James Hansen

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was chewing the scenery in a Wednesday discussion of global warming on CNN’s Amanpour show. He trashed Sen. James Inhofe for demanding an investigation into U.N. climate science, suggesting Inhofe needs to be investigated: "I'd love to see all the e-mails between his office and various coal and oil companies over the last 20 years....we'll let citizens and voters decide where the real science is."

Friedman also invoked Dick Cheney, oddly comparing Iraqi WMD to climate change: "I mean, I'm a Dick Cheney guy on this. I'm with Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney said, if there's a 1 percent chance that Iraq has a nuclear weapon, we need to take that on. Well, if there's a 1 percent chance on climate change, just like Cheney said -- I'm with Cheney -- we need to prepare for it."

Friedman appeared on CNN alongside leftist NASA scientist James Hansen -- who insisted that cap-and-trade was for wimps, when we needed a massive carbon tax -- and in a surprising nod to balance, Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Amanpour began by asking about Inhofe’s call for an investigation:

Prepare for more panic talk about the end of the world as Dr. James Hansen, a leading global warming alarmist whose temperature data has come under question, launches a media tour for his new book out this week, 'Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.'

Hansen is director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

One place I know he'll pop up this week is on the Late Show with David Letterman where he's scheduled to appear Thursday night as the second guest after actress Kate Hudson.

E-mail messages between high-ranking scientists appear to indicate a conspiracy by some of the world's leading global warming alarmists to falsify temperature data in order to exaggerate global averages.

Those involved allegedly include: James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Michael Mann, famous for Mann's "Hockey Stick"; Gavin Schmidt, NASA climate modeler, and; Stephen Schneider, Stanford professor and Al Gore confidant.

A statement released Friday by the alarmist website RealClimate has confirmed that e-mail servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich, England, were hacked recently with contents illegally made available over the Internet. 

Although the authenticity of all these e-mail messages has yet to be proven, what's currently available points to a coordinated attempt to manipulate climate data by those directly involved in advancing the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

New Zealand's Investigate magazine reported Friday that it has verified these e-mail messages are indeed real:

In a stunning rebuke of the Obama administration, NASA's James Hansen, one of the world's foremost climate alarmists, called the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the anti-global warming bill that recently passed the House, "less than worthless."

Not only that, he referred to it as a "counterfeit climate bill" that employs a "Ponzi-like 'cap-and-trade' scheme" setting the nation on a "disaster course" as a result of the 219 members of Congress he accused of voting for it without reading it.

As you might have already deduced, Hansen's complaint is that the bill doesn't go far enough to solve what he believes is a looming cataclysm.

But, who cares? It's fun watching the alarmists eat their own, especially as it seems quite unlikely his critique published at the Huffington Post Thursday will get much media coverage (h/t Climate Depot):

NASA's James Hansen is looking to stir up trouble at a coal mining facility in West Virginia, and the CEO of the company about to be marched on isn't taking it lying down.

Quite the contrary, Massey Energy's Don L. Blankenship, whose company is set to be protested by Hansen and actress Daryl Hannah this coming Tuesday, has challenged the NASA official to debate him about global warming and West Virginia's economy.

As reported by WOWKTV.com Sunday, Blankenship issued the following statement concerning the matter:

Despite years of hysterical, Al Gore-loving media hype that humans are destroying the planet by emitting too much carbon dioxide, more Americans now believe global warming is being caused by long-term planetary forces rather than man's activities.

This represents a stunning reversal in the past twelve months, and is likely a function of a recent global cooling that has thwarted efforts by climate alarmists to convince citizens that the warming trend that began in the mid-'70s was going to continue forever if the world didn't immediately stop burning fossil fuels.

Now, according to Rasmussen Reports, those believing man can actually control the planet's thermostat have plummeted in number:

Remember when the alarmists were taking the premise that anthropogenic global warming was more of a threat to the planet than just polar bears and penguins, but also sea levels and catastrophic weather patterns?

Jacob Weisberg, the editor in chief of the Slate Group and author of "The Bush Tragedy," presents seven things taken for granted that might not be completely correct in a column for the April 13 issue of Newsweek.

"A lot of premises have turned out to be wrong lately," Weisberg wrote. "I'm not talking about evanescent bits of conventional wisdom, but about overarching assumptions that were widely shared across the political spectrum."

When a high-profile government employee goes overseas claiming "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," should the American news media take notice.

