Hansen also says that the climate system is “rapidly deteriorating.”
The Guardian reports,
Leading climate scientists have given their support to a Freedom of Information request seeking to disclose who is funding the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a London-based climate sceptic thinktank chaired by the former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson.
James Hansen, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies who first warned the world about the dangers of climate change in the 1980s, has joined other scientists in submitting statements to be considered by a judge at the Information Rights Tribunal on Friday. They will argue that Lawson’s foundation routinely misrepresents and casts doubt on the work of climate scientists. Their statements will form part of the supporting evidence being presented by an investigative journalist who is appealing against an earlier rejection of his FOI request to the Charity Commission for it to make public a bank statement it holds revealing the name of the educational charity’s seed donor, who gave £50,000 when it launched in 2009…
James Hansen told the Guardian: “Our children and grandchildren will judge those who have misled the public, allowing fossil fuel emissions to continue almost unfettered, as guilty of crimes against humanity and nature. But the eventual conviction of these people in the court of public opinion will do little to ease the burdens that will have been created for today’s young people and future generations.”
“The science is clear. Unless we restore the planet’s energy balance and stabilise climate, by rapidly reducing fossil fuel emissions, we will leave today’s young people a rapidly deteriorating climate system with consequences that will out of their control. If successful, the FOI request may, by exposing one link in a devious manipulation of public opinion, start a process that allows the public to be aware of what is happening, what is at stake, and where the public interest lies.”
I am writing a book about climate change and wanted to see what some anti-climate change advocates are saying on social media. The comments above are stunningly ignorant. Great fodder to show the illogic and sad stupidity at work against the science of climate change. “CO2 is good. It’s plant food!” … that is true and utterly irrelevant to the arguments for climate change … as if someone suggested we should remove C02 from the Earth entirely. Wow. Thank you for your idiocy! It will help my book.
Absolutely correct.!!!!! Three of the most profound and accurate pieces of info that could be presented , and it didn’t cost billions of dollars of research. Kudos, fs.
To the editor: Sorry editor, but the article you referred your reader to is not correct either. There is an example there of Earth absorbing 100 units of heat from the Sun, then exporting 50 units back into space, and 50 units into the atmosphere, of which the atmosphere sends 25 units back to earth and emits 25 units into space. This does not add up, because the net outflow of heat from the Earth (which includes the atmosphere) is 75 units. The total amount of heat the Earth receives from the Sun must equal the total amount of heat that the Earth (including the atmosphere) sends back into space. Otherwise the Earth’s temperature would be increasing until… the Earth’s emission, which increases as the 4th power of the Earth’s absolute temperature matches the absorbed radiation. Once the equilibrium condition is attained the Earth (including the atmosphere) sends all the power received back into space.
The role of IR active gases in the atmosphere, of which water vapour is by far the most important, is different. The gases work like heat impedance: they slow down energy transfer in both directions, thus leveling the difference between night and day, but they do not introduce any additional heating. The only source of heat in this game is the Sun.
Sorry Tony but there is no conflict between GHE and the second law of thermodynamics, only a misdescription of the world. See Is there a conflict between Greenhouse Effect and the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
Oh gee, Jeff, that list’ll take far too long. Can you find any when he’s been right?
Please provide examples of when James Hansen has been wrong.
Who’s to say such temperature’s wasn’t manmade? People can pollute the air by burning wood if there’s enough people to do it, e.g. India. The warm period could in fact coincide with Ancient Rome and the Early Medieval Period. The drop in temperature might when people were dying en masse from one of those Plague outbreak causing pollution to be small for a long period.
climate change has always been and always will be.
Tell us Mr. James Hansen how many thousands of gasoline gallons have you used to run your fancy cars?
PLS don’t give us that crap.
I am only surprised that no one has apparently picked up the proven scientific fact that the Greenhouse Radiation Theory contradicts the proven scientific laws of Thermodynamics. (Understanding the Thermodynamic Atmosphere Effect. 2011. Joseph E. Postma. (M.Sc. Astrophysics, Honours B.Sc. Astronomy)
But even before that, in the High Court, the Government’s scientists, along with the makers of Al Gore’s political propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth, were forced to concede that the 12,000 year old ice-core’s showed the exact opposite to the claims made by Al Gore. The cores show that during this period rising global temperatures were followed, 800 – 2,000 years later by identical rises in CO2 levels. (rising global temperature gradually, over hundreds of years warm the oceans, forcing them to create more CO2.
The idiot, Hanson, rants about a fabricated rise in global temperature caused by anthropogenic use of fossil fuels, but the science shows that the CO2 levels today are a response to the higher global temperatures that prevailed between 12 BC – and 1212 BC.
Every single piece of evidence that supported the anthropogenic global warming has proved to be either faked, or pure rhetoric.
The decision to impose a tax on carbon was taken by the UN during its African Review, it was thought that by providing a scenario of impending global catastrophe, it would stifle any outcry from the taxpayers of the West, and hide its true purpose; a wealth redistribution tax, to benefit Africa.
As someone has already commented, Al Gore, George Soros, and Goldman Sach have made £billions from green taxes and enforced use of green technology.
We’ve been robbed, and it’s still going on!
Hansen has a vested interest. If he is wrong, his career is finished. More and more research is coming out that CO2 has nothing to do with global warning if it exists at all. Personally, after all the reading and research I have done, i don’t think it exists. However, the thing these guys are counting on, is the disasters are so far in the future, we skeptics will all be dead. They are indoctrinating our children with this crap so in the end, the world will be run by the UN and people like Hansen. 1984 is getting closer.
Yeah, but unfortunately Hansen and the rest of the alarmists are still winning because the vast majority of the people in the world never hear any opposing views. It’s easy for those of us who inhabit the conservative blogosphere to think that we’re making big progress, but we’re really not. Without the fact that the warming stopped, and Climate-gate I & II, we’d be nowhere right now.We need to start repeating the basic facts over and over again, and keep doing so until this entire carbon nonsense is dead and buried.
1: CO2 is good, it’s plant food. Without it NOTHING would be green.
2: It’s the sun stupid!
3: Warming is good!
fs
If you don’t drink the Koolaid, you are committing crimes against nature or you are a racist or a terrorist. Guilty on all counts!
Dr. Hansen never gets tired of being wrong, does he? He just keeps spitting into the wind, hoping it will blow away when it just ends up hitting him in the face. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t coming from someone in his position.
Are we really supposed to take seriously an individual’s (Hansen) point of view that works out of the very same building as Tom’s Restaurant, which was the exterior for the restaurant in Seinfeld? This is a skit….right?
The normal citizen is supposed to believe in global warming and everyone needs to “cut back to save the planet” when people like Al Gore with his 20+ room mansion, James Cameron with his 750 acre ranch with 4 houses and Bill Gates with his 60,000 sq foot house and $30,000 per month electric bill don’t, but tell us we have to is probably the biggest reason I wouldn’t believe the science of manmade global warming, even if it was fact.