Jim Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, but he writes on this policy-related topic as a private citizen.
It didn't take long for the counterfeit climate bill known as Waxman-Markey to push back against President Obama's agenda. As the president was arriving in Italy for his first Group of Eight summit, the New York Times was reporting that efforts to close ranks on global warming between the G-8 and the emerging economies had already tanked:
The world's major industrial nations and emerging powers failed to agree Wednesday on significant cuts in heat-trapping gases by 2050, unraveling an effort to build a global consensus to fight climate change, according to people following the talks.
Of course, emission targets in 2050 have limited practical meaning -- present leaders will be dead or doddering by then -- so these differences may be patched up. The important point is that other nations are unlikely to make real concessions on emissions if the United States is not addressing the climate matter seriously.
With a workable climate bill in his pocket, President Obama might have been able to begin building that global consensus in Italy. Instead, it looks as if the delegates from other nations may have done what 219 U.S. House members who voted up Waxman-Markey last month did not: critically read the 1,400-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and deduce that it's no more fit to rescue our climate than a V-2 rocket was to land a man on the moon.
I share that conclusion, and have explained why to members of Congress before and will again at a Capitol Hill briefing on July 13. Science has exposed the climate threat and revealed this inconvenient truth: If we burn even half of Earth's remaining fossil fuels we will destroy the planet as humanity knows it. The added emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will set our Earth irreversibly onto a course toward an ice-free state, a course that will initiate a chain reaction of irreversible and catastrophic climate changes.
The concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere now stands at 387 parts per million, the highest level in 600,000 years and more than 100 ppm higher than the amount at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Burning just the oil and gas sitting in known fields will drive atmospheric CO2 well over 400 ppm and ignite a devil's cauldron of melted icecaps, bubbling permafrost, and combustible forests from which there will be no turning back. But if we cut off the largest source of carbon dioxide, coal, we have a chance to bring CO2 back to 350 ppm and still lower through agricultural and forestry practices that increase carbon storage in trees and soil.
The essential step, then, is to phase out coal emissions over the next two decades. And to declare off limits artificial high-carbon fuels such as tar sands and shale while moving to phase out dependence on conventional petroleum as well.
This requires nothing less than an energy revolution based on efficiency and carbon-free energy sources. Alas, we won't get there with the Waxman-Markey bill, a monstrous absurdity hatched in Washington after energetic insemination by special interests.
For all its "green" aura, Waxman-Markey locks in fossil fuel business-as-usual and garlands it with a Ponzi-like "cap-and-trade" scheme. Here are a few of the bill's egregious flaws:
There is an alternative, of course, and that is a carbon fee, applied at the source (mine or port of entry) that rises continually. I prefer the "fee-and-dividend" version of this approach in which all revenues are returned to the public on an equal, per capita basis, so those with below-average carbon footprints come out ahead.
A carbon fee-and-dividend would be an economic stimulus and boon for the public. By the time the fee reached the equivalent of $1/gallon of gasoline ($115/ton of CO2) the rebate in the United States would be $2000-3000 per adult or $6000-9000 for a family with two children.
Fee-and-dividend would work hand-in-glove with new building, appliance, and vehicle efficiency standards. A rising carbon fee is the best enforcement mechanism for building standards, and it provides an incentive to move to ever higher energy efficiencies and carbon-free energy sources. As engineering and cultural tipping points are reached, the phase-over to post-fossil energy sources will accelerate. Tar sands and shale would be dead and there would be no need to drill Earth's pristine extremes for the last drops of oil.
Some leaders of big environmental organizations have said I'm naïve to posit an alternative to cap-and-trade, and have suggested I stick to climate modeling. Let's pass a bill, any bill, now and improve it later, they say. The real naïveté is their belief that they, and not the fossil-fuel interests, are driving the legislative process.
The fact is that the climate course set by Waxman-Markey is a disaster course. Their bill is an astoundingly inefficient way to get a tiny reduction of emissions. It's less than worthless, because it will delay by at least a decade starting on a path that is fundamentally sound from the standpoints of both economics and climate preservation.
Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who died this week, suffered for 40 years -- as did our country -- from his failure to turn back from a failed policy. As grave as the blunders of the Vietnam War were, the consequences of a failed climate policy will be more severe by orders of magnitude.
With the Senate debate over climate now beginning, there is still time to turn back from cap-and-trade and toward fee-and-dividend. We need to start now. Without political leadership creating a truly viable policy like a carbon fee, not only won't we get meaningful climate legislation through the Senate, we won't be able to create the concerted approach we need globally to prevent catastrophic climate change.
The Waxman-Markey bill, with its cap-and-trade provisions, heads ...