After all, such was uttered Wednesday by NASA's James Hansen, one of the world's foremost climate alarmists who is disgusted by the fact that democratically elected governments aren't completely buying into his junk science concerning anthropogenic global warming.

As a result, he's not only advocating acts of civil disobedience here in America, but he is also in England to participate in a protest at the Coventry headquarters of power firm E.ON.

Makes one wonder if our tax dollars paid for his trip.

As the British Guardian reported Wednesday:

Prominent hurricane forecaster Dr. William M. Gray, a professor at Colorado State University, appeared at The Heartland Institute's 2009 International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) in New York on March 11 to elaborate on his theory that a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures related to the salinity (the amount of salt) in ocean water was responsible for some global warming that has taken place.

Gray also distributed a document containing a scathing critique of Dr. James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who is widely known for his outspokenness on the issue of manmade global warming. Gray's document criticized the American Meteorological Society (AMS), an organization that issues a "seal of approval" to broadcast meteorologists, for awarding Hansen the 2009 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal.

BMI's Dan Gainor has a great column on the Fox Forum about the silence around "global cooling."

This is the winter of environmentalists’ discontent. They desperately want the earth to be warming to prove Al Gore’s truth inviolate and they are going to make you pay thousands of dollars for it no matter whether it’s true or not.

But the weather has been inconveniently cold. Thirty-two states have experienced record or near-record lows this winter – poking holes in the predictions of imminent fiery doom. Just ask the die-hard global warming activists who showed up in Washington last week to protest the nation’s use of coal. Their event was hampered by nearly a foot of snow in the nation’s capital – enough to freeze out luminaries like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Still, there they were, a couple thousand idiots standing in a winter wonderland, chanting about global warming. What’s amazing is that NASA’s climate chief James Hansen was part of this foolishness. Here we have a man who the left keeps telling us is so smart we need to listen to everything he says and he doesn’t have the public relations sense of a freshman communications major.

I have a news flash for Mr. Hansen – it gets cold in the winter. Sometimes it snows – even in Washington. If you want to promote global warming, look at a thermometer and wait until that red stuff climbs up real high.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) participated in a conference call with a number of bloggers on Wednesday.

On the agenda was the Fairness Doctrine, and what the Senator believes the Democrats have up their sleeves to attack conservative talk radio.

Also on the docket was an update on the potential for a carbon cap-and-trade scheme to be enacted by this Congress, and what Republicans are going to do to try to rein in spending (30-minute audio available here).

NASA's James Hansen has created an advertisement for a protest at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C., on March 2.

In the piece, Hansen claims:

We cannot burn all the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet. The only practical way to solve the problem is to phase out the biggest source of carbon and that is coal.

Is this what someone working for the United States government and paid with our tax dollars should be doing (video embedded below the fold):

I'll betcha this won't get much notice in the Obamedia, so it needs some here.

Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe's Environment and Public Works Committee Press Blog released a statement last night reporting that Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of over-the-top global warming alarmist James Hansen, has publicly rebuked his former employee's conduct, refuted Hansen's comedic claim that he was being muzzled, and has joined the ranks of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) skeptics.

Hansen's histrionics were last noted on January 18 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) when the UK Guardian carried his dire warning that the about-to-be-inaugurated Barack Obama "Has Four Years to Save Earth" from the impact of global warming.

Here are key excerpts from the press release posted by Marc Morano (HT Watts Up With That via Tigerhawk; bolds are mine):

Pity the poor global warming alarmists such as Al Gore, James Hansen of NASA, and the Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen. They went way out on the limb in promoting the absolute certainity of global warming and now Mother Nature is sawing it off behind them with the coldest weather in decades. To spare themselves complete embarrassment, you might have noticed that many media outlets and global warming promoters are backing off from that term and are now using "climate change" more frequently. Last Friday, one of the big global warming promoters on the Huffington Post, Kevin Grandia, publicly struggled over whether to replace the older phrase with "climate change":

Is it more appropriate to use the term "global warming" or "climate change"?

Of course, like anything, it's complicated. For a bit of history lesson on the terms there is a great post on the NASA Global Climate Change blog.

This is a hopefully good news, bad news post.

First, the bad news: James Hansen, head of NASA's the Goddard Institute of Space Studies is still bloviating about the catastrophes that await us because of what yours truly and others refer to as globaloney (the belief that the earth is dangerously warming, that human activity is the cause of the warming, and that radical steps that would cause huge reductions in standards of living around the world are required to save the planet from extinction). Reporter Robin McKie carries Hansen's latest "we'd better act or else" warning at the UK Guardian.

