Search Results for “hansen” – Page 2

What Really Happened 30 Years Ago with Hansen’s testimony? Morano’s new book reveals the warmist ‘self-puffery’ of the day

June 25, 2018

SPOTLIGHT: Competing accounts of an historic climate hearing. BIG PICTURE: June 23rd, 1988 is considered the day the climate crusade hit the jackpot. Thirty years ago, a sea of television cameras recorded NASA’s James Hansen testifying before a US Senate committee. The “greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now,” he said. There was “99 percent confidence” that human-caused global warming was underway. The person chairing the committee was Democratic Senator Timothy Wirth. Nine years later, when interviewed by PBS’s Frontline, he cheerfully revealed that the date of the hearing had been specially chosen. We “called the Weather Bureau,” said Wirth, and then scheduled the hearing on a day that had previously broken heat records. Matters were then taken further: What we did is we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. The fact that everyone, including television cameramen, felt overheated while Hansen was testifying helped emphasize his message. You can read that portion of the Frontline transcript here. There’s also a one-minute video clip: I and others have responded to Worth’s tale by wondering why behind-the-scenes machinations were necessary. If Wirth and others felt sure of the science, why the stagecraft? Fast forward eight more years and things get bizarre. As Marc Morano points out in his Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, Wirth wholly recanted in 2015. Indeed, he advised the Washington Post that the above-described events actually didn’t happen. Three different people told the Post Wirth’s story is false. In the words of Hansen: “I love Tim and his wife Wren, but he just made these up later to make it seem interesting.” Asked to respond, Wirth sent the Post a written statement three sizable paragraphs long. They say, in part: Some myths about the hearing also have circulated over the years, including the idea that windows were left open or the air conditioning was not working. While I’ve heard that version of events in the past, and repeated it myself, I’ve since learned it didn’t happen. So let’s put those stories to rest and instead focus on the substance of the hearing… In the video, Wirth sure sounds as though he’s describing his own actions. He tells the story with relish. But he uses the word “we” rather than “I.” So maybe he was just spreading fanciful rumours. The Post‘s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, calls this “a quintessential example of Washington self-puffery.” He also observes: It is rather remarkable that events that happened just 27 years ago could so easily get twisted and misreported, based on one overenthusiastic interview. Kessler gave Wirth four Pinocchios, and urged PBS to “add a corrective note on the Web page containing the Wirth interview.” (Three years later, that still hasn’t happened.) TOP TAKEAWAY: In the climate world, the line between real and fake is strangely murky. LINKS: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change Marc Morano the full 2007 PBS transcript Washington Post, Setting the record straight: The real story of a pivotal climate-change hearing. my previous post, Journalists Relied on James Hansen’s Say-So Rupert Darwall points out, in The Age of Global Warming, that the first IPCC report (1990) “carried an implicit rebuke to James Hansen and his claim two years earlier to have detected the greenhouse effect.” He quotes the IPCC: “Because of the many significant uncertainties and inadequacies in the observational climate record, in our knowledge of the causes of natural climate variability and in current computer models, scientists working in this field cannot at this point in time make the definitive statement: ‘Yes, we have now seen an enhanced greenhouse effect.’”(my italics)

Book details NASA’s ‘ex-con’ James Hansen’s 1988 climate testimony – ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change’

