January 2009

James Hansen of NASA is one of the leading climate alarmists, and possesses a scientific credibility lacking in the Goracle.  But Hansen really has become a parody of himself, more activist than scientist.  His supervisor at NASA was a skeptic.  And as Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review wrote a year ago:

If you’ve paid any attention to the global warming debate, you’ve heard of James Hansen.

Hansen is the politicized NASA climate scientist who virtually invented the global warming issue in the broiling summer of 1988 when he was the star doomsayer at Senate hearings called by Al Gore.

Since then, Hansen has received better press than Mother Teresa. In hundreds of interviews and glowing profiles, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has been treated as objective and/or infallible by an adoring mainstream liberal media.

Yet Hansen’s not even close to being an objective scientist. He is openly ideological and rabidly partisan. His political pals and financial patrons are liberal Democrats — Gore, John Kerry and left-wing groups funded by George Soros and Teresa Heinz.

Nor is Hansen part of the hallowed scientific “consensus” on global warming. He’s much more apocalyptic. He still predicts faster and much greater sea-level rises, ice-sheet meltings and species extinctions than the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Hansen’s Teflon credibility wasn’t even scratched after the August revelation that since 2000 he and his fellow scientists had been incorrectly crunching the data from about 1,200 ground weather stations that NASA uses to take the country’s annual average temperature — and which the unquestioning mainstream media used as “proof” the country has been getting hotter every year since 1998.

Maybe Hansen will be proved right.  But these days he seems more interested in ideology than science.

James Hansen of NASA has become one of the leading climate alarmists.  Quite simply, the world is about to end.  That being the case, industry executives who don’t toe the line (only wrecking the economy can save humanity from destruction) should be tried in a kind of environmental Nuremberg Trial.

It turns out that Hansen’s supervisor, at least, was not so enamored of his work.  Reports the Spectator in London:

But now the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works reports that James Hansen’s former supervisor, retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon, former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Programme at NASA who was responsible for all weather and climate research in the agency from1982 to 1994, has said he thinks man-made global warming theory is anti-scientific bunk:

‘I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man-made,’ Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. ‘I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation… 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). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress…

Theon declared ‘climate models are useless.’ ‘My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,’ Theon explained. ‘Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,’ he added.

It’s too bad Dr. Theon’s views don’t get the same attention as those of Dr. Hansen.

Al Gore and Venus Envy

by William Yeatman on January 29, 2009

in Blog

Al Gore has a new argument for why carbon dioxide is the global warming boogeyman — and it’s simply out of this world.

His Winter of Discontent

by William Yeatman on January 29, 2009

in Blog

Al Gore braved a midwinter snowstorm yesterday to tell a Senate committee that the world is heating up and the only thing that can save us is “conservation and renewables.”

The Obama/Pelosi green stimulus is taking shape as it winds two paths through the House and the Senate. Both chambers agree with President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s staff that the government should shower winners in the renewable energy industry with about $30 billion in taxpayer money.

The well paid lobbyists for wind and solar energy producers deserve a round of applause—they did a great job.

There is, however, one small kink: The House and Senate disagree on how to give this money away.

According to E&E News, legislators on the House side want to fund up to 30 % of the construction of renewable energy projects, using grants, or direct give-aways. On the Senate side, leading members of the party in power are indicating that grants are an inappropriate mechanism to pick winners and losers in the energy business. They would prefer some other pork delivery format, probably a refundable tax credit, which is but a grant by another name.

The only good news is that the House and Senate have a history of jurisdictional disputes over give-aways to the renewable industry. Maybe they’ll get so worked up with territoriality that they’ll prove resistant to compromise, and this crummy stimulus bill will die.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98g3ktSNBTs 285 234]

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wStc-gKtxY 285 234]

Signaling a departure from the Bush administration’s environmental policies, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has named Todd Stern as special envoy for climate change and vowed that America will “vigorously pursue negotiations, those sponsored by the United Nations, and those at sub-global, regional, and bilateral level that can lead to binding international climate agreements.”

By now the practice of educational indoctrination by environmental extremists is well known, from public school showings of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” to widespread emphasis every year on Earth Day, to daily guilt trips thrown at students by eco-conscious teachers.

Al Gore, The Lobbyist

by William Yeatman on January 29, 2009

In a letter dated January 26th, 2009 Al Gore’s company Generation Investment Management sent a coalition letter along with other institutional investors representing $1.7 trillion in assets to Senate Majority leader Harry Reid. The letter asked for:

1) longer-term economic incentives including extending the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for five years or more,

2) funding for energy efficiency programs – such as retrofitting buildings,

3) federal funds to flow to states that allow utilities to treat energy efficiency comparable to new supply; states that adopt energy efficiency resources standards to achieve energy savings goals; or, states that adopt strong building codes to encourage energy savings, and

4) that part of the funding in the stimulus package should be directed toward modernizing and improving the electric grid system.

Today, two days later,  Al Gore, The Climate Protector, testified to the Senate Foreign relations Committee of the need for:

1) renewable tax credits and “small” grants for wind power and solar,

2) energy efficiency and conservation,

3) decoupling (giving utility companies a guaranteed source of revenues and Gore’s declared “single most important measure”), and

4) the need for a new electric grid.

He also frequently mentioned solar energy (an extremely expensive source of energy), deforestation (big area of carbon trading) and soil carbon credits (they need the farm votes).

Of course, Chairman Gore punctuated these requests by the possibility of every earthly catastrophe befalling us if we don’t grant him his requests.