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The New Scientist
Chris Mooney, Seed Magazine
James Hansen is the world’s leading–and most politically outspoken–climate researcher.
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“They would have been better off if they’d just ignored me, rather than trying to shut me up. They brought the publicity about themselves.”
James Hansen is sitting in his cluttered corner office on the seventh floor of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, just blocks from the Columbia University campus in upper Manhattan, and upstairs from Tom’s Restaurant (of Seinfeld fame). A wiry scientist who looks young for his 65 years, Hansen speaks with a distinct Midwestern accent; as he talks, he gazes off into space, as if scrutinizing an invisible PowerPoint presentation. If he has a lot on his mind, it’s no surprise: Hansen is the number one scientist in America—and perhaps the world—who has been publicly speaking out about our looming climate catastrophe. And in so doing, he has shattered some long-held convictions in the scientific community, ones overdue for a challenge.
Hansen believes, as did Albert Einstein, that speaking out politically at key moments is part of a scientist’s responsibility. He also rejects the idea that scientists should pose as completely objective fact machines that refrain from offering opinions that aren’t purely scientific in nature (even about subjects that they know better anyone else). What’s refreshing is that he makes no apologies for that.
(11 March 2007)
Will Climate Change Destroy the Atmosphere?
Richard Bell, Global Public Media
…there is no doubt that the Republican climate skeptics are reeling from the arrival at the end of February of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC has been studying climate change for quite some time. This year’s report is the 4th in a series. There were 152 lead authors, and another 400 scientists served as contributing authors. Not too shabby.
Here’s what this 600-person IPCC consensus report concluded about humans and global warming. I am presenting all of the main conclusions from the Executive Summary for Policy Makers. The language is a little stiff, but it’s worth reading through once before you read about how the Republicans are distorting the IPCC’s conclusions.
…Given the responsibilities of the committee, few of the Republican members who attacked the IPCC appeared to be deeply informed, based on their questions and assertions.
…sitting in the hearing room, I came away with the sense that the Republicans knew they were fighting a doomed rear-guard action. The outlandish assertions and the scientifically ignorant blustering have begun to be embarrassing, the kind of language that grown-ups do not use in public. Several times during the questioning, you could hear the witnesses, and the room, draw in its collective breath at some outstandingly bone-headed, ill-informed remark.
Too many people are seeing the effects of climate change with their own eyes. I sit here typing, looking at my little front yard, where my daffodils lie limply, having popped up in early January, instead of late February. They were about to burst into bloom, when an icy snow blew in last week and knocked them flat.
Where did you see climate change today?
(10 March 2007)
To the end of the earth
Richard Girling, Sunday Times (UK)
This is our future – famous cities are submerged, a third of the world is desert, the rest struggling for food and fresh water. Richard Girling investigates the reality behind the science of climate change
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Mark Lynas rummages through his filing cabinet like a badger raking out his bedstraw, much of the stuff so crumpled that he might have been sleeping on it for years. Eventually he finds what he is looking for – four sheets of printed paper, stapled with a page of notes.
It is an article, dated November 2000, which he has clipped from the scientific journal Nature: “Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model”. Even when they are mapping a short cut to Armageddon, scientists do not go in for red-top words like “crisis”. If you speak the language, however, you get the message – and the message, delivered by the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change, was cataclysmic.
“There should have been panic on the streets,” says Lynas in his new book, Six Degrees, “people shouting from the rooftops, statements to parliament and 24-hour news coverage.”
In layman’s language, Hadley’s message was that newly discovered “positive feedbacks” would make nonsense of accepted global-warming estimates. It would not be a gradual, linear increase with nature slowly succumbing to human attrition. Nature itself was about to turn nasty.
(11 March 2007)
Evangelical Body Stays Course on Warming
Alan Cooperman, Washington Post
Rebuffing Christian radio commentator James C. Dobson, the board of directors of the National Association of Evangelicals reaffirmed its position that environmental protection, which it calls “creation care,” is an important moral issue.
Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, and two dozen other conservative Christian leaders, including Gary L. Bauer, Tony Perkins and Paul M. Weyrich, sent the board a letter this month denouncing the association’s vice president, the Rev. Richard Cizik, for urging attention to global warming.
The letter argued that evangelicals are divided on whether climate change is a real problem, and it said that “Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time,” such as abortion and same-sex marriage.
(11 March 2007)
Emissions panel funds fossil fuels over renewables
Richard Baker, The Age Australia
THE fossil-fuel industry has been the overwhelming beneficiary of the Federal Government’s $500 million low-emission technology development fund, receiving $335 million of the $410 million already allocated.
The renewable-energy sector has received $75 million, with just one renewables project — a massive solar-power station near Mildura — having its funding application approved by the panel appointed by the Government to distribute the $500 million fund, created in 2004.
The majority of the panel members have links to the coal, mining and fossil-fuel industries. Aside from two senior bureaucrats, the panel consists of Ken Humphreys, the technical support manager for a joint United States Government-private sector, clean-coal initiative called FutureGen; former National Australia Bank chief executive and Ashton Mining director Nobby Clark; and former CRA mining company chief executive, former BHP director and former Commonwealth Bank chairman John Ralph.
Mr Ralph made headlines last October when he questioned the link between human activity and climate change. Another panel member, Paul McClintock, was a former senior private secretary to Prime Minister John Howard and has served as chairman of Ashton Mining and Plutonic Resources and as a director of Homestake Mining. ..
But Australia Institute deputy director Andrew MacIntosh said the announcement was further evidence of a “one-sided process” for government funding that put coal projects far ahead of renewable energy initiatives. “The Government is being totally dictated to by the coal industry and is showing no regard for Australia’s long-term interest,” he said. ..
(13 Mar 2007)
Contributor SP writes: Australia’s Coal-ition Government and it’s relationship with the mining industry on full display.