The hopefully good news is that Hansen's warning is thus far getting very light press coverage. A 9:45 a.m. Google News search done on "Hansen climate" (not in quotes) for January 16-18 came back with all of 24 items (the first page of results says there are 267, but there are really only 24.

Here are the first five paragraphs of McKie's article, if you can bear reading them (bolds after title are mine):

President 'has four years to save Earth'
US must take the lead to avert eco-disaster

As Democrats and their president-elect -- with invaluable assistance from their media minions -- continue spreading climate hysteria in order to raise taxes and redistribute wealth, a possibly inconvenient truth has just been presented to the international community: "The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science."

Additionally, the entire bogus manmade global warming theory that climate alarmists and their surrogates have been forcing down the throats of the citizenry "is based on data that is drawn from a ridiculously narrow span of time and it demonstrates a wanton disregard for the ‘big picture’ of long-term climate change." 

Such was reported by Russia's Pravda Sunday, and it not only goes quite counter to the junk science being espoused by folks like Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his accomplices James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt, but it has also been regularly proffered by many of the real scientists and climatologists around the world that global warming loving media not only refuse to cite and/or interview, but also disgracefully ridicule as deniers and flat earthers.

According to Pravda, it is Gore, Hansen, Schmidt, and all their sycophant devotees that are the flat earthers who are distracting the world from a much more serious climate threat (emphasis added throughout):

Climate realists around the world have contended for years that the real goal of alarmists such as Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his followers is to use the fear of man-made global warming to redistribute wealth.

On Monday, one of Gore's leading scientific resources, Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief James Hansen, sent a letter to Barack and Michelle Obama specifically urging the president-elect to enact a tax on carbon emissions that would take money from higher-income Americans and distribute the proceeds to the less fortunate.

The eco-socialism cat was let out of the bag on page five of a PDF Hansen published at Columbia University's website on December 29 (emphasis added, h/t Britain's Guardian, file photo):

Earlier today, Christopher Booker at the UK Telegraph noted a "surreal scientific blunder," followed by an attempted cover-up, that should cause everyone to question the source's past and future credibility.

The source of the shoddy work is NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the outfit run by world champion globalarmist James Hansen. Hansen has in the past stated that "heads of major fossil-fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be 'tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.'"

What Booker reports causes one to wonder what the appropriate punishment should be for committing drop-dead obvious errors and integrity-lacking follow-up.

Part of the punishment is surely the Telegraph's delicious headline, followed by Booker's criticism (bolds are mine):

The world has never seen such freezing heat

The next time some media member says something stupid like "the global warming debate is over," or "the science is settled," consider the firestorm that was set off by a tiny NewsBusters article playfully titled "Clean Air Causes Global Warming, Global Warming Causes Smog."

Although it is now two weeks since this was first published, folks at NewsBusters and RealClimate -- as well as an "esteemed" NASA scientist -- continue to bicker about its contents and meaning.

In fact, as of Thursday evening, NASA's Gavin Schmidt was still battling to make his point:

Today is the official publication date of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The release of this book was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Paul Ehrlich's once exceedingly popular "The Population Bomb" in 1968. If you expect to see much about either of these books in the mainstream media, you are in for a big disappointment. The MSM is avoiding the whole subject of Paul Ehrlich and his apocalyptic "The Population Bomb" like the plague nowadays. The reason is probably because it might draw embarrassing attention to the fact that apocalyptic visions, despite their popularity at one time such as the current global warming alarmism, are usually proven to be flat out wrong.

If you needed any more evidence as to just how far to the left NASA's James Hansen is, consider that on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of his highly-controversial testimony to Congress -- wherein he presaged gloom and doom at the hands of the naturally occurring gas carbon dioxide -- he decided to make his global warming case at the ultra-leftwing website the Huffington Post (h/t NBer NL207).

This puts him in the company of such luminaries as Alec Baldwin, John Cusack, Bill Maher, and other Hollywoodans feigning intellectual superiority.

Of course, this comes after being interviewed on the ultra-leftwing National Public Radio.

If this guy's an impartial, unbiased member of the scientific community, so's Rosie O'Donnell!

Frankly, I have absolutely no interest in quoting anything this man has to say. As such, those that can stand it should go here -- with my blessings and condolences.

Although it seems like just yesterday, Monday marks the 20th anniversary of the day James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told members of Congress the world was doomed if the burning of fossil fuels didn't immediately cease.

