NASA's James Hansen Recycles Myths in His Pointless Attack on U.S. Climate Action

Much as I am happy to publicize Hansen's leading edge climate science (see links below), I am unhappy to have to waste any time debunking his bleeding edge climate policy analysis (see "Memo to Hansen: Your opposition to Waxman-Markey is ill-conceived and unhelpful. There isn't going to be a carbon tax nor should there be." and "Memo to Hansen 2: Why is the country's top anti-science blog reprinting your stuff?").

Still, his arguments need debunking because he is mostly recycling myths that others are pushing -- and with the country's top climate scientist putting his name on this collection of false and misleading statements, they will no doubt be parroted by yet more people. Hansen has just written, "G-8 Failure Reflects U.S. Failure on Climate Change" for The Huffington Post.

UPDATE: Predictably, Swift Boat smearer Marc Morano has made Hansen's post his top story at ClimateDepotted, again revealing that Hansen is mostly providing aid-and-comfort to the deniers and delayers.

Let me go straight to his needlessly (and pointlessly) provocative attacks on the "counterfeit climate bill known as Waxman-Markey," which is filled with right-wing and left-wing myths -- and very little understanding of the basics of either this bill or cap-and-trade systems.

Hansen claims "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." Not so. I have previously explained why W-M takes us sharply off of the BAU emissions path over the next decade, probably reducing coal use more than 25% by 2020 (see "Game changer, Part 2: Why unconventional natural gas makes the 2020 Waxman-Markey target so damn easy and cheap to meet"). And then it requires a 42% emissions reduction by 2030 and an 83% reduction by 2050, which will drive a massive energy transition over the next few decades.

The global economy is indeed a Ponzi scheme, but this is the first piece of legislation by any major country that makes a serious effort to end that Ponzi scheme.

Hansen then lists "a few of the bill's egregious flaws":

• It guts the Clean Air Act, removing EPA's ability to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants.

No. The EPA doesn't have the "ability to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants." EPA might well use its recent endangerment finding to get that ability (partially and eventually), but it hasn't asserted that regulatory capability yet.

More importantly, the CAA authority is most readily translated into regulating emissions from new power plants. Regulating CO2 emissions from existing power plants would take a long time, engendering a great deal of litigation. As John Podesta, former Clinton Administration Chief of Staff and now CEO of CAP, recently said, "it would be difficult for the EPA to enact a CO2 cap and trade without congressional cooperation."

Moreover, for a man who wants to "phase out coal emissions over the next two decades," as Hansen does, this is a pretty pointless complaint. The Obama EPA was certainly never going to use the endangerment finding to do anything like that.

This "EPA can solve the problem on its own" myth is so commonplace that I will do separate post next week addressing it. I certainly agree with NRDC that the bill should be changed to allow EPA to retain its CAA authority, but I wouldn't list this among the bill's top 4 flaws, let alone put it first.

Hansen's next "egregious" flaw in W-M:

• It sets meager targets -- 2020 emissions are to be a paltry 13% less than this year's level -- and sabotages even these by permitting fictitious "offsets," by which other nations are paid to preserve forests -- while logging and food production will simply move elsewhere to meet market demand.

Not quite -- though the first part of this statement is the bill's biggest flaw (and the only truly serious objection Hansen raises here). The 2020 target is inarguably too weak from a scientific perspective (although using this deep-recession/near-depression year as the baseline and not the bill's 2005 base year is a critique that should be beneath Hansen). That unfortunate outcome came about principally because the Bush administration did nothing for eight years, which meant that any U.S. climate bill passed now that starts in 2012 was never going to have a 2020 target like Hansen (and developing countries) wanted, which would have required the equivalent of a 40% cut in 8 years. I guess Hansen and others can trash the Obama administration and leading environmental legislators like Waxman and Markey for that, but I see that as worse than pointless.

[Note to Hansen: Congress was never going to pass a carbon tax that would "phase out coal emissions over the next two decades." You can pretend it was -- and vent your misplaced wrath at cap-and-trade proponents -- but even if a carbon tax could pass Congress, it would ultimately be little different from W-M in its outcomes, and would lack the targets needed to move the international negotiations process forward.]

