NASA's Hansen Calls Out Obama On Climate Change 461
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."
Re:"Level playing field" is a sham (Score:4, Informative)
But research just doesn't generate the same number of jobs that a manufacturer can.
Research can provide as many jobs as you have funds.
Re:The problem no one will mention (Score:4, Informative)
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.
What Hansen doesn't say about the Pliocene (Score:2, Informative)
What Hansen doesn't say about the Pliocene is that back then, North America and South America were divided continents.
What we call the Gulf Stream today (and some people seem to be quite impressed by it) would have been the Pacific Stream back then. It transported a much larger amount of heat to Europe and beyond than it currently receives from that puny bathtub called the Gulf of Mexico. Of course that had a large influence on the amount of ice in and around the arctic sea and the global sea level.
There is no causative link from higher CO2 levels during that age to higher sea levels, it is merely a correlation.
In context (Score:4, Informative)
Let's put this alarmist prediction into context [slashdot.org]:
Re:Nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
Ban? Care to elaborate on this? I know of no bans or even any regulation on where you can live?
Well, we're pretty much stuck working with what we have. I mean, where are you planning to get the massive funding, to tear up the current cities and their infrastructure, to 're-do' it into a properly organized and planned and laid out way of life for us all to live 1 block from work, and have all our groceries delivered, etc? Not getting into the common things of people changing jobs every few years and not wanting to sell the house and move just to be closer to the new job (would we need to average the distance between couples that both work?)
I do, that's why I drive sports cars...I've never owned any car with more that 2 seats in my life (ok, the Porsche turbo technically was a 4-seater, but you couldn't even really fit one kid back there for more than a couple blocks).
???
Nothing stops me from having a drink after work and socializing...nor does it stop any of my friends. I mean, do you not see those bars on the way home with very large parking lots that are filled with cars? Those lots aren't filled up by employees of the establishment.
Err...those roads and all are paid for by fuel taxes...I don't know that any of my property or sales tax goes for my roads. Even if some of it did, no...it isn't that bad. I like having the independence to go where I want when I want, and not have to sit waiting for a fucking bus in the rain, heat, humidity...and take hours to get back and forth (which takes minutes in my own car)...and try to haul all my groceries on/off multiple busses while sitting next to a smelly bum...and then, figuring some way to carry the load of stuff home from the nearest bus stop which is about 1/2 a mile away easily. I frankly dunno how I could carry all my groceries on said public transport. Hell, I have to usually make 3-4 trips at least to carry them into the house from my car in the garage. Geez, what about families that have to feed 3-4 mouths? That would really be impossible, unless you are saying you want to force everyone to take time out of their day to shop daily....
I'm not sure where you get your stats. On my cooking lists, I'm often shocked how much my friends in the UK and other EU countries say their food is compared to ours here in the US.
Re:"Level playing field" is a sham (Score:4, Informative)
Attaching a cost to pollution is meaningless. You either reduce (in absolute terms) by a certain fixed amount or you don't. Nature doesn't care about your greenbacks.
Nature doesn't, but humans, who are the ones who have to actually do the reducing, do. An arguably effective way for them to do that is for it to be in their financial best interest to do so.
The only thing an economic system of carbon emissions trading does
Who said anything about emissions trading? That's not the only way to make emissions have a cost. Hansen himself favors a tax-and-dividend plan [slideshare.net].
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
Ban? Care to elaborate on this? I know of no bans or even any regulation on where you can live?
It's called Zoning [wikipedia.org], look it up sometime.
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
It takes 15 Terawatts to power the world [wikipedia.org] and each fission reactor apparently provides about 1 gigawatt [euronuclear.org], so to furnish 50% of the world's energy needs of today with nuclear, we'd need to build 1 billion nuclear fission reactors.
Your math is wrong. 15*10^12 / 1*10^9 = 15000 reactors. The estimate I've read is lower, 3000 new reactors over 60 years, i.e. 50 new reactors a year globally, which might be acheivable. See Sustainable energy without the hot air, chapter 24: Nuclear: Mythconceptions [cam.ac.uk]
I heard that nuclear power can’t be built at a sufficient rate to make a useful contribution.
The difficulty of building nuclear power fast has been exaggerated with the help of a misleading presentation technique I call “the magic playing field.” In this technique, two things appear to be compared, but the basis of the comparison is switched halfway through. The Guardian’s environment editor, summarizing a report from the Oxford Research Group, wrote “For nuclear power to make any significant contribution to a reduction in global carbon emissions in the next two generations, the industry would have to construct nearly 3000 new reactors – or about one a week for 60 years. A civil nuclear construction and supply programme on this scale is a pipe dream, and completely unfeasible. The highest historic rate is 3.4 new reactors a year.” 3000 sounds much bigger than 3.4, doesn’t it! In this application of the “magic playing field” technique, there is a switch not only of timescale but also of region. While the first figure (3000 new reactors over 60 years) is the number required for the whole planet, the second figure (3.4 new reactors per year) is the maximum rate of building by a single country (France)!
A more honest presentation would have kept the comparison on a per- planet basis. France has 59 of the world’s 429 operating nuclear reactors, so it’s plausible that the highest rate of reactor building for the whole planet was something like ten times France’s, that is, 34 new reactors per year. And the required rate (3000 new reactors over 60 years) is 50 new reactors per year. So the assertion that “civil nuclear construction on this scale is a pipe dream, and completely unfeasible” is poppycock. Yes, it’s a big construction rate, but it’s in the same ballpark as historical construction rates.
How reasonable is my assertion that the world’s maximum historical construction rate must have been about 34 new nuclear reactors per year? Let’s look at the data. Figure 24.14 shows the power of the world’s nuclear fleet as a function of time, showing only the power stations still operational in 2007. The rate of new build was biggest in 1984, and had a value of (drum-roll please...) about 30 GW per year – about 30 1-GW reactors. So there!
Re:let's level it for real then (Score:5, Informative)
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 [cam.ac.uk]
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.
Re:"Level playing field" is a sham (Score:5, Informative)
"Hide the decline" (Score:4, Informative)
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 [noaa.gov]. I think you'll find there are