To commemorate this inauspicious occasion, Hansen is going back to Capitol Hill to call for oil company executives to be put on trial for crimes against humanity and nature.

Can you imagine the media firestorm this is going to create?

Critical update: Audio of Hansen discussing this with NPR's Diane Rehm available here (h/t Anthony Watts).

While you ponder, the following was reported by England's Guardian Monday (emphasis added):

If you plug the search terms "James Hansen" and "censored" into Google, you get 37,900 results. Do the same search substituting "Roy Spencer" for "James Hansen," and you get 610 results (the third of which is from Newsbusters [here and here]).

The media is highly selective about the censorship it covers. Consider the note climatologist Roy Spencer posted on his website today:

If there were a Society of Global Warming Alarmists, Bill McKibben might get kicked out for being too much of a worry wart . . .

You've probably seen those phone-message forms with check boxes in ascending order of urgency from "FYI—no need to return call" all the way up to "the future of civilization hangs in the balance." We might see that last category as light-hearted exaggeration, but it's no laughing matter to McKibben. In his jeremiad in today's LA Times literally entitled "Civilization's last chance," McKibben solemnly declares that "the world looks a little terminal right now" and "it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth." OK. Just so long as it's nothing serious.

McKibben's lament is based in important part on a paper that James Hansen and several co-authors have submitted to Science magazine which concludes that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

By now most people are aware that the founder of The Weather Channel, John Coleman, said global warming is "the greatest scam in history" last November.

On Monday, while speaking at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change being held in New York City, Coleman took his criticisms further by advocating that all those involved in the sale and marketing of carbon credits, including Al Gore, should be sued "to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”

As reported over at the Business & Media Institute by my colleague Jeff Poor (emphasis added throughout, h/t to many):

Global warming alarmist Anne Thompson has shown a propensity for having little regard for economic reality.

Thompson offered viewers on the February 21 broadcast of the "NBC Nightly News" a variety of reasons why building a badly-needed coal-fired power plant in an isolated part of Nevada is a bad idea.

"Critics say emissions are exactly the issue, because coal-fired power is the nation's biggest producer of CO2 emissions," Thompson said in a February 21 report from Ely, Nev. "That's why Nevada is in the center of this fight. The Ely energy center, which would sit in this valley, along with the other two proposed coal-fired plants, could more than double those greenhouse gas emissions, sending another 31 million tons into the sky."

Fortunately, most people will likely be watching the Giants-Packers game Sunday evening, and will therefore miss the one-sided hysteria.

However, for those that mysteriously don't switch channels after the Chargers-Patriots game, CBS will offer a special about global warming this Sunday instead of "60 Minutes."

How marvelous.

The CBS News website hysterically described this installment of "The Age of Warming":

CNN’s special “worldwide investigation” “Planet in Peril,” in two segments looking at the debate amongst politicians and scientists on whether climate change is a man-made phenomenon, failed to mention that NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen [pictured at right], one the scientists featured in the second segment, has received funding from George Soros, while mentioning that “second biggest contributors to [global warming skeptic Senator James] Inhofe's Senate office are energy and natural resource companies.”

The first segment, which began 8 minutes into the 10 pm Eastern hour of Wednesday night’s program, examined the political debate over climate change, focusing on “the loudest voice” of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. CNN correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta introduced the segment by referring back to the previous segments of “Planet in Peril,” which looked at the impact of climate change in different parts of the world. “From what we’ve seen in Greenland, Alaska, and Africa, the Earth's climate is clearly changing. It's not a theory. It's a fact. But what's causing those changes? The majority of the scientific community says it's mankind. But there are powerful voices who say otherwise.”

A fascinating new liberal defense mechanism has arisen in the past couple of years: Whenever you want to dodge criticism, just claim you are being swift-boated.

In fact, this has become such a part of political parlance that Microsoft Word now recognizes the term "swift-boated" without highlighting it as errant. Isn't that special?

With that in mind, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, is claiming that recent accusations made about him - that he was involved in a GISS report in 1971 predicting an ice age, and that he received money from multi-billionaire George Soros - are nothing more than swift-boating by his critics.

Of course, folks who offhandedly use this defense seem to forget that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) actually never proved that any of the claims made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were false.

Similarly, in Hansen's case, though he admirably tried to deflect scrutiny, he also failed to thoroughly refute the claims made against him (emphasis added, h/t NB reader M. Hoff):