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 Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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 Still crazy after all these years. 
#8554931 - 06/23/08 04:00 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Its not as hot today as it was 20 years ago, June 23, 1988. The crazy man thinks its even more imperative now to change our religion or the sky is going to fall soon.
Turning Up the Heat on Climate Issue
20 Years Ago, a 98-Degree Day Illustrated Scientist's Warning
By David A. FahrentholdWashington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 23, 2008; Page A03
There have been hotter days on Capitol Hill, but few where the heat itself became a kind of congressional exhibit. It was 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, and the warmth leaked in through the three big windows in Dirksen 366, overpowered the air conditioner, and left the crowd sweating and in shirt sleeves.
James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist, was testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He was planning to say something radical: Global warming was real, it was a threat, and it was already underway.
Hansen had hoped for a sweltering day to underscore his message.
"We were just lucky," Hansen said last week.
Today, 20 years later, a series of events around Washington will commemorate Hansen's appearance before the Senate committee. Hansen himself will appear before a House committee on global warming.
This anniversary comes just after a major setback for environmentalists, as a bill that would have begun to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions failed in the Senate.
But still, activists say that Hansen's 1988 testimony will look to history like a turning point -- a moment when the word "if" started to disappear from the national debate about climate change.
"Before Jim Hansen's testimony, global climate change was not on the political agenda. It was something that a few environmentalists and a few politicians . . . were talking about," said Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, an environmental group.
"Hansen was clear, explicit and unequivocal," Lash said. "It absolutely put global climate change at the center of the discussion."
Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, will give a speech on climate change at noon at the National Press Club. In the afternoon, he is scheduled to give a briefing before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
He is now semi-famous, at least in Washington, for his warnings about the growing danger of climate change -- and for his repeated showdowns with higher-ups who have sought control over his message. The clashes have been particularly frequent with the administration of George W. Bush.
In 1988, however, Hansen was just a government scientist, and his cause was almost equally obscure.
He told the sweltering senators that 1988 was shaping up to be the warmest year in recorded history, and that -- with heat-trapping gases building up in the atmosphere -- this was probably not a coincidence.
"The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now," Hansen said, according to a Washington Post account of the hearing. "We already reached the point where the greenhouse effect is important."
Christopher Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute said Hansen's testimony made a crucial point: that rising temperatures were a problem for the present, not just for future generations.
"Until there was some evidence that it was actually happening, it was virtually impossible to motivate anyone," said Flavin, whose group is hosting Hansen's lunchtime speech today. "That will really sort of go down in history as a kind of pivot point."
Two decades later, climate change has become a global cause. Last year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- a collaboration of scientists from around the world -- won the Nobel Peace Prize for research establishing a consensus that the phenomenon is real. The panel shared the prize with former vice president Al Gore, who was recognized for his film "An Inconvenient Truth."
But things look different on Capitol Hill. In the two decades since Hansen's testimony, Congress has not passed any law mandating major cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. In that interval, 21 new coal-fired generating units have been built at power plants around the United States. The country's total emissions of carbon dioxide have climbed by about 18 percent, according to the latest statistics.
The most recent attempt to pass a law, sponsored by Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John W. Warner (R-Va.), was pulled from the Senate floor June 6, after its supporters could not muster the votes to overcome a filibuster threat.
Opponents of the bill said that it would impose huge costs on the U.S. economy by raising fuel prices and that it would deliver only uncertain results.
In an e-mailed statement, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) said the bill's failure was proof that Hansen's message had not caught on.
"Hansen, Gore, and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans are not buying it," Inhofe said. "It's back to the drawing board for Hansen and company as the alleged 'consensus' over man-made climate fears continues to wane and more and more scientists declare their dissent."
Today, Hansen said, he intends to repeat his message from two decades ago -- this time with even more urgency. He said he believes that the United States must wean itself almost totally off fossil fuels, and do it as quickly as possible, to stave off the most catastrophic consequences of warming.