June 23, 2018

Book excerpt: ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,’ By Marc Morano Excerpt from ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change’: In 2009 NASA then–lead global warming scientist James Hansen endorsed a book called Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis, which ponders “razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine” as possible solutions to global warming. “The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization,” the book explains. “A future outside civilization is a better life; one in which we can actually decide for ourselves how we are going to live.” Hansen declared on the book’s Amazon page that author Keith Farnish, “has it right: time has practically run out, and the system is the problem. Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests—they will not look after our and the planet’s well-being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort.” Remember, Hansen was NASA’s lead global warming scientist, in charge of the temperature dataset, endorsing a book suggesting the solution of calling for ridding the world of industrial civilization. Hansen is a hardcore activist who has been arrested multiple times protesting climate change. He has accused climate skeptics of “crimes against humanity and nature.” … Nineteen-eighty-eight was also the year of NASA scientist James Hansen’s dramatic testimony to Congress about the urgency of global warming. This was the key moment when Hansen warned, “the greenhouse effect is here.” As the New York Times reported at the time, “‘Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming,’ Hansen said at the hearing today, adding, ‘It is already happening now.’” Hansen’s testimony as NASA’s lead global warming scientist was a huge media sensation. But one of Hansen’s former supervisors explained that Hansen’s dramatic testimony was not well received at NASA. Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon explained in 2009, “We were somewhat appalled. We were certainly embarrassed,” by Hansen’s testimony. “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it),” Theon wrote. “Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” Theon added. “I probably would have been removed if I had tried to cut off Jim Hansen’s funding, after all, he had Al Gore…on his team.” It wasn’t until nearly two decades later that we learned the extent to which that testimony was staged to manipulate the public—exactly like so much of the climate change “science” we have been bombarded with ever since. The theatrical hearing was orchestrated in part by Senators Al Gore and Timothy Wirth, as was revealed in a 2007 PBS Frontline special, which reported on the “stagecraft” employed at the Hansen hearing to facilitate the transition from cooling fears to warming fears. PBS correspondent Deborah Amos reported that “Sen. Timothy Wirth was one of the few politicians already concerned about global warming, and he was not above using a little stagecraft for Hansen’s testimony”: TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it. DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day? TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the—when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot. [from the 1988 hearing] WIRTH: Dr. Hansen, if you’d start us off, we’d appreciate it. TIMOTHY WIRTH: The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving this remarkable testimony. But in 2015, Senator Wirth was seemingly pressured to recant his version of events. Hansen accused Wirth of fibbing about the stagecraft.” “He just made these up later to make it seem interesting,” Hansen said. Wirth suddenly remembered that his stories about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the hearing were totally made up! Wirth now says he was in error: “Some myths about the hearing also have circulated over the years, including the idea that windows were left open or the air conditioning was not working. While I’ve heard that version of events in the past and repeated it myself, I’ve since learned it didn’t happen.” It’s hard to believe that global warming science can be “settled” when major players behind promoting it can’t agree on basic events surrounding their biggest day. ★★★★★ Global Cooling Flashback In 1988, NASA’s James Hansen was the authority trotted out before a U.S. Senate committee to launch the global warming panic. But sixteen years earlier, in the global cooling scare era, “a computer program developed by Dr. James Hansen” had been applied by other scientists to the question of “the carbon-dioxide [that] fuel-burning puts in the atmosphere.” They found “no need to worry” about the carbon dioxide, but warned that other particles from burning fossil fuels “could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees” in fifty years, bringing on a new ice age by 2021. … ★★★★★ When Reality Fails to Alarm, Make Scary Predictions In 2015 NASA’s former lead climate scientists James Hansen released a study projecting sea level rise of up to ten feet in the next fifty years and warned that unchecked climate change is shaping up to be “highly dangerous” for the world. “Science by press release: Journalists received ‘summary’ of Hansen’s paper via PR firm,” noted Meteorologist Ryan Maue. Even Hansen’s fellow climate change activist scientists found Hansen’s skewing of the science over the top. UN IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth said Hansen’s study was “rife with speculation . . .many conjectures and huge extrapolation based on quite flimsy evidence.” Climategate’s Michael Mann admitted Hansen’s estimates were “prone to a very large ‘extrapolation error.’” # Related Links: Move over Rachel Carson! – Morano’s Politically Incorrect Climate Book outselling ‘Silent Spring’ at Earth Day Order Your Book Copy Now! ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change’ By Marc Morano Czech Physicist mocks NASA’s retiring ex-con James Hansen: ‘A crazy hippie is just retiring from NASA so he will become much less important because most of his importance did boil down to his position in NASA’ 1989 NYT Editorial By Nicholas Wade Slammed Former NASA Scientist James Hansen For Pushing Climate BS – ‘Crying Wolf in the Greenhouse’ – ‘Very few of his [Hansen’s] colleagues agree with him’ that ‘the greenhouse effect is already here’ – NYT: ‘The Office of Management and Budget drew criticism when it heavy-handedly made Mr. Hansen qualify testimony to Congress last month. But its caveat, his warnings ‘should be viewed as estimates from evolving computer models and not as reliable predictions,’ was scientifically impeccable. The computer models of the greenhouse effect are indeed ”evolving” -they’re somewhere around the amoeba stage. Environmental lobbyists are tempted to emphasize the threat of the greenhouse effect because it reinforces so much of their other agenda.’ Climate Alarm: Failed Prognostications from 30 years ago ‘continue to be falsified in the real world’ Watch: Tony Heller on Hansen’s failed predictions from 1988: Fmr. Harvard physicist slams ‘professional propagandist’ James Hansen: ‘There’s nothing worse about the climate of 2018 relatively to the climate of 1988’ – Czech Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl: “Well, the actual history of CO2 followed Scenario A most closely – the CO2 emissions kept on rising at a slightly accelerating rate. So you can see that Hansen predicted the warming trend about 3°C per century. The actual observed trend from the 1980s (well, early 1980s) has been about 1.3°C per century according to satellite and slightly below 2°C per century according to weather stations. Although we didn’t really stop CO2 emissions at all, the temperature was growing almost exactly like Hansen’s scenario in which the CO2 concentration becomes constant after 1988!” … “There’s nothing “worse” about the climate of 2018 relatively to the climate of 1988.” Analysis: James Hansen’s 1988 testimony was ‘the end of any pretense in reality with climate science’ Scientists: 30 Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up? Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels and Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue: “Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios—enough to determine which was closest to reality. And the winner is Scenario C. Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago…” “Several more of Mr. Hansen’s predictions can now be judged by history. Have hurricanes gotten stronger, as Mr. Hansen predicted in a 2016 study? No. Satellite data from 1970 onward shows no evidence of this in relation to global surface temperature. Have storms caused increasing amounts of damage in the U.S.? Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show no such increase in damage, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product. How about stronger tornadoes? The opposite may be true, as NOAA data offers some evidence of a decline. The list of what didn’t happen is long and tedious.” Fmr. chief of NASA climate science James Hansen: Prez. Obama ‘failed miserably’ on climate – ‘Late, ineffectual & partisan’ – Also rips Merkel & Gov. Brown as ‘both pretending to be solving the problem’ – Via UK Guardian: Jame Hansen’s long list of culprits for this inertia are both familiar – the nefarious lobbying of the fossil fuel industry – and surprising. Jerry Brown, the progressive governor of California, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, are “both pretending to be solving the problem” while being unambitious and shunning low-carbon nuclear power, Hansen argues. James Hansen: ‘Promises like Paris don’t mean much, it’s wishful thinking. It’s a hoax that governments have played on us since the 1990s.’ There is particular scorn for Barack Obama. Hansen says in a scathing upcoming book that the former president “failed miserably” on climate change and oversaw policies that were “late, ineffectual and partisan”. Hansen even accuses Obama of passing up the opportunity to thwart Donald Trump’s destruction of US climate action, by declining to settle a lawsuit the scientist, his granddaughter and 20 other young people are waging against the government, accusing it of unconstitutionally causing peril to their living environment. “Near the end of his administration the US said it would reduce emissions 80% by 2050,” Hansen said. NASA’s James Hansen to Retire – Marc Morano Statement: ‘Celebrate! It’s A Happy Day for Science! Hansen’s sad legacy will serve as a cautionary tale for future scientists. Hansen chose ideology, activism, stagecraft and handcuffs over science. He will be sorely missed by global warming skeptics, as he made our life so much easier by just being himself. NASA & Science deserved much better than James Hansen.’ Background on Hansen: 1) NASA’s James Hansen, a muse to Eco-Terrorists?! Watch Now: Morano on Fox News: ‘NASA’s resident ex-con James Hansen is inspiring these people to potential acts of eco terrorism’ — Morano: ‘He was arrested for the 3rd or 4th time this past week protesting the pipeline. Hansen has endorsed a book calling for ridding the world of industrial civilization, for blowing up dams and razing cities to the ground and turning off our greenhouse gas machine’ — 2) Flashback: NASA scientist James Hansen endorses book which calls for ‘ridding the world of Industrial Civilization’ – Hansen declares author ‘has it right…the system is the problem’ — Book proposes ‘razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine — 3) Flashback: Greenie David Roberts of Grist turns on NASA’s Hansen: ‘I know I’m not supposed to say this, but Hansen managed his transition from scientist to activist *terribly*. All influence lost’ — 4) Flashback 2009: One of James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic — Says Hansen ‘Embarrassed NASA’ & ‘Was Never Muzzled’ — 5) Alert: NASA’s James Hansen Declared Obama Has One Week Left To Save The Planet! — ‘On Jan. 17, 2009 Hansen declared Obama only ‘has four years to save Earth’ — Only 7 Days left! — 6) Watch Now: Morano rips NASA’s James Hansen: ‘Hansen said we only have 4 years left to save the planet in Jan.2009, We passed another Mayan calendar deadline’ — 7) Flashback 2008: Don’t Panic Over Predictions of Climate Doom -Get the Facts on James Hansen— ‘High Crimes Against Humanity’ Trial for Climate Skeptics? Alert: NASA’s James Hansen Declared Obama Has One Week Left To Save The Planet! — ‘On Jan. 17, 2009 Hansen declared Obama only ‘has four years to save Earth’ — Only 7 Days left! Obama Mission Accomplished! ‘Obama succeeded in reversing global warming’ Global Temps Cooling Over past 4 years