And it is really quite out of character for Hansen to make such a factually untrue assertion as

...sabotages even these by permitting fictitious "offsets," by which other nations are paid to preserve forests -- while logging and food production will simply move elsewhere to meet market demand.

Of the more than 1000 Clean Development Mechanism projects funded and sold to date as international offsets (CERs) under the Kyoto process, 3 have been forestry. Hansen has repeated an absurd and rather destructive myth, which will no doubt resonate around the blogosphere.

Why destructive? Because one of the single best things in the entire W-M bill is that utterly separate from the offset provisions, it sets aside allowances to create a huge pool of money for the United States to contribute to a new international effort to stop deforestation using national-accounting based methods -- a strategy explicitly designed to stop the very problem Hansen (falsely) claims the bill will accelerate. Indeed, the funding in W-M is so great that the United States contribution alone is aimed at stopping deforestation equal to some 720 million metric tons of carbon dioxide -- equal to 10% of U.S. emissions in 2005 -- which is on top of the emissions reductions mandated by the bill.

Finally, the offsets complaint is a bit odd in a piece whose basic thesis is that the first-ever attempt by the United States to take climate action -- which includes a requirement that this country cut greenhouse gas emissions 42% in two decades and 83% in four decades -- is the entire reason for the failure of rich and poor countries to agree on an emissions pathway this week. Hansen writes:

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.

That, of course, is poppycock. The delegates haven't read the bill, and they certainly only care about the targets. They could care less about the other 1300 pages of the bill that so bother Hansen (which he hasn't bothered to read, or even read a summary of, as we'll see). Yes, the 2020 target is too weak, but that is true of Japan's new 2020 target -- and frankly even Europe's proposed target wouldn't satisfy what many developing countries have asked for.

More to the point here, the Kyoto process created international offsets, and the Europeans are committed to keeping them (and improving quality and oversight). Whatever complaints the developing countries have about Waxman-Markey, the fact that it makes use of international offsets is not high on their list. In fact, they want a mechanism by which rich polluters help them develop with clean energy.

I am not a big fan of offsets, but after much research and discussion with leading experts, I've come to the conclusion that they do not vitiate the targets (see "Do the 2 billion offsets allowed in Waxman-Markey gut the emissions targets?"). The bill is written in a manner that should allow the United States to strengthen oversight of international offsets, but in any case, it is difficult to blame the United States for the current state of the CDM. And again, what the bill does on global forest preservation is not an "egregious flaw" but a central contribution to stopping global warming.

Hansen's third "egregious" flaw:

Its cap-and-trade system, reports former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro, "has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives."

This is an utter falsehood. Indeed, it is a repackaged version of a falsehood that anti-scientific anti-clean-energy Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour put forward (see "Barbour utterly tries to scare public with wildly implausible Chinese scheme to manipulate the emissions market"). So let me repeat for the record:

There are many provisions (and realities) that would stop "insider trading" (whatever the heck that is in this case) and "a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives."

First off, the permit market is huge. Even purchasing 2% of the permits in, say, 2015, would probably cost $1 billion. And speculators would have to purchase several times that to significantly run up the price.

(As an aside, Hansen should really like speculators because they increase the price of the permit.)

Second, it will be so easy to meet the targets for at least the first decade (see here) that the "real" price of a permit will probably be slightly below the auction price (which has a floor). So it will be highly unprofitable to buy lots of permits, which would run up the price, in an effort to make money selling those permits sometime in the future. I can't imagine a plausible scenario in which this would make economic sense for any entity even if they could get away with it, which they cannot.

Third, the bill requires EPA to promulgate regulations to cover the auction. As CQ's summary of the bill explains:

• Bidders must disclose all parties sponsoring their bids;


• Individual bidders would be limited to purchasing up to 5% of allowances sold at any quarterly auction;


• EPA would have to publish information about winning bidders

So it would be very difficult to do any major purchasing in secret, any major "insider trading," and virtually impossible to acquire a large fraction of the permits. Indeed, in this context, "insider trading" looks to be just a collection of meaningless scare-words. Hansen can do better.

