warns, and the Earth is cooked. Hansen has been forecasting greenhouse weather for decades now, and his record is prescient. A man with a domed forehead, twinkling eyes, and a mild but very forthright manner, Hansen in person seems a most unlikely hate object, as he measures his words, struggling to make the complexities of geophysics understandable and germane to ordinatory people.

Hansen’s daily life can be filled with the pecks-to-death by ducks of climate contrarianism, a haze of mites who befog the real issues, divorcing the hard science from nit-picking and character assassination, turning global warming into a little chamber of rhetorical horrors. Since the contrarians cannot argue geophysical reality, they use other tactics. In addition to making a very big purported something out of nearly nothing (discussed above), they attack personally. Hansen has been attacked personally so often that he can see them coming and laughs them off. The slime machine is very good at character assassination. Has Hansen received $720,000 under the table payments from liberal industrialist George Soros? (Hansen, 9/27/07). “The bottom line is,” said Hansen. “I did not receive one thin dime from George Soros. By the way, in case anybody finds out that George Soros INTENDED to send me $720,000 but could not find my address, please let me know! We are pretty hard-pressed here.”

Another slime-machine tactic: invent a contradiction in a climate scientist’s record, long in the past. Wouldn’t it be nifty, for example, to catch Jim Hansen advocating an ice age? During September of 2007, Hansen found himself inundated with reports that he had issued such a statement 36 years earlier, during 1971. This was almost as juicy among the contrarians as catching a politician in bed with a person of the same sex. Of course, it never happened. It was all political fabrication. If the carbon dioxide had a sense of irony, it might have gotten a chuckle out of all these human foibles — but it doesn’t. Carbon dioxide now has politics. It just holds heat. And the more of it we have, the more heat we will eventually get.

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).