Fmr. Harvard physicist slams ‘professional propagandist’ James Hansen: ‘There’s nothing worse about the climate of 2018 relatively to the climate of 1988’

June 22, 2018

https://motls.blogspot.com/2018/06/hansens-testimony-30th-anniversary.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+LuboMotlsReferenceFrame+(Lubos+Motl%27s+reference+frame) Hansen’s testimony: 30th anniversary Tomorrow, it will have been exactly 30 years from the day (June 23rd, 1988) when James Hansen gave a testimony before the U.S. Senate. For the first time, the American politicians were told by a “mainstream looking” active scientist that the global warming would kill us unless we dramatically change our industries and society. As a professional propagandist, James Hansen chose a blisteringly hot day in D.C. The temperature went up to 98 Fahrenheit in the U.S. capital. He was sweating like mad. The Weather Underground predicts the high temperature 73 F for today and 86 for tomorrow – a cooling by 27 or 14 Fahrenheit in 30 years, respectively. The New York Times have announced that an expert told the Senate that the global warming had begun. Well, there was nothing special happening to the climate in 1988 or any similar year but something has begun on that year: The global warming hysteria among the mainstream Western politicians and journalists. The year 1988 was really essential for the birth of that pseudoscientific movement. While James Hansen – formerly a decent atmospheric physicist analyzing the conditions in the atmosphere of Venus, among other things – has made a big impact in the U.S, the U.K. climate alarmists successfully globalized their panic and promoted their national organization to a global one: the IPCC was founded in 1988, too. The Real Climate – well, Gavin Schmidt – reminds us about the anniversary. A part of the Hansen 1988 package was this paper, Global Climate Changes as Forecast by [GISS 3D] model. Note that in 1988, it was fashionable to use the plural for “climate changes”. Incidentally, this is still the convention in Czech – and I guess in other languages. In English, for some reason, a single “climate change” became much more popular. The singular form was probably supported by some leftist organizations promoting Gaia and its unity – or the unity of all nations in the world. It probably sounds more impressive when a single important thing (“the climate”) is changing then if you admit that there are just mostly random changes of thousands of quantities that are really separate from each other. There have been various graphs in Hansen’s paper – and the testimony. Those graphs contained wiggles that they couldn’t really predict. And the real world data contain interannual oscillations, too. But what is “actually” predicted are the trends of the global warming. Hansen predicted: Scenario A: 3.3±0.3ºC/century (95% CI) Scenario B: 2.8±0.3ºC/century (95% CI) Scenario C: 1.6±0.3ºC/century (95% CI) Here, Scenario A was meant to be business-as-usual in which the CO2 emissions kept on increasingly at a very slightly accelerating rate. Scenario B assumed some slowdown of the emissions. Scenario C assumed that we would stop emitting CO2 immediately. Well, the actual history of CO2 followed Scenario A most closely – the CO2 emissions kept on rising at a slightly accelerating rate. So you can see that Hansen predicted the warming trend about 3°C per century. The actual observed trend from the 1980s (well, early 1980s) has been about 1.3°C per century according to satellite and slightly below 2°C per century according to weather stations. Although we didn’t really stop CO2 emissions at all, the temperature was growing almost exactly like Hansen’s scenario in which the CO2 concentration becomes constant after 1988! To say the least, Hansen overstated the warming trend by a factor of two or so (perhaps between 1.5 and 2.5, depending on which observational data you build upon). The evolution of the concentrations of N2O was between the “immediate halt” and “lower emissions”, despite the fact that no policies against this gas have really been enacted. Hansen’s false predictions are even clearer in the case of CH4. He predicted a fast growth in the absence of effective policies. But even though no one has really adopted policies that would effectively discourage CH4 emissions, the CH4 concentration basically stopped growing. And so did CFC11 and CFC12, some complicated greenhouse gases. When it comes to the concentrations and temperature changes, Hansen overstated the problem by a factor of two. It’s a big inaccuracy but you could say it isn’t completely game-changing. But his contribution was important because he has also pioneered the hysterical discourse when it comes to the hypothetical “detailed additional consequences” of the “climate changes”. There have been virtually none – but he was predicting many. I am talking about the frequency of wildfires, hurricanes, torrential rains, droughts, and all these unwelcome events. Nothing has really become worse about them at all. I think that the temperature change isn’t really the core of the propaganda – the real-world temperature is changing by amounts that are approaching one degree in the recent century and they’re only predicting twice or thrice that amount. It’s primarily the additional, “less physically calculable” impacts where they’re really lying. Their predictions of those changes are either completely wrong or overstated by at least an order of magnitude. James Hansen remained a radical activist – who hasn’t hesitated to be arrested. In his new book, Hansen criticizes Barack Obama and other leftists as losers. They could have enacted something insane and effective, like a global carbon tax, but they did nothing and James Hansen despises them. Some temperature change has taken place but I think that 30 years after Hansen’s testimony, all sensible people may see that the idea that “something bad was gonna happen to the climate within our lifetimes” seems utterly implausible. There’s nothing “worse” about the climate of 2018 relatively to the climate of 1988. We’re 30 years older – some of us weren’t around in 1988 – but the climate is doing fine and vegetation and ecosystems are arguably much healthier than in the late 1980s. 1988 was the year of the peaking advanced socialism in my country. I remember insane emissions at that time, dirty cities, dust, carcinogenic emissions, acid rains etc. Those should have been reduced and they were reduced within less than a decade dramatically. But a problem with CO2? Not really. Incidentally, soda and beer makers are just facing shortage of CO2 that they need to add to their beverages. That’s quite ironic in a world where lots of people claim that CO2 is basically a poison.

