• Building a Sustainable Future Is Not a Luxury

  
  
  
  
  

• Greenland’s Icemelt Speeding Up

• Limbaugh Feasts on Ignorance

• Hansen Battles Climatic Self-deception Worldwide

• Right-Wing Punditry & Green Cheese Science

• Hansen: Cut CO2 10 Percent in 10 Years

• Global Warming Is Alive
  and Well

• The Skiing Industry Faces a Future with Less Snow

• ‘Swiftboating’ Geophysical Reality

• Bjorn Lomborg’s Warm, Fuzzy World

  
  
  
  
  

• The Inuit Hold George W. Bush Responsible for Their Melting Ice World

• Global Warming, “Thermal Inertia” & Tomorrow’s News

• The Carbon Footprint of the Iraq War

• Making A Buck As The World Burns

• Life After Oil

• What's HOT In Global Warming? Ethanol, Polar Bears, Dogs & Phytoplankton

• Al Gore's Plan

• The Lessons of Mild Winter Nights

• ‘Doomsday Clock’ Creeps Closer to Midnight

• What's HOT In Global Warming?

Hansen Battles Climatic Self-deception Worldwide

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

During June and July, 2008, Jim Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute traveled to Europe and Japan and found a “sobering degree of self-deception in countries that are among the best-educated on climate change.” Hansen believes that even the most advanced governments have not realized the urgency of the situation and have placed their bets on market-driven solutions such as carbon-emissions (“cap-and-trade”) solutions. In the meantime, even Germany, Great Britain and Japan — all countries that he visited — are still building coal-fired power plants without adequate technology to remove polluting carbon dioxide from their effluent.

In Germany, during June, Hansen spoke with Minister of the Environment, Sigmar Gabriel. After the meeting, in a diplomatic way, Hansen said that Gabriel and other German officials (who have been avid advocates of curtailing emissions in a general sense) just didn’t get the point. “I am grateful for Minister Gabriel’s generosity with his time, and I have no doubt about his sincerity in dealing with climate change,” Hansen said. “However, we did not come to a common understanding about… the stark policy implication of the data, [that] I assert, [creates an] urgency for a moratorium on coalfired power plants… In effect we agreed to disagree, as we were both trying to be cordial.”

In Great Britain, Hansen was dealt a similar hand by officials who maintained that emissions trading would bring greenhouse gas emissions back into a safe range. In Japan, the prime minister’s representatives declined to accept his letter of introduction until they realized that it was all over the Tokyo newspapers. They, too, professed faith in cap-and-trade. Replied Hansen: “Emissions trading is such an unutterably bogus concept that we should toss it on the slagheap right off the bat. It is a shell game that allows corporations to buy the right to pollute.”

Heading to an Ice-Free World

Hansen’s letter, which also has been presented to several state governors in the United States, argues that “If CO2 emissions from coal were phased out over the period 2010-2030, and if use of unconventional fossil fuels (tar shale, tar sands) remained negligible, atmospheric CO2 would peak at 400-425 parts per million. In that case, improved forestry and agricultural practices, especially reforestation, could get atmospheric CO2 back beneath 350 ppm within a century or less. During the overshoot phase we might hope that ocean and ice sheet inertia may keep climate impacts tolerable, avoiding the most disastrous effects.”

“However,” continues Hansen, “If coal use continues or expands (as it is now) CO2 will be headed to the 500-600 ppm range… we will hand our children a planet that has entered a long chaotic transient period with climate changes out of their control, as the planet heads inexorably toward an ice-free state.”

Furthermore, Hansen is telling all heads of government: “The danger of carbon caps and percent- reduction goals is that they allow self-deception, a pretense that the climate problem is being solved. Unless they are accompanied by phase-out of coal emissions, they have practically no impact on climate change.” The European Union has required that new coal plants be “carbon-capture ready,” but the technology is not yet available. Such a requirement without the technology, says Hansen, is “sobering self-deception.”

Coal-fired plants can be made unnecessary, said Hansen, by investment in an electricity grid that leaks less power (as much as half our power is lost in transmission), along with increasing use of wind and solar power in a crash program resembling the “Manhattan Project” during World War II.

Climatic Trash Talkers

Meanwhile, back in the United States, Jim Hansen deals with the trash talkers. He gave a speech to the National Press Club June 23, 2008, which — following copious press attention — brought him hundreds of critical-to-nasty emails. While a few such messages a day is not uncommon for him, Hansen sensed something organized here.

Most of the e-mailers rehearsed a familiar contrarian mantra, spiced with a generous helping of personal attacks on Hansen himself. Most insisted that the sun is the primary cause of climate change, with a large number convinced that a new ice age is right around the geophysical corner.

Many of the messages asserted that the Earth is entering an ice age, with the temperature in 2008 already having lost all of the warming of the past several decades. Hansen’s calculations indicate that the main cause of our brief recent cooling is a La Nina episode in the Pacific Ocean.

By mid-2008, however, the La Nina was ending, tropical temperatures have returned nearly to average, after which a new El Nino episode may propel them to or past recent high levels during the next few years. “The low temperatures in the first half of 2008 lead us to estimate that the mean 2008 global temperature will be perhaps in the range about 10th to 15th warmest year in our record,” Hansen said.

The contrarians are not having of this, as they ‘swift-boat’ Hansen mercilessly. One e-mail to him virtually shouted: “THE SUN IS GOING OUT!” The sun does have a role, but the contrarians overplay it. The sun is inactive at the present, at a minimum of the normal roughly 11-year solar cycle. Thus, if the sun remains “out” (i.e., stuck for a long period in the current solar minimum), it can offset only about seven years of CO2 increase, Hansen said.

One lengthy email to Hansen was signed “John Doe, Texas.” It read, in part: “What kind of kindergarten fairy land are you living in, Jimmy?… I’ve been doing my level best for the last 2 years to tell people what a fraud you and your ilk are… I’ve also been telling people that you were basically bribed to lie… and that you don’t even have a degree in climatology… so your biggest enemy is ME, buddy boy… not the oil companies… I am completely impartial and have no economic stake in the argument one way or the other… which gives me a lot more credibility then [sic] you… So you just keep sounding off like some closet Hitler and spewing your lies… I will continue to trash your professional reputation and your pretended manhood… I always keep my word when dealing with incipient [sic] nazis like you… I will destroy you, Jimmy… do not doubt it… the science and the facts are on my side.”

No one said that defending the Earth against some members of the human race would be easy.

SOURCE: Hansen, James E. “Trip Report.” August 5, 2008.

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).

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