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NASA's Hansen Calls Out Obama On Climate Change
Hugh Pickens writes "Dr James Hansen, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, writes in the NY Times that he was troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves 'regardless of what we do.' According to Hansen 'Canada's tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.' Hansen says that instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world's governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year."
The level playing field for carbon neutrality is a sham designed to do nothing more than transfer wealth from first-world economies to third-world economies. In the process, all you really do is set a soft cap on carbon emissions without reducing actual dependence upon fossil fuels.
We can achieve the same goal of reducing carbon output by instead investing that money into first-world research and development of alternative fuels. Full implementation then eliminates carbon emissions altogether, a goal which can't be achieved by market-based carbon neutrality alone.
Blame Canada!
Do you have any idea how much oil it takes to produce a kilo of beef?
So on this website whenever Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, etc. do anything that America doesn't like it's universally applauded as "standing up against evil imperialist right-wing Chrisitan America" No matter how bad or destructive the action, it's OK because it's "speaking truth to power" or some nonsense.
Now we have Canada basically saying that it's going to use its own oil, and the exact same people are going apoplectic. International intervention suddenly become
Note that these same people are strangely silent when Brazil or Venezuela develop new oil resources, and I haven't heard any huge outrage over the fact that drilling off the coast of Cuba will put oil rigs just a few miles from the Florida Keys. The same people who complain that America == Somalia (you've seen those posts) because we don't have the federal government in control of all economic activity never complain when foreign corporations drill for oil righ in the middle of sensitive areas.. as long as the money will be going to a government they approve of.
I've come to realize that environmental movement doesn't really care about what is done to the planet, only on who is doing it. Put up a windmill in America that a bird might run into? Destroying the world! Use nuclear power in Japan? CHINA SYNDROME! Setup nuclear plants in Iran that are known to be using unsafe designs that are intended to produce weapons-grade plutonium instead of producing electricity? No problem. Put an oil pipeline directly through the rainforest in Venezuela to prop up Hugo Chavez? That's a wonder of the world showing how great socialism is!
I've seen it all before and this is just a thin coating of green paint on a corrupt and broken set of ideas.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
So if I understand well, eating the vegetables ourselves is unsustainable. But feeding animals with them, then eating the meat is somehow sustainable?
Sorry but something doesn't adds up here.
Consider the vast amount of energy the sun is pumping into earth (not to mention all the stuff that doesn't hit earth....). We need to get to that, instead of plundering resources that could be used for other things other than just burning them, or in some cases even are best just left there. If worst comes to worst, we let "elites" and private, short-sighted interests run amok with this, and when they're done with it let it serve as an excuse for even more control and subsidies (for more stuff that does more harm than good, ofc). Instead of, you know, being gentle(wo)men and trying to get free energy, shelter and food for everybody. How can we even look in the mirror.. Oh wait, we can't, that solves that.
I know this is a rather random rant off-topic; I have no clue about the details about any of this, anyway... but "the big picture" gets me every time. It's just nuts! No convincing me otherwise.. we have a veritable Garden of Eden on one hand, and New York and Calcutta is what we turn it into. WTF.
If we were all vegetarian, we'd starve until the seas rose.
What? If we ate more efficiently, we'd starve until the seas came up and rendered the land unable to support crops for five years across the affected area? Whatchoo talkin' bout, willis?
There isn't enough arable land for that to hold up
Maybe not with bullshit "Green Revolution" agriculture designed to provide windfalls to pesticide and fertilizer companies, which destroys the land on which it used, killing off the biological components of the soil. More people are going to have to pick crops until we figure out how to do it with robots, but as it turns out, if you interplant (for example) plants which need nitrogen with plants which fix nitrogen, it all works out a lot better. Indeed, it is possible to produce more food per acre by simply interplanting, and as well, the food is more nutritious as the soil contains the trace elements that we like to find in our food. And you can do it without tilling.
Have you any idea how much oil it takes to produce a kilo of soya?
None whatsoever is required but a great deal is used.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What's wrong here is the feeding of the cows with soya. In the former times, cows were eating grass which isn't eatable by humans and grows in places not useful for agriculture. In other words, they made additional resources available.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I love subtle humour as much as the next guy. Not enough arable land? Priceless.
Besides we can always eat insects, algae, people, fungi. The list is end- what? I said we can eat insects, algae and fungi. Jeeze. Why are you looking at me like that?
Don't forget, the third most populous country is the United States.
Its China and India with their 36.47% of the worlds population, and then the United States with its 4.47%.
Your statement, while correct, is disingenuous in intent. You are using the truth to be dishonest.
This graph spells it out nicely. The United States is on the same line as all less populous countries, while China and India are playing on a completely different field.
The fact that every other country falls on that line says something important about the line, and also says something important about the only two outliers.
"His name was James Damore."
Hansen would be garner more support from a wider base and generally more acceptance if instead of trying to stop people from doing things he encouraged them to do something...such as invest in nuclear power.
If the AGW crowd expended only half as much energy advocating and educating the public about nuclear power, and how it could solve the AGW problem, as they do with silly stunts and way over the top scenarios (50 feet higher eh?), it would be a win win. CO2 would be cut and we could tell the Oil Tyrants to fuck off and die.