Analysis: James Hansen’s 1988 testimony was ‘the end of any pretense in reality with climate science’

June 22, 2018

https://realclimatescience.com/2018/06/thirty-years-since-global-warming-began/ by tonyheller On June 23, 1988 NASA’s James Hansen told Congress that global warming had begun. Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate – The New York Times One June 22, the night before his testimony, Hansen and Senator Tim Wirth sabotaged the air conditioner in the meeting room. we called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6 or June 9 or whatever it was, so we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo: It was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it. It was stiflingly hot that summer. [At] the same time you had this drought all across the country, so the linkage between the Hansen hearing and the drought became very intense. … What we did it was went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right? So that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room and so when the, when the hearing occurred there was not only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot. … So Hansen’s giving this testimony, you’ve got these television cameras back there heating up the room, and the air conditioning in the room didn’t appear to work. So it was sort of a perfect collection of events that happened that day, with the wonderful Jim Hansen, who was wiping his brow at the witness table and giving this remarkable testimony. Interviews – Timothy Wirth | Hot Politics | FRONTLINE | PBS That day was by far the hottest June 22 on record in the US, with almost the entire country over 90 degrees and much of the country over 100 degrees. That summer was the last really hot summer in the US, but in matters of climate, facts are irrelevant. The political left found an excuse to blame humans and seize power, and that was the end of any pretense in reality with climate science.

Fmr. chief of NASA climate science James Hansen: Prez. Obama ‘failed miserably’ on climate – ‘Late, ineffectual & partisan’ – Also rips Merkel & Gov. Brown as ‘both pretending to be solving the problem’

June 19, 2018

Gore And Hansen Join “False Prophets Hall of Fame” As Arctic Ice Volume Now Only 4% Below Mean!