"We're at the situation again when there's this big gap between what we understand scientifically and what is known, recognized by the public and policymakers," he said. "This time, we have to close that gap in a hurry, because we're running out of time."
This time, though, the weather won't help as much. The high for today is supposed to be only in the low 80s.
Staff writer Joel Achenbach contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/22/AR2008062201862.html
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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 Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: Luddite]
#8559136 - 06/24/08 05:01 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Here's another article about this arrogant bastard. He wants us all to stop using coal.
Burned Up About the Other Fossil Fuel
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, June 24, 2008; Page A03
Here's something to ponder as you park your Prius: What if gas guzzling isn't the problem?
That rather counterintuitive theme emerged yesterday from a visit to Washington by James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute and one of the first to sound the alarm about global warming in a congressional hearing 20 years ago yesterday. As he undertook a commemorative, I-told-you-so tour, from Diane Rehm's radio show to ABC News to the National Press Club to the House of Representatives, he made a point of saying the biggest worry isn't what we put in our cars, but what we put in our power plants.
"Practically, I don't see how we can stop putting the oil in the atmosphere, because that's owned by Russia and Saudi Arabia," he advised the House committee on global warming. "We can make our vehicles more efficient, but that oil is going to get used and it's going to get in the atmosphere . . . and it doesn't really matter much how fast we burn it. But what we could do is stop the coal."
The theme was much the same at the press club, where he gave a luncheon speech. "CO2from oil is going to get into the atmosphere," he said, because "you're not going to be able to tell Saudi Arabia and Russia, the countries that have oil, not to sell their oil." Hansen's solution: "Phase out coal as promptly as is practical."
The message from the celebrated scientist was somewhat at odds with a popular culture that has equated global warming with miles per gallon. And while Hansen wasn't discouraging fuel economy -- he called it "very important," because it could discourage drilling for "every last drop of oil" -- he said there's hope of preventing the world from burning through the rest of the world's major oil reserves. If we don't put it in our Hummers, the Chinese will eventually put it in theirs. "We can't prevent [using] the big, easily available oil in these superdeposits that Saudi Arabia have," he said. "That's going to end up in the atmosphere. I don't see any way to avoid it."
But what we could do, Hansen said, is phase out all coal use by 2030 except at those power plants that could capture the carbon dioxide. With the help of a carbon tax, coal would be replaced by solar, wind and other renewable energy, he said. That, and improved forestry and agriculture, could return carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to safe-for-the-planet levels, even if we burn through the half of Earth's oil that we haven't already used.
Environmental leaders hailed Hansen as a conquering hero as he marked the 20th anniversary of his original testimony to the Senate energy committee yesterday. Former senator Tim Wirth introduced him at the press club as a "brave and lonely leader" of the fight against climate change. "Jim Hansen is a hero of science, a hero of our planet," Wirth said. Two hours later in the Rayburn House Office Building, Rep. Ed Markey called him a "modern-day Cassandra" -- but then abandoned that comparison for a more flattering one. "Dr. Hansen is a latter-day climate-change Paul Revere," Markey proposed.
But Hansen was too dour about the condition of the Earth to enjoy such praise. "We have limited time," he complained when the audience at the press club gave him an extended standing ovation. "Actually, it's not a time to celebrate. Although the issue has become popular, the fact of the matter is that the emissions are continuing, basically unfettered." Likewise, the first sentence out of his mouth after Markey's effusive introduction was this: "It's probably also worth pointing out that our actions to deal with climate change over the past 20 years have really been minuscule and we're really running out of time."
Hansen's stature was raised substantially -- if accidentally -- when Bush administration political appointees a few years ago tried to silence him by ordering him to make his public statements consistent with official policy. Because of the public embarrassment the administration suffered from that episode, Hansen is now untouchable. In addition to his duties at Goddard, he has an adjunct professorship at Columbia and takes "vacation" time to speak as a "private citizen" on the issue of global warming.
