James Hansen - Al Gore stooge

NASA's James Hansen, an Al Gore stooge, is at his dishonest best in this new article telling us that we're all doomed and that the reason people aren't taking action is due to the strength of the oil industry.

GLOBAL warming has plunged the planet into a crisis and the fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public, NASA's top climate scientist says.

“We've already reached the dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told AFP.

There has never been any reasonable definition of what is a 'dangerous' amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Furthermore, these amounts are based on computer models that have never been accurate - ever - due to their inability to get precipitation correct.

“But there are ways to solve the problem” of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which Hansen said has reached the “tipping point” of 385 parts per million.

In a paper he was submitting to Science magazine on Monday, Hansen calls for phasing out all coal-fired plants by 2030, taxing their emissions until then, and banning the building of new plants unless they are designed to trap and segregate the carbon dioxide they emit.

In other words - Big Green's major socialist priority policy.

The major obstacle to saving the planet from its inhabitants is not technology, insisted Hansen, named one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2006 by Time magazine.

“The problem is that 90 percent of energy is fossil fuels. And that is such a huge business, it has permeated our government,” he maintained.

“What's become clear to me in the past several years is that both the executive branch and the legislative branch are strongly influenced by special fossil fuel interests,” he said, referring to the providers of coal, oil and natural gas and the energy industry that burns them.

In a recent survey of what concerns people, global warming ranked 25th.

“The industry is misleading the public and policy makers about the cause of climate change. And that is analogous to what the cigarette manufacturers did. They knew smoking caused cancer, but they hired scientists who said that was not the case.”

Thaaaaaat must be it. Big Oil has bought off all of the scientists that disagree with the so-called science supporting the climate change argument. How did Big Oil do in Europe? Not so well. In New Zealand? Failed. In Australia? Failed. Stopping Earth Hour? Failed. Big Oil does not run the media, which is in the pocket of Big Green, so how they can stop the the world from knowing the true extent of the 'problem' seems a bit far fetched. The common thread across all countries that have ratified Kyoto is that the are left wing. Left wing governments supporting a big government policy? Imagine that.

Hansen says that with an administration and legislature that he believes are “well oiled, our best hope is the judicial branch.”

That is - force it on the people in spite of their opposition to draconian measures. These people are profoundly anti-democracy.

Last year Hansen testified before the US Congress that “interference with communication of science to the public has been greater during the current administration than at any time in my career.”

Government public relations officials, he said, filter the facts in science reports to reduce “concern about the relation of climate change to human-made greenhouse gas emissions.”

Balderdash. Anyway, if there has been any interference then it's been spectacularly ineffective given the daily deluge of pro-AGW communication from Big Green and its supporters in the media, the left and education institutions.

While he recognises that he has stepped outside the traditional role of scientists as researchers rather than as public policy advocates, he says he does so because “in this particular situation we've reached a crisis.”

Or maybe he does so because Al Gore gave him hundreds of thousands of dollars...

The policy makers, “the people who need to know are ignorant of the actual status of the matter, and the gravity of the matter, and most important, the urgency of the matter,” he charged.

“It's analogous to an engineer who sees that there's a flaw in the space shuttle before it is to be launched. You don't have any choice. You have to say something. That's really all that I'm doing,” he explained.

No it's not. It's analogous to the population 'crisis', heterosexual aids 'crisis' and a litany of other high profile non-crises that the left has promoted over the years.

Hansen was in Wilmington, Delaware, to receive a $US50,000 Common Wealth Award for outstanding achievement, along with former Australian prime minister John Howard, the US actress Glenn Close, and NBC news anchor Ann Curry.

The awards are provided by a trust of the late Ralph Hayes, a former director of Coca Cola and Bank of Delaware, now PNC. In 29 years, 165 former honorees in seven fields have included former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former US newsman Walter Cronkite, French marine biologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Howard, who would not sign the Kyoto protocol when he was in office, told AFP: “I thought it was the right policy at the time because the major emitters” were not on board.”

He added: “You need a new Kyoto protocol with all the major emitters committed to it. Then you are cooking with gas.”

And good on former Australian prime minister John Howard for his common sense approach to it all. Unfortunately, there are too few brave politicians like Howard and too many leftists like Hansen for the reality of the false science of climate science to be truly exposed to the public.

'Follow the money' goes the old saying. The irony of people like Hansen who have done well financially from Al Gore who is also enriching himself on the back of climate hysteria seems to be missed on them.

(Nothing Follows)