May 22, 2018

Gore And Hansen Join “False Prophets Hall of Fame” As Arctic Ice Volume Now Only 4% Below Mean! http://notrickszone.com/2018/05/19/gore-and-hansen-join-false-prophets-hall-of-fame-as-arctic-ice-volume-now-only-4-below-mean/ Japanese skeptic blogger Kirye posted here at Twitter the latest news on Arctic sea ice volume, which earlier this spring took a sudden and unexpected jump upwards – adding some 2 trillion cubic meters. What follows is the latest chart from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI): Source: DMI. As the chart shows, Arctic sea ice volume hasn’t really budged that much since it peaked in early April. Less than 4% below the mean And when one looks at the chart closely, it is seen that the mean Arctic se ice volume for this time of year is just under 25,000 cubic kilometers. Currently we see that volume is the same as it was in 2014, at some 24,000 cubic kilometers. The deviation from the mean is less than 1000 cubic kilometers, i.e. less than 4%. That means sea ice volume is well within the range of natural variability. Predictions of an ice-free Arctic go back decades Two days ago the Deplorable Science Blog here reminded us: “Sixty years ago, the New York Times predicted ships would be sailing over the North Pole ‘within the lifetime of our children.’” The false prophets In the same article Steve Goddard brings up a 2008 article by the AP’s Seth Borenstein, who quoted climate alarmist, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, who then called James Hansen a “climate prophet”. Both Al Gore and former NASA GISS director James Hansen warned –“echoing work by other scientists” — that the Arctic would be ice-free in the summer by now! So, add two more names to False Prophets Hall of Fame. Skeptics right Ironically the real “prophet” turns out to be Oklahoma Senator, global warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe, who in 2008 dismissed all the predictions as media doom, and said that Americans weren’t buying it. Ten years later Senator Inhofe turns out to be right. — gReader Pro

NASA James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt Paper: 10 More Years of Global Warming Pause (Maybe)

January 25, 2018

by Eric Worrall Guest essay by Eric Worrall h/t Benny Peiser / GWPF – Former NASA GISS Director James Hansen and current director Gavin Schmidt think nature may conspire of the next ten years to produce the impression of an ongoing pause in global warming. Though of course it may not. Global Temperature in 2017 18 January 2018…

Fight ‘Climate Change’ by Suing Polluters, Says Frm. NASA’s James Hansen

November 13, 2017

By Stephen Leahy PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 7, 2017 Countries should sue the world’s biggest oil, coal and gas, and cement companies for damages resulting from climate change—says well-known climate scientist James Hansen. Hansen, a former NASA scientist who warned Congress about the dangers of climate change in 1988, says global warming of 2°C, or even 1.5°C, is dangerous, risking sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. That would put major parts of coastal cities like New York underwater. He believes major impacts of climate change are happening faster than what is reported in even the latest science reports, including the U.S. government’s Climate Science Special Report released last Friday. An enormous amount of money is urgently needed to dramatically slash emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), take existing CO2 out of the atmosphere, and for countries to cope with the impacts of climate change, Hansen argues. And that money should come from the companies that profited most from burning fossil fuels, Hansen will tell world leaders Tuesday in Bonn, Germany, at the annual United Nations climate negotiations. Known as COP 23, negotiators from 197 countries are meeting this week to finalize details around the Paris Climate Change Agreement, including a process to increase emission reductions. The current reductions promised by countries under the Paris Agreement are only a third of what is needed to stay below 2C, according to the United Nations Environment Program. “I tried to get an opportunity to address the negotiators but did not succeed. I will give my talk at a press conference,” Hansen told National Geographic in advance of the meeting. TARGETING “CARBON MAJORS”? The companies that could be sued are known as the “carbon majors,” Hansen says. These are the 100 companies who have been the source of more than 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron are listed as among the highest carbon-emitting, investor-owned companies. This legal action is comparable to the successful tobacco industry lawsuits that resulted in billions of dollars in settlements, he adds. LEGAL PRECEDENTS In fact, climate lawsuits are already happening. Last year, a Filipino government body called the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines accused 47 carbon majors of human rights violations because of their role in climate change. Three California coastal communities sued 31 fossil-fuel companies in July. Last month, four municipalities on Canada’s west coast asked Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and others to pay their share of the climate costs those communities are facing. There is now even a nascent movement called Climate Law in our Hands that helps communities go after these carbon-emitting companies. Governments are also being sued. A Dutch citizens’ group won the first-ever climate lawsuit against a government in 2015. The courts agreed that the Netherlands government wasn’t doing enough to protect its citizens and made the unprecedented ruling that the country’s annual CO2 emission reduction target had to increase from 17 percent to 25 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. For comparison, 2015 (most recent available) annual U.S. emissions are four percent higher than 1990. Hansen is involved in a 2015 lawsuit against the U.S. federal government, brought by 21 kids under the age of 21, including his own granddaughter. The case argues that the government’s failure to curb CO2 emissions has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property. A trial will be held February 5, 2018 in the U.S. District Court of Oregon. Another group of youth just filed a lawsuit against Governor Bill Walker of Alaska alleging that “the state is violating their constitutional rights by putting fossil-fuel production above the safety of their lives.”