Yesterday was one such vacation day -- and Hansen showed no fear of his administration superiors as he sounded new and better alarms: "a disaster of almost unimaginable proportions. . . . We've passed the tipping point. . . . We are going to lose all of the arctic sea ice within the next five to 10 years. . . . We are in the process of pushing off the planet polar and alpine species. . . . There's the potential for ecosystems to begin to collapse."
The Post's Sally Quinn asked Hansen if he has "had a chance to sit down face to face with President Bush and tell him everything that you've just told us."
Hansen laughed at the thought. "Unfortunately, no, I've not had a chance to talk to the president," he said. "I know that Michael Crichton did." (Bush was otherwise engaged yesterday meeting with members of the Phoenix Mercury, the winners of last year's WNBA championship.)
Since his appearance on the Hill 20 years ago, Hansen had lost most of his hair; the few remaining strands, suspended over his head by static electricity or some other force, gave him a crazy-professor look. Now 67, he still speaks in the slow cadence of his native Iowa and the technical dialect of a physicist. But he has embraced his role as polemicist as well, accusing fossil-fuel interests of "crimes against humanity" and demanding that politicians "have the guts" to embrace a carbon tax.
But the carbon tax remains a political nonstarter, and lawmakers were despairing as they listened to Hansen's grim presentation in the Rayburn Building -- just a few blocks from Congress's own coal-fired Capitol Power Plant. "You've been at this for two decades, and we've made marginal to no progress," Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) told Hansen. "What should be our short-term goal?"
The answer had nothing to do with Priuses and fuel cells. "There is a difference between oil CO2and coal CO2in that we can slow down the oil but we're not going to prevent it," the scientist said. "Coal is the one that we could prevent, so I think the most important near-term thing is to say let's have a moratorium on coal."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/23/AR2008062301920.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
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 zouden
Neuroscientist
Registered: 11/12/07
Posts: 7,091
Loc: Australia
Last seen: 14 years, 6 months
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: Luddite]
#8561224 - 06/25/08 04:28 AM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Don't you already have your own thread for this?
--------------------
I know... that just the smallest
part of the world belongs to me
You know... I'm not a blind man
but truth is the hardest thing to see
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ScavengerType
Registered: 01/24/08
Posts: 5,784
Loc: The North
Last seen: 10 years, 5 months
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: zouden]
#8570009 - 06/27/08 06:15 AM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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he wants to annoy new people.
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"Have you ever seen what happens when a grenade goes off in a school? Do you really know what you’re doing when you order shock and awe? Are you prepared to kneel beside a dying soldier and tell him why he went to Iraq, or why he went to any war?"
"The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done—dare I say it—in the name of God. Montesquieu said, "There have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of God." And I begin to feel that’s true. The shareholder is the excuse for everything."
- Author and former M6/M5 agent John le Carré on Democracy Now.
Conquer's Club
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: ScavengerType]
#8573989 - 06/28/08 10:55 AM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: Luddite]
#8574144 - 06/28/08 12:04 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist· Testimony to US Congress will also criticise lobbyists
· 'Revolutionary' policies needed to tackle crisis
Ed Pilkington in New York The Guardian, Monday June 23, 2008
Article history
James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.
Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.
Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.
In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."
He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".
He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.
The current concentration is 385 parts per million and is rising by 2ppm a year. Hansen, who heads Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, says 2009 will be a crucial year, with a new US president and talks on how to follow the Kyoto agreement.
He wants to see a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, coupled with the creation of a huge grid of low-loss electric power lines buried under ground and spread across America, in order to give wind and solar power a chance of competing. "The new US president would have to take the initiative analogous to Kennedy's decision to go to the moon."
His sharpest words are reserved for the special interests he blames for public confusion about the nature of the global warming threat. "The problem is not political will, it's the alligator shoes - the lobbyists. It's the fact that money talks in Washington, and that democracy is not working the way it's intended to work."