Fourth, the bill has a whole section devoted to "Carbon Market Assurance." As the WRI summary describes it:

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is given regulatory authority over allowance and offset markets and allowance derivative markets (Sec. 761, pg. 449). The president is also delegated authority to instruct agencies to take on pieces of market regulation based on existing authority as long as regulations are consistent with this section. The draft makes it a federal crime to commit fraud or manipulate any carbon market. In addition, the regulations facilitate and maintain market oversight and transparency and require market monitoring to prevent fraud, manipulation and excessive speculation.

That section explicitly includes derivatives, with further oversight by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Fifth, the bill has a Strategic Reserve (with tons originally skimmed off from each year's total target) that an entity can purchase permits from if the price sees a short-term run up of about 60%. So again the bill will is designed to prevent someone from cornering the market.

So this charge by Shapiro and Hansen is utterly false. Now Hansen apparently hasn't bothered to look at the bill or any of the many summaries. I would note that essentially all of these oversight provisions were in the original March draft -- so they should not be a surprise to anybody.

Since Hansen really doesn't follow this sort of policy issue closely -- even though he opines on it -- I can understand why he might just parrot Shapiro. But Shapiro is, as Hansen notes, former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs and co-chair of the U.S. Climate Task Force. So he should know better. Then again, one of the two (!) advisors listed for the U.S. Climate Task Force is "Kevin Hassett, Director of Economic Studies for the American Enterprise Institute."

Now AEI remains a leading anti-climate-action, anti-clean energy right wing think tank. For instance, AEI continues to assert (without any supporting evidence), "No matter what you've been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly," and it continues to parrot utterly false denier talking points like "For the last decade, warming peaked, and has recently declined: we're back to the average temperatures that prevailed in 1978" (see "AEI: Still crazy with denial and delay after all these years"). I simply can't imagine any group that wants to be taken seriously on climate policy having a senior AEI staffer as an advisor. So for now, the analysis of "The U.S. Climate Task Force" and its leadership should be ignored by anyone who wants to be taken seriously on climate policy.

But Hansen isn't content to quote Shapiro's falsehoods once. No, his fourth and last egregious flaw is:

It fails to set predictable prices for carbon, without which, Shapiro notes, "businesses and households won't be able to calculate whether developing and using less carbon-intensive energy and technologies makes economic sense," thus ensuring that millions of carbon-critical decisions fall short.

Uhh, no. In fact, the bill does set a very predictable (and rising) floor on the auction price. And again, since the 2020 target is so easy to meet with abundant, low-cost domestic clean energy -- like efficiency, conservation, renewables, and fuel switching from coal to gas -- I think the carbon price is likely to hug the floor price through 2020. But that's what I think -- not what the industry believes.

Hansen has this argument exactly backwards. One of the biggest pluses of a cap-and-trade over a tax is that participants tend to think that the cost of meeting the targets -- and hence the cost of the permits -- will be much higher than they actually turn out to be. So they do more than is necessary, especially once they find out how easy it is to cut emissions. That is why in previous cap-and-trade programs, like sulfur dioxide, the targets were achieve faster and cheaper than anybody expected.

Remember the industry-funded economic models show very high permit prices. That's why the industry ends up acting as if the permit price is going to be high. I already know medium-sized energy-intensive companies that have done bupkes on energy for decades who are now scrambling to figure out what this bill means for them. They will inevitably put in place basic energy efficiency and carbon mitigation strategies of the kind that I detail in my book Cool Companies (see "Cool Companies, Part 1: How the best businesses boost profits and productivity by reducing greenhouse gas emissions" and "The United States of Waste"). That will be repeated by hundreds of different companies, ultimately leading to far more emissions reductions at a far lower cost than all the economic models project.