I know that Hansen supports nuclear, including Breeder reactors for waste recycling, but he's not very vocal about it.
People respond better when you come to them with a solution rather than admonishments, guilt and doomsday predictions.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Let's put this alarmist prediction into context:
Liberty in your lifetime
We aren't going to stop using whatever kind of oil we find, obviously. So we need to clean up this carbon out of the air. Classically, nature does this for us but we seem to have overloaded that mechanism. Trees have been the acme of biological agents for scrubbing the air, but we need a new one.
We need a plant that grows fast, and by growing and producing it's seeds/fruit it consumes a lot of carbon. We have just such a perfect candidate, but leave it to politics to forbid it. I am talking about hemp. Hemp has the bulk and the seed production that will yank carbon out of the air by the scruff of it's neck. It grows small tree tall in a single season and it sucks so much carbon that the seeds are teaming with a hydrocarbon.
Historically, it's a weed that farmers hate because it leaches soil quickly of nutrients. To me this isn't a problem with modern hydroponics. We have plenty of recyclable products and our own sewer to feed a hydroponic system that would feed these hemp plants. It would process waste and carbon into a plant that has more uses than I can count.
With hydroponics, lots of real estate that is worthless to build on can be used for hemp patches, piping a rich slurry to feed them, processing our own waste. We don't need to cut into crop lands, hence the "leaching" effect can be controlled.
Of course there are roadblocks to this solution. The cotton industry has been an enemy of hemp, mostly out of fear that it will replace them. Of course we have the anti-drug crowd that will insist that hippies are going to smoke it. Counters to that are that is creates new industry and innovations from a very "green" resource that is not only renewable, but it helps scrub the air. Everyone wins. Except for the hippies who tried to smoke it, who are wreathing in agony from a "ditch weed" headache.
Take the Red Pill.
Depending on how you account for these factors, you reach very different answers about who should pay for carbon emissions.
The obvious answer to the question "who should pay for emissions?" is "the people who did it". You are, for some reason, attempting to lump in lots of other environmental issues to the one of CO2 emissions. When we regulated SO2 emissions, we just did it - we didn't wait until we had figured out how to handle deforestation or population growth in Africa, or how to somehow "correct" the effects of colonialism or emigration in Europe thousands of years ago.
If you don't think that the emitter should pay, then who should? The rich? The poor? Everyone pay an equal share? If so, how do you account for different salary rates in different nations - should everyone pay an equal proportion of their income? It is ridiculous to suggest that, say, Africans with their average income of $315 a year should have the same responsibility towards paying this cost as Westerners who earn many times more, especially when it was the Western nations who contributed most to the increase in co2 levels:
The major countries with the biggest per-capita emissions are Australia, the USA, and Canada. European countries, Japan, and South Africa are notable runners up. Among European countries, the United Kingdom is resolutely average. What about China, that naughty “out of control” country? Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s, but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average. India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries.
So, assuming that “something needs to be done” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, who has a special responsibility to do something? As I said, that’s an ethical question. But I find it hard to imagine any system of ethics that denies that the responsibility falls especially on the countries to the left hand side of this diagram – the countries whose emissions are two, three, or four times the world average. Countries that are most able to pay. Countries like Britain and the USA, for example.
Historical responsibility for climate impact
If we assume that the climate has been damaged by human activity, and that someone needs to x it, who should pay? Some people say “the polluter should pay.” The preceding pictures showed who’s doing the polluting today. But it isn’t the rate of CO2 pollution that matters, it’s the cumulative total emissions; much of the emitted carbon dioxide (about one third of it) will hang around in the atmosphere for at least 50 or 100 years. If we accept the ethical idea that “the polluter should pay” then we should ask how big is each country’s historical footprint. The next picture shows each country’s cumulative emissions of CO2, expressed as an average emission rate over the period 1880–2004. Average pollution rate
Congratulations, Britain! The UK has made it onto the winners’ podium. We may be only an average European country today, but in the table of historical emitters, per capita, we are second only to the USA.
If the trees and temps don't jive now, then why is it valid to say they jived a thousand years ago?
If you throw out the enitire TR proxy the results are virtually the same as only throwing out the divergent part. This in itself strongly suggests the "good" part of the proxy does indeed correlate well with the average of the other proxies wich in turn correlate with instrumental records and/or isotopic 'clocks'. As you say the TR proxy diverges from the instrumental record after the 1950's, and it's unknown why this is so, but it doesn't change the reconstruction in any meaningful way.
You should always consult the primary source, especially when the subject is AGW. If you haven't read the hockey stick paper and it's 2005(?) follow up, then do so, they list the proxies and discuss the tree ring problem. Proxy data sets can be found at Nasa's paleoclimate data repository. I think you'll find there are more than a "few samples" in the 3377 TR data sets they have on their books. Yes, data SETS, not data points.
Speaking of sources, you may want to try running your bullshit detector over the primary source that led you into this well known cul-de-sc of irrelevant trivia.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.