Green campaigners and climate scientists are losing the public debate over global warming, one of the movement’s leading proponents has admitted.
Dr James Hansen, director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, said that public scepticism about the threat of man-made climate change has increased despite the growing scientific consensus.
Speaking ahead of a public lecture in Edinburgh this week, he admitted that without public support it will be impossible to make the changes he and his colleagues believe need to occur to protect future generations from the effects of climate change.
He blamed sceptics who are opposed to major social and economic changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for employing “tremendous resources” to undermine the scientific evidence.
Dr Hansen, who will receive the Edinburgh Medal at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, pointed to a number of controversies involving climate scientists, such as the leaked University of East Anglia emails, as being partly responsible for the shift in public opinion.
Critics, however, insist the public have become desensitised by decades of dire warnings by climate scientists.
Isn’t New York supposed to be underwater by now Mr. Hansen, according to you?
It’s not the fault of sceptics that it’s not happened.
Many other places actually are. New Orleans was pretty big. This isnt a movie – Not seeing the statue of liberty under water doesnt mean other places are seeing sea level change.
Vee, no it doesn’t, but global sea level rise of 2 mm/year has been unchanged globally. There has been no greatly increased rise in sea level, and there has been no evidence of it rapidly accelerating. In his 1990 address to Congress, Hansen claimed that there would be 20 feet of sea level rise by 2030. After 20 years, total rise has been mere inches, not 10 feet.
What Ralph is saying is that the hyperbole has bit them. Every catastrophic prediction thas failed to come to pass.
My grandmother, who observed the various revolutions of the early 20th century, passed along a valuable lesson to me that applies to this.
She noticed that the ‘Revolutionaries’ who sought to overthrow an established system invariably recruited from the university *undergraduate* population because they are always energetic and unrestrained by wisdom.
Once the revolutionaries attained what they felt was sufficient power to do so, however, they purged the society of the university-educated ‘intellectuals’ who knew enough to be able to argue effectively against them.
From the Bolsheviks to the National Socialists to the Cultural Revolution, the patter remained the same.
Climate scientists are losing the public debate on global warming
That’s because they’re activists, not scientists. The only “scientific method” they employ is calling people “deniers” and “racists”
Hansen is speaking to the group who bestowed the same honor upon Clerk k Maxwell, and I get sicker by the day reading this kind of thing
Dr Hansen: My “tremendous resources” are the mush between my ears and one finger on each hand that work the keyboard of my computer attached to the internet, which your organization played a major role in developing.
Is it not a beautiful irony that the mechanism that allowed you to bring us to the edge of doom is the one that will save us all from your lunacy?
Science is science and its application will remian pure.
The MOB opinion is a different kettle of fish that is motivated by other issues such as a little thing called MONEY that makes the world go round. Carbon trading will become a trillion dollar revenue machine and because of this money can be placed on projects to promote Global warming caused by MAN, regardless if there is evidence to support such an issue.
The science evidence showing cycles in Earths temp caused by Earth’s cycles, volcanic activity, meteorite and particularly the Sun’s cycles etc etc are quite open to all to see.
There is no evidence to support the issue that CO2 is causing any temp increase to the Earth’s average temp. Maybe we should stop cutting forests down and increase green growth that requires more CO2.
Too much overselling at the front end. The climate shysters knew that if you talked about 1 foot sea rises in 100 years, and 1 deg celsius temp rise in 50 years, no one was going to hand them the reins of government and the keys to the bank. So they had to go with worst case senarios and end-of-the-world alarmism to get knee-jerk legislation through before the party bus left..
But now that 20 years have past with no discernable changes (except on [doctored] paper), and the costs of “fighting” global warming starting to really manifest themselves, people are slowly coming to the realization that they have been taken in by the biggest swindle in the history of mankind.