So it is sheer nonsense -- and the exact opposite of the truth -- for Hansen and Shapiro to claim this bill will ensure "that millions of carbon-critical decisions fall short."

Yes, those who like carbon taxes think that predictable prices are preferable. But I'm with Nobelist Krugman, who writes, "The claim that carbon taxes are better than cap and trade is, in my view, just wrong." In particular:

One objection -- the claim that carbon taxes are better than cap and trade -- is, in my view, just wrong. In principle, emission taxes and tradable emission permits are equally effective at limiting pollution. In practice, cap and trade has some major advantages, especially for achieving effective international cooperation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, think about how hard it would be to verify whether China was really implementing a promise to tax carbon emissions, as opposed to letting factory owners with the right connections off the hook. By contrast, it would be fairly easy to determine whether China was holding its total emissions below agreed-upon levels.

Now Hansen can keep pointlessly pushing his carbon tax if he wants to. Heck, he can argue the merits of Betamax and John McCain and Adam Lambert, if he wants. But trashing Waxman-Markey and its supporters based on recycled myths touted by others remains ill-conceived and unhelpful.

Related Posts:

• Right for 27 years: 1981 Hansen study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels


• Stabilize at 350 ppm or risk ice-free planet, warn NASA, Yale, Sheffield, Versailles, Boston et al


• Drilling off-shore is a "crazy thing" says Hansen on 20th anniversary of his famous testimony


• 'Tipping Point' -- A non-technical Hansen piece


• Hansen's plea for leadership to Nevada Gov.


• Hansen: Yankee Ticket Prices and Fossil Fuels


• NASA's Hansen responds to NYT's Revkin


• Hansen (et al) must read: Get back to 350 ppm or risk an ice-free planet


• Hansen throws cold water on cooling climate claim


• Hansen: The Shadow on American Democracy


• Dr. Hansen to Dr. Merkel: Carbon is forever -- so ban new traditional coal plants now


• Hansen's op-ed advice to Massachusetts


• Hansen apologizes, warns against "averting our eyes"


• Hansen's final Iowa testimony


• More swiftboating of James Hansen


• Another "Must Read" from Hansen: 'Long-term' climate sensitivity of 6°C for doubled CO2


• A Must Read: "Global Temperature Change," by James Hansen et al.


• Hansen 1: Sea Level Rise


• Hansen 2: Iowa Edition of Declaration of Stewardship


• Hansen on "civil disobedience"


• Hansen on "Fossil Fuel Subsidies"


• NASA's Hansen on Live Earth, Gore, and Coal

Memo to Hansen 2: Why is the country's top anti-science blog reprinting your stuff?

Comments

[research]

1$ per ton carbon tax!

[Jashand]

Micheal Smith just posted a hilarious riposte ('Battle of the Brights") to Romm here:
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2009/07/battle_of_the_brights.html.

A snippet:

"The scattershot incoherence of Joe’s essay betrays his bad conscience. He knows that Waxman-Markey is a joke. Hell, not four months ago, in a talk at the American Museum of Natural History, he proudly rolled out his own phrase, ripoffsets, to disparage those spongy “somewhere else reductions” that are central in Waxman-Markey’s “hide the ball” ethos.

Joe now says he came to understand offsets “after much research and discussion with leading experts.” But how to explain his positively nutty statement that “One of the biggest pluses of a cap-and-trade over a tax is that participants tend to think that the cost of meeting the targets — and hence the cost of the permits — will be much higher than they actually turn out to be." So they do more than is necessary?

[StartLoving]

Brilliant! Thank you so much!

[bradwieser]

AGW POSTPONED TIL 2020!

From Real Climate:

“We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal, and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.

LOL

[OliverTwist]

Here is a link to a video showing what real scientists observe about global sea ice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MozcU7woNNQ

Sea ice is decreasing. The artic is warming and the volume of sea ice is decreasing and the control of the release of global warming gases is rapidly slipping out of our control.

When you cab burn the air above artic ice that is clue.

It would be smart to be afraid for our children and grandchildren.