Fmr. NASA’s James Hansen at UN Summit declares Paris pact’s ‘ambition’ is a ‘hoax’

November 9, 2017

Via: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.theecologist.org/Interviews/2989449/james_hansen_at_cop23_the_voice_of_dissent.html&gws_rd=cr&dcr=0&ei=XWEEWoHDI9LAkwXoxa6wAw By Nick Breeze – The Ecologist – 9th November, 2017 James Hansen is making his second visit to the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, COP23 in Bonn to declare the that the Paris Agreement “ambition” is a “hoax”. NICK BREEZE meets the man still raising the climate alarm. If you look at the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere…it is actually growing more rapidly than it was two years ago. Nick Breeze (NB): Can you rate the progress that the Paris Agreement has achieved since COP21? James Hansen (JH): I would say there is very little progress because there is no reductions in global emissions of carbon dioxide. If you look at the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and methane in the atmosphere, it is actually growing more rapidly than it was two years ago. NB: Is this what you expected? JH: I expected very little from the Paris Agreement. It is analogous to the Kyoto Protocol. There politicians agreed that climate was a problem and that nations would try to reduce their emissions; in fact the emissions accelerated. The rate of growth increased. If you look at developed countries their emissions peaked in 1980 and since then have been flat. There is no evidence of an impact of the Kyoto Protocol or the framework convention in the 1990’s. Now we got to 2015 and we have the Paris Protocol, all the politicians clapping each other on the back as if something had been accomplished but there is not going to be a reduction in fossil fuel use as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy. And that’s the situation. We have to make fossil fuels include their cost to society. That means the air pollution cost, the water pollution cost, the climate change cost. So we have to add a carbon fee, a carbon tax, which has to be across the board: oil, gas and coal. Not some cap and trade gimmick which does almost nothing. There is no realisation of the politicians that they have not taken the needed actions, so in that sense there has been no progress. NB: Do you speak to leading figures from the UNFCCC or government officials? JH: I have gone to different countries and tried to make this case and they do not really change their approach. I tried to persuade them that cap and trade with offsets is really not doing anything. And they have to admit that! I met with the science advisor to the European Commission and she agreed that cap and trade is not working and what you need is an across the board carbon tax or carbon fee. But, she says, you have to persuade them, the bureaucrats in Brussels. Well that is hard to do because there are all these deals and as yet, these politicians are working more for the fossil fuel industry than they are for the public. When you see words like “ambition” – a word tied very closely to the COP – how do you interpret that and what do you think? JH: Yeah, that is just a hoax in my opinion! They say that they are going to try to do something but it won’t work. As long as fossil fuels are allowed to be the cheapest energy someone will burn them. Some countries will try real hard and they’ll reduce their emissions by twenty percent, or by thirty percent but look at the global emissions. They are still staying at least the same, if not increasing and that is going to be true as long as fossil fuels are allowed to be the cheapest energy. NB: Could you summarise what you’d prescribe as a course of action? JH: Yeah, the course of action should be to collect a fee from the fossil fuel companies at the domestic mines and the ports of entry and give the money to the public; an equal amount to all legal residents. That way the person that does better than average in limiting their carbon footprint will make much more money. In fact, if you look at the distribution of energy use by the public, about 70% of the people could make money with the present distribution. Wealthy people would lose money but they can afford that. They have a bigger carbon footprint because they travel more and they live in bigger houses, but this would be a big incentive for people to pay attention to what they are buying. As the carbon fee rises, products that are made with fossil fuels will become more expensive. So people will tend to buy other products and this will move us off of fossil fuels. Economists all agree: this is the way to do it, let the market help you solve the problem. You can’t do it by regulations, and by subsidising solar panels. It does very little good because we’re getting less than 1% of solar energy from solar panels. NB: When you look across the political spectrum today, do you feel that we could go in the direction you are prescribing? JH: I think we will go in that direction because China will eventually go in that direction. They are already beginning to have internal carbon price and carbon tax and they have a few hundred million people living near sea-level. They do not deny the science, they understand it and they want to go to clean energy because their pollution is so bad. So they are going to move in that direction and as their economy continues to grow, relative to the rest of the world, they may be in a position where they could virtually impose this. You see, either the United States, or China, or the European Union has to decide that ‘we are going to have a carbon fee or a carbon tax’. None of them have done that yet. But if just one of them would do it they could practically impose it by means of border duties on products from countries that do not have an equivalent carbon fee. That then is a big incentive for other countries to have their own carbon fee so they can collect the money themselves. The World Trade Association agrees that such a border duty would be justified and that is what we need but we haven’t got any one of these three economic powers to agree to do it yet. NB: Why is this view not being considered as part of the roadmap to 1.5 or 2 degrees? JH: The reason that we are not doing what every economist says we should do and have a carbon tax, is that the fossil fuel industry is too damn powerful in capitals all around the world. In Washington DC and in other capitals. I thought that the U.S. was worse than the rest of the world and in some ways at the moment it is but I went to about a dozen countries and I found that the fossil fuel industry is very powerful in very capital. NB: So are you hopeful we will turn this situation around? JH: I think we’ll turn it around but we better do it pretty soon because the fundamental difficulty is the delayed response of the climate system. We have only witnessed about half of the change for the gasses that are already in the atmosphere just because the ocean has so much inertia. It doesn’t warm up quickly. There is more energy coming into the planet than there is going out. Therefore the oceans are going to continue to rise even if we stabilised atmospheric CO2 today. Then the ice-sheets also have great inertia. So they are beginning to melt but sea-level is only going up at a rate that if it continues a hundreds years is only [~40cm’s] but that rate has doubled a few times in the last hundred years and if it doubles a few more times then you are talking about metres. Then we would lose all coastal cities if we stay on that path. So we really need to begin to stabilise atmospheric composition and that means reduce fossil fuel use rapidly over the next few decades. We should be off fossil fuels by the middle of the century if we want to stabilise climate. NB: But even if we stabilise, what you are saying is that we are still going to see the impacts? JH: Well, if we would reduce emissions a few percent each year, which economists say you could easily do if you had a rising price on carbon, then the maximum temperature rise would be 1.5 degrees [Celsius]. It is already a little more than 1 degree and it might still go up for a few decades but it would peak at about 1.5 and then begin to go down. We would also, in addition to reducing emissions a few percent a year, need to store more carbon in the soil and biosphere. But that is possible and has other advantages with improved agricultural and forestry practises the soil can contain more carbon and become more fertile in the process. And we can do that. NB: This is a hope story in a way? JH: It’s plausible. Economic studies show that if you had a reasonable rising carbon fee then emissions would go down by a few percent a year, so it’s feasible but not without a carbon price. This Author Nick Breeze is a climate interviewer posting regularly at: http://envisonation.co.uk and http://climateseries.com

‘Fraud, Fake…Worthless Words’: NASA’s James Hansen on UN Paris Pact – Trump should take note

May 11, 2017

By Robert Bradley Jr. — May 9, 2017 “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.” – James Hansen, “Isolation of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Part I,” November 27, 2015. “[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.” – James Hansen, quoted in Oliver Milman, “James Hansen, Father of Climate Change Awareness, Calls Paris ‘A Fraud’.” The Guardian, December 12, 2015. James Hansen has weighted in the Paris agreement, which is now on the firing line with the U.S. threating to set into motion a pullout. Hansen’s disfavor of this global climate agreement, setting voluntary targets for greenhouse gas reductions globally, might rival that of President Trump, but for contrary reasons. The good news is that the father of climate alarmism has repeatedly spoken truth to power when it comes to the politics of energy and climate.

Search Results for: hansen – Page 2