Posted on 02/02/2010 12:19:35 PM PST by Lorianne
Ignore James Hansen's climate predictions at your peril.___ I started reading James Hansen's new book, Storms of My Grandchildren, at the edge of a vanishing Arctic. I sat on a bare brown Greenland hillside listening to the ferocious crack and crash of the dying glaciers in the distance. As I watched the corpse of the ice sheet float by, broken into a thousand icebergs, it seemed the right place to begin the leading NASA scientist's explanation for what I was seeing. Since the year I was born, 1979, 40 percent of the Arctic sea ice has vanished. If we don't change our behavior fast, Hansen says I will live to see the day when it is all gone, and the North Pole is a point in the open ocean, reachable by boat. He stresses these are only the starting symptoms of a planetary fever that will remake the map of the world—and the capacity of human beings to survive on it. I finished reading the book at the Copenhagen climate summit, where the world's leaders gathered to offer a giant shrug.
Professor Hansen has been driven into a strange situation, and produced a strange book. For one-third of a century now, this cantankerous scientist has been more accurate in his predictions about global warming than anyone else alive. He saw these disastrous changes coming long before others did, and the U.S. government has tried to censor or sack him for his prescience. Now he has written a whistle-blower's account while still at the top: a story of how our political system is so wilfully, deliberately blind to environmental realities that we have no choice now but for American citizens to take direct physical action against the polluters.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Taken at face value, this is yet another example of:
“The government doesn’t work, the government is corrupt ... let’s have MORE GOVERNMENT !!!”
Maybe defunding NASA and NOAA isnt’ such a bad idea.
Maybe "Idiot Alert" would be more apt.
BS
Mr. Hansen's work has no science in it, either.
My only point.
Problem is, they defunded all but the Global Warming wing at first glance.
That, that means since the year I was born almost 60% of the ice has disappeared, oh the humanity! The Inuit are loosing population numbers by the millions and the polar bears have been drowning, and the baby harp seal hunts have been canceled, whatever shall we do to fix this problem?
I Know let's call, Super ALGOREBULL Warming man, he will fix the problems by selling carbon credits, the planet will be happy again and all the ice will come back. /heavy sarc/
What did it eat?
Yeah but in winter it’s all dark most of the time up there so no one can really see it so um like it isn’t really there. /sarc
First of all, that statement is false. Sea ice routinely vanishes and is replenished according to natural processes including solar, oceanic and atmospheric phenomena. Secondly, using 1979 as a baseline for measurement of Arctic ice is like using the month of March as a baseline for Northern Hemispheric winter temperatures. It marks the end of a regularly-distributed cool period and the beginning of a warmer one. As to Arctic ice, the prior cool period is thought to have begun in the late 1950s (measurements were more observational rather than mechanical back then).
It appears we have now entered a new cool period, but even photographic evidence and computer metrics are ironically denied by those who accuse others of being "Deniers". Finally, James Hansen is considered to be an outlier (to be kind) even by many of his fellow Global Warmists, and an outright liar by many others.
Youngsters are funny. They should however cleave closely to the dictum that are best seen not heard. Perhaps maturity and a wider review of available information may heal him.
Or not...
If you look at the number of icebergs that drift south of 48 degrees north latitude per year the number has not increased as one might expect if the Greenland iceberg producing glaciers were melting faster. I believe that the worst iceberg year was 1972.
As far as sea ice goes a couple of cold winters will produce all the sea ice that the world requires. Sea ice comes from the surface ocean waters freezing. Icebergs which drift south of 48 degrees north latitude come from fresh water glaciers calving into the Labrador Sea.
The author of this article needs to spend a couple of years on Ice Patrol with the US Coast Guard.
a story of how our political system is so wilfully, deliberately blind to environmental realities that we have no choice now but for American citizens to take direct physical action against the polluters.
Is he not calling for the overthrow of our government?
Direct physical action?
A pox on these enviromental fools who would see us
reduced to political slavery in the name of false
global warming.
>> Almost everything on Earth died. A solitary pig-sized creature, the Lystrosaurus, had the land to itself for another 30 million years.
What did it eat? <<
It ate other members of it’s species....
Duh! LOL
Not! I know plenty of refugees from the Sixties who are as immature and inane as they were forty years ago. In fact, they’re worse now due to all the brain cells they have killed due to dope-smoking and liquor.
It's worse than we thought:
“With age comes wisdom. But sometimes age comes alone.” - unknown
“I like you, you remind me of myself when I was young and stupid.” - Also unknown
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