[kold]

I wonder, if we start using other than fossil energy, will it get spent just as fossils do? Say we will start using the energy of sun, will it be spent sooner than in those millions of years? Luckily, there is also an energy that we cant ever touch, that will never be spent, or isnt there?

[Evan Murdock]

You mean are we going to use of the energy of the sun sooner? No. That energy is 'spent' regardless, it's just a question of whether we use some tiny fraction of it for our own devices.

Holding your cup under a waterfall doesn't make it run out of water any faster.

[indy100]

How could you overspend the energy of the sun? The energy is there, regardless of whether or not it's "used" by humans. And the sun is very gradually (over millions of years) actually expanding, the energy will only become stronger. In fact in several million years the earth will become inhabitable for all life forms now existing. But that's a topic for another day.

[bootspur]

Look, until the rationalization of Global Warming is shouted down, and is NO LONGER VIEWED through the warped lens of the pound, franc, lira, dollar & deutsche-mark etc., then we will continue to see a quickening of the pace of death and disease within our world's population center's, power utility generated carbon pollution increase, agricultural soil runoff increase from extreme weather, regional Hot wars over fertile grounds etc.

Global Warming is considered a political issue by the Right, Or the Republicans, the left considers this an issue of life OR death.

[OliverTwist]

Perhaps the problem is that too many on the right imagine that they are priviledged to avoid the consequences. For some few this might be true. But for most, their children will suffer the consequences with the rest.

[indy100]

Unfortunately the "values" folks on the right don't think farther than next year, and are quite happy to leave their children and grandchildren to fend for themselves.

[fairtaxnow]

Did Man also raise the temps of the OTHER planets in the solar system? I think not.

“I think it is an intriguing coincidence that warming trends have been observed on a number of very diverse planetary bodies in our solar system,” Peiser said in an email interview.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/070312_solarsys_warming.html

"Weve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is WRONG, we will be doing the right thing -- in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)

http://www.svpvril.com/nwo.html

[fairtaxnow]

American Physical Society has some questions also.

In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton's paper an "expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and "extensive errors"

http://www.dailytech.com/Myth+of+Consensus+Explodes+APS+Opens+Global+Warming+Debate/article12403.htm

[fumes]

say it's not so!

[Aramingo]

And the APS added a disclaimer to the post. It's just a couple of cranks.

[Evan Murdock]

"Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases."

Statement of the APS council 11/18/07

[OliverTwist]

Check the orbits of the planets.

[OliverTwist]

You must know that this is false science and misrepresents the facts. It has been discussed over and over. That makes you a bearer of false witness on a matter of life and death for millions. Shame on you.

In case you are sincerely mislead by others google this: Climate Denial Crock of the Week - Mars Attacks!!

[OliverTwist]

I read your link and find that it in fact debunks the claims that there is higher sun output and that is the cause of climate change and debunks the claims about climate changes on other planets being associated.

I was mislead by misreading of your narrative which seemed to go the other way.

Sorry.

[Aramingo]

That first reference does come down on the "science" side of things. By your tone I assumed we had some kind of denialist thing going on. The question I have for those who cite recent warming on Pluto and Neptune is "How do we know what the climate on those planets should be when we haven't even observed an entire year on them?" Pluto was discovered in the early 1930s. It takes Pluto 248 years to orbit the sun. Neptune was discovered in the 1840s. Neptune takes 164 years to orbit the sun. So we've seen one Neptunian year. The point is that, while we may have a reasonable estimate of what the climate should be on these planets (I'm betting it's cold), we need a little more data before we start talking about climate change there.

[WilliePilgrim]

There may not be enough canvas to cover the three ring circus of myths that surround the debate over climate change, the biggest one of which is that we have to do something now or the world will be spun into an inferno of rising temps leaving an uninhabitable planet. The one thing that could do that, a extraplanetary event of unimaginable dimension, could indeed happen and end our little species existence. Of course we might be able to prevent that if we were to focus our attentions and efforts on using the fossil fuels we're blessed with to power our incredible industrial economy to build the infrastructure that will at long last bring us beyond our doorstep and into the neighborhood where energy and materials abound free of the pollution and gravity of the earth's surface. But if we look at fossil fuels as something bad, and miss this opportunity, I really doubt we'll ever have the kind of concentrated energy we need to create launch vehicles. The money wasted on trying to controll an insignificant amount of CO2 could be used to usher in space based solar power and speed up the developement of new fusion technologies. It's raining soup and we act as if building a bucket were somehow immoral.

