NASA warming scientist: "This is the last chance"

[Tock]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080623/...ming_scientist

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
54 minutes ago



WASHINGTON - Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world's only hope is drastic action.

James Hansen told Congress on Monday that the world has long passed the "dangerous level" for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and needs to get back to 1988 levels. He said Earth's atmosphere can only stay this loaded with man-made carbon dioxide for a couple more decades without changes such as mass extinction, ecosystem collapse and dramatic sea level rises.
"We're toast if we don't get on a very different path," Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences who is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science, told The Associated Press. "This is the last chance."

Hansen brought global warming home to the public in June 1988 during a Washington heat wave, telling a Senate hearing that global warming was already here. To mark the anniversary, he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming where he was called a prophet, and addressed a luncheon at the National Press Club where he was called a hero by former Sen. Tim Wirth, D-Colo., who headed the 1988 hearing.

To cut emissions, Hansen said coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon dioxide emissions shouldn't be used in the United States after 2025, and should be eliminated in the rest of the world by 2030. That carbon capture technology is still being developed and not yet cost efficient for power plants.

Burning fossil fuels like coal is the chief cause of man-made greenhouse gases. Hansen said the Earth's atmosphere has got to get back to a level of 350 parts of carbon dioxide per million. Last month, it was 10 percent higher: 386.7 parts per million.

Hansen said he'll testify on behalf of British protesters against new coal-fired power plants. Protesters have chained themselves to gates and equipment at sites of several proposed coal plants in England.

"The thing that I think is most important is to block coal-fired power plants," Hansen told the luncheon. "I'm not yet at the point of chaining myself but we somehow have to draw attention to this."

Frank Maisano, a spokesman for many U.S. utilities, including those trying to build new coal plants, said while Hansen has shown foresight as a scientist, his "stop them all approach is very simplistic" and shows that he is beyond his level of expertise.

The year of Hansen's original testimony was the world's hottest year on record. Since then, 14 years have been hotter, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Two decades later, Hansen spent his time on the question of whether it's too late to do anything about it. His answer: There's still time to stop the worst, but not much time.

"We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes," Hansen told the AP before the luncheon. "The Arctic is the first tipping point and it's occurring exactly the way we said it would."

Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer.

Longtime global warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., citing a recent poll, said in a statement, "Hansen, (former Vice President) Gore and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans are not buying it."

But Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., committee chairman, said, "Dr. Hansen was right. Twenty years later, we recognize him as a climate prophet."

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On the Net:
Hansen's speech: http://www.columbia.edu/jeh1/2008/TwentyYearsLater_20080623.pdf

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen....frontpagenews

Bush administration accused of doctoring scientists' reports on climate change

· Inconvenient conclusions censored, hearing told
· Researchers warned not to talk about global warming

The Bush administration was yesterday accused of systemic tampering with the work of government climate scientists to eliminate politically inconvenient material about global warming.
At a hearing of Congress, scientists and advocacy groups described a campaign by the White House to remove references to global warming from scientific reports and limit public mention of the topic to avoid pressure on an administration opposed to mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions.
Such pressure extended even to the use of the words "global warming" or "climate change", said a report released yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project. The report said nearly half of climate scientists at government agencies had been advised against using those terms.

Yesterday's hearings, overseen by the new Democratic chair of the House committee on oversight and government reform, Congressman Henry Waxman, follow years of complaints by scientists that the Bush administration was seeking to put its own spin on scientific research at government agencies. They also complain of a reduction in funding for climate research since the 1990s.

The committee was warned that the campaign by the Bush administration discouraged free academic inquiry. "If you know what you are writing has to go through a White House clearance before it is to be published, people start writing for the class," said Rick Piltz, a former senior associate at the US Climate Change Science Programme. "An anticipatory kind of self-censorship sets in."

The balance appears to have shifted somewhat since the Democrats took control of Congress this month. At least five bills proposing mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions - an idea that is anathema to the White House - have been introduced in the House and Senate.

However, Mr Piltz told Congress even he was taken aback by the extent of the political interference, in technical reports, public meetings as well as exchanges with the media, in which scientists were assigned minders from the administration.
In the survey of 1,600 government scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 46% had been warned against using terms like global warming in speech or in their reports. The scientists interviewed were working at seven government agencies, from Nasa to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Forty-three percent of respondents said their published work had been revised in ways that altered the meaning of scientific findings. Some 38% said they had direct knowledge of cases where scientific information on climate was stripped from websites and printed reports.

"There were a very large number of edits that came at the 12th hour after all the earlier science people had signed off," said Mr Piltz, who eventually resigned from his job because of such pressure. In one such case, a White House appointee, Phil Cooney, demanded 400 last-minute changes which significantly changed the meaning and tone of the report.

No detail was beyond the scrutiny of administration officials, it seemed. Drew Shindell, a scientist at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, described how officials repeatedly objected to the title of a report which measured rapid warming in Antarctica before dictating their own choice. "Word came back from above that it should be: 'Scientists study Antarctic Climate Change'," Dr Shindell said. "I thought it was so watered down it would be of little interest to anybody."

Much of the testimony yesterday centred on the influence exerted by Mr Cooney, a former lobbyist for the petroleum industry who was put in charge of the Council on Environmental Quality. Mr Cooney now works for Exxon Mobil, the committee was told. In one instance, Mr Cooney personally edited out a key section of an Environmental Protection Agency report to Congress on the dangers of climate change. "He called it speculative musing," Mr Piltz said.

Mr Waxman said he knew of further evidence of such tampering but had been stonewalled by a White House which had repeatedly resisted requests for documents about Mr Cooney's involvement in controlling information.

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I have no expertise on this topic, but if it turns out that the Bush Administration has been monkeying around with scientific studies affecting the fate of this planet, all for political gain with the US oil companies, and if the net result is negative for the planet, then they should all be tried in court for crimes against humanity.

From what I understand, there are lots more scientists with expertise on this stuff who agree that humans are causing global warming, than who take the contrarian position.

Again, I don't know much about this topic. But I do know that the Bush Administration messed up on the Iraq war, they've plunged the US deep deep deep into debt, and gave foreigners lots of excellent reasons to mistrust and dislike us. If I have to choose between NASA rocket scientists and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, well . . . it won't take a rocket scientist to pick the more trustworthy of the two . . .

[spywizard]

I guess china and russia had better stop burning all those fuels then huhhh??

Are these the same scientist that in the 60's when developing the moon lander, said that since the earth was millions of years old, and the moon was the same age..

given that space dust was constant then the moon lander needed to have the large pads in order to stay atop the deep deep space dust that the moon would have..

when they got there.. average depth 2.5" (if memory is correct)
using the same math.. that would make the moon roughly 6.4 thousand years old..

trust them?? naw, i don't think so..

[Tock]

I guess china and russia had better stop burning all those fuels then huhhh??

Maybe so.

Are these the same scientist that in the 60's when developing the moon lander

No, they are not.

that would make the moon roughly 6.4 thousand years old..

I have no idea what they said back in the 1960's, or how many scientists agreed with them, but whatever it was, they figured out a way to test their notions, and they did it.

But all they had to risk back then were a few guys in a moon lander. Now, there's a lot more on the line . . .

[g0dsend]

Global warming is fake In my opinion. I know I'm most likely wrong, but I play along like its not real so I dont have to worry about it.

"If you run a model and nothing happens, then it won’t get printed. If you run the model and something amazing happens, people will say it’s exciting and it’ll get picked up by the media. There’s a bias towards results that are dramatizable."

http://www.intelliot.com/blog/archiv...-warming-fake/