A group seeking to increase pressure on international leaders is launching a campaign today called 350.org. It is taking out full-page adverts in papers such as the New York Times and the Swedish Falukuriren calling for the target level of CO2 to be lowered to 350ppm. The advert has been backed by 150 signatories, including Hansen.
About this articleClose This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday June 23 2008 on p8 of the UK news section. It was last updated at 10:42 on June 24 2008. Printable version Send to a friend Share Clip Contact us larger | smaller ShareClose Digg reddit Google Bookmarks Yahoo! My Web del.icio.us StumbleUpon Newsvine livejournal Facebook BlinkList EmailClose Recipient's
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/fossilfuels.climatechange
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: Luddite]
#8575396 - 06/28/08 07:42 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Natural Gas Shortages in North America
In part because of a belief in man made global warming, new coal fired power plants are not being built in the USA. Coal fired power plants produce pollutants such as SO2 and mercury, but technology exists to handle it. Carbon sequestration techology doesn't exist and probably will never be economical even if it could be made to work. Most new power plants are powered by natural gas. Natural gas is also used to heat over 50% of people's homes in North America. According to the links below we're about to run out of natural gas in North America. Importing it using LNG tankers is expensive and there aren't even enough LNG terminals in North America to handle it all, mainly because of opposition to building these terminals by people in the areas where they're needed. Imagine one cold winter night when you want to turn up the thermostat and there's no gas left for your furnace. Power plants also won't have any gas so you might even have rolling black outs. Will you freeze to death or have you prepared to deal with the extreme cold all night and all day for months? Do you have a wood stove, a kerosine or propane heater? Will the subway trains be running?
According to these links, natural gas in North America is about to run out.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/8/6636/36918
http://www.geocities.com/davidmdelaney/oil-depletion/oil-depletion.html
The USA has over 200 years of coal reserves at present rates of consumption. Coal can be used to generate electricity and can even be made into liquid fuels for use in cars, trucks, trains and planes.
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: Luddite]
#8577201 - 06/29/08 12:45 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: Luddite]
#8584554 - 07/01/08 03:53 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Global Warming as Mass Neurosis
July 1, 2008; Page A15
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.
What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").
But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard Harris.
The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.
So let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.
The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.
A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.
And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.
Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?
As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.
In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
And add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121486841811817591.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
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Gumby
Fishnologist
Registered: 06/13/01
Posts: 26,656
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: Luddite]
#8584635 - 07/01/08 04:10 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Do you think anyone is actually reading all of that?
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: Gumby]
#8584682 - 07/01/08 04:23 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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How many cubic feet of natural gas can be recovered from the Marcellus shale?
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: Luddite]
#8584684 - 07/01/08 04:24 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Edited by Luddite (07/01/08 04:25 PM)
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zouden
Neuroscientist
Registered: 11/12/07
Posts: 7,091
Loc: Australia
Last seen: 14 years, 6 months
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: Luddite]
#8584687 - 07/01/08 04:24 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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Worst answer ever
--------------------
I know... that just the smallest
part of the world belongs to me
You know... I'm not a blind man
but truth is the hardest thing to see
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Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: zouden]
#8584694 - 07/01/08 04:26 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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I didn't answer.
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zouden
Neuroscientist
Registered: 11/12/07
Posts: 7,091
Loc: Australia
Last seen: 14 years, 6 months
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: Luddite]
#8584701 - 07/01/08 04:27 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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You sure didn't
--------------------
I know... that just the smallest
part of the world belongs to me
You know... I'm not a blind man
but truth is the hardest thing to see
|
Luddite
I watch Fox News
Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Still crazy after all these years. [Re: zouden]
#8584718 - 07/01/08 04:31 PM (15 years, 9 months ago) |
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The Marcellus shale may contain 50 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas. How much natural gas is used in North America in a year. What's the total reserves of natural gas in North America?
Edited by Luddite (07/01/08 04:32 PM)
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