[fumes]

agreed.. drill baby drill..

just don't soot up the place!!

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=soot+melting+ice&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

[jaundicedview]

I understand Hansen's frustration. The Waxman-Markley bill is a feckless and essentially toothless thing. Hansen knows the extent of change required to avoid catastrophe, and he knows this bill falls far short.

Of course "realists" know that a carbon tax is off the table (along with a single payer health plan, the impeachment of Bush/Cheney, etc) A Cap and Trade system is just providing the financial system with another commodity to base a bubble upon. It is basically the selling of indulgences.

We can't regulate CO2 from existing power plants because that would be hard. Yeah that sums it all up, doesn't it. While it' true that the perfect is the enemy of the good, the Waxman Markley bill is evidence that the piss-poor is also the enemy of the good.

[OliverTwist]

Eloquent. I especially like the ending!

[roquelaure]

I think you've accidentally turned up in the "wonky" section of HuffPo. You belong in the "empty political posturing and snooty bromides" section.

I'm not sure why you chose to reply to this post if you didn't even bother to read it. Every point you've made is substantially addressed above. And when I say "point you've made," I'm being generous, since you've basically coughed up a set of rote and milquetoast complaints.

[ABSORB]

Global warming is supported by shame science, carbon tax has nothing to do with improving the environment and everything to do with with enslaving you and bring your standard of living down. Global Warming is being pushed on us by Global elitist , Banks and and corporations that will benefit from taxing carbon.
On a global basis, world sea ice in April 2008 reached levels that were "unprecedented" for the month of April in over 25 years. Levels are the third highest (for April) since the commencement of records in 1979, exceeded only by levels in 1979 and 1982

and that is just one fact

[geroldf]

One interesting thing that has become apparent in this discussion: the information age is also the disinformation age. Clowns like "ABSORB", for whatever reason, spew absolute nonsense like this idiotic "shame science" post. See also the previous post, from "nonein2008" - same crap. Total BS. No references, just empty lies

[ABSORB]

Name calling is what kids do, You want references well here are just two. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2008/mar/global.html#seaice
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3066

everybody who is buying into what the MSM (same people who told you we had to go to war with IRAQ because of WMD!!) is saying about climate control should watch this documentary !!!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6690593849703875256&q=The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle&ei=vBEaSL_aNIui-wHY04z0Bg

[jaundicedview]

One fact does not a trend make. Here's a big bunch O' facts:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

[OliverTwist]

Your characterization is deceitful. Shame on you.

You are cherry picking and misrepresenting a result for the relatively unimportant measurement of surface area for a particular year and month in a limited data set and proposing that this is important contrary evidence.

This kind of event has only slightly more significance in the course of global climate change as the cool breeze that comes from your refrigerator when you reach for a frosty one.

What matters in determining how much cooling capacity is stored in ice is the mass of sea ice - which is measured by the volume of ice not the area. The yearly average volume of sea ice has been decreasing steadily.

You must know that, eh.

[noneIn2008]

See if you can get Hansen to release the raw temperature data and programing code to the public so other scientists can see how he has "adjusted" the NASA temperature data?

[marinade]

There absolutely should be a carbon tax. Emissions cause a lot of damage. The people who cause the emissions should pay for the damage.

[SonofLiberty1]

Dr. Romm,

If you are such an environmentalist?

Why aren't you talking about

LIGHT POLLUTION?

Apparently, I know something you don't!

[Peabodies]

Dr. Romm, two things-- what happened to that "billion dollar" green energy project of yours? Anything to show for it?

Second, has the Center for American Progress gone funky on us? Just askin'