Steve Kirsch: Waxman-Markey: Three Tough, Unanswered Questions
Scientific
And H2O doesn't rise as high in the atmosphere as CO2, which mixes right up into the upper layer, thus trapping infrared radiation that passes through water vapor and escapes the tropospher
Note: what I have said above does not say that H2O is dominating the TREND, just that it is a larger contributo
(2) - The IPCC's projection
(3) - The positive feedback with water is based on the assumption that increased warming from CO2 will cause more H2O vapor, and thus more warming - a positive feedback. Since H2O is a more powerful greenhouse gas, at a much larger concentrat
Since H2O is a more powerful greenhouse gas, at a much larger concentrat
/quote
What a bunch of baloney! "Positive feedback" does not imply *instantan
(5) The confirmati
You accuse me of employing a "strawman argument" and then the first statement you make is an outright lie. The IPCC does not prefer reports that support urgency or imply catastroph
The standard of *participa
(5) The confirmati
/quote
It is nobody's burden to convince you. If you honestly want to contribute to better science, go and get your better research published. Go, stop being a useless critic, and get in the arena.
A : the atmosphere is made of air, water vapor, condensati
then you wrote: ''what is making the wv concentrat
A : yes.. water vapor is a runaway ghg.. e.g. thunder storms, tornadoes, hurricanes
Keeling curve to July 2009 at NOAA:
www.esrl.n
CO2 has been going up and is going up. The world is getting warmer and is going to get much warmer unless we do something about it.
I am with Dr. Hansen. It is time to not only do something about it, but to be certain that we do enough!
Carl Sagan often wrote metaphoric
Gypsy
"The Arctic Oscillatio
Conclusion
"As the AO has been fluctuatin
http://www
Fumes, when are we supposed to go golfing with President Obama?
he said to get back to him as soon as we can find a fourth!
i'm thinkin' onevoice or mioffe..
I think your point here is that it is very complicate
The atmosphere is primarily made up of Nitrogen(7
Below 100,000 meters the earths atmosphere has a more or less uniform compositio
Despite its small percentage in the atmosphere
At this point it is the worlds scientific consensus that this measured increase in Carbon Dioxide is causing global warming.
Regards,
Problems:
The blackbody emission from the Earth's surface will quickly be stripped of the shorter wavelength IR CO2 absorption bands (2.7, 4.3 um) by the H2O. So additional CO2 would not increase the absorption
The longer wavelength band at 15 um will be absorbed to extinction very close to the Earth's surface by CO2. So additional CO2 would not increase the absorption
The only region that would actually see more absorption with increasing CO2 concentrat
1) Warming of the climate system is unequivoca
2) Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatur
The conclusion
ipcc-wg1.u
The physical science basis for the concensus are at:
ipcc-wg1.u
''There is evidence supporting the existence of a climate cycle called the Arctic Oscillatio
Personally
AGW exists only in Hansen’s head.
31,000 American scientists have agreed global warming is a complete fraud
http://www
The current list of petition signers includes 9,029 PhD; 7,153 MS; 2,585 MD and DVM; and 12,711 BS or equivalent academic degrees. Most of the MD and DVM signers also have underlying degrees in basic science.
http://www
http://www
Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politician
by Roy Spencer
...In Climate Confusion, distinguis
Your arguments are a pathetic intellectu
Here is the world's scientific consensus from the 2007 IPCC report:
1) Warming of the climate system is unequivoca
2) Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatur
3) Anthropoge
4) The probabilit
5) World temperatur
5a) Sea levels will probably rise by 18 to 59 cm (7.08 to 23.22 in) [table 3].
5b) There is a confidence level >90% that there will be more frequent warm spells, heat waves and heavy rainfall.
5c) There is a confidence level >66% that there will be an increase in droughts, tropical cyclones..
6) Both past and future anthropoge
7) Global atmospheri
Regards,
You don't actually read anything that doesn't support your past conclusion
Remember the Scientific Method:
- Define the question
- Gather informatio
- Form hypothesis
- Perform experiment and collect data
- Analyze data
- Interpret data and draw conclusion
- Publish results
- Retest (frequentl
Anyone who says "the science is settled" is being disingenuo
"More recently, the George Marshal Institute has focused on disputing mainstream scientific opinion on climate change. Funded by ExxonMobil and chaired by a former official of the American Petroleum Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute has been described by the Union of Concerned Scientists as a "clearingh
http://en.
Your list of 31,000 scienitist
http://sel
He did this intentiona
http://www
say.. downthread you said, "The radiative forcing of the climate system is dominated by the long-lived GHGs."
but you don't consider ever-prese
have you considered same for co2?
there in lies your answer
I took a quick read of the refer you linked below
http://dow
and saw some disturbing omissions. Although it admits on page 15 that H2O is the most abundant and important GHG in the atmosphere it relagates it to a positive feedback from the CO2. Why is a gas at .038% driving the behavior of a gas at ~4%? Tail wagging the dog! H2O has the added effect of reflection of incoming radiation which is an even stronger negative effect. From what I read, this is not well understood or modeled (i.e. science not settled!). The glaring omission is in the chart on page 16, where they neglect the effect of NATURAL H2O entirely - likely because it would put some perspectiv
I fear that declaring the "Science Settled" is merely a tool for silencing those with differing views.
"Although rising concentrat
http://www
But again it is a feedback of the rise in temperatur
http://www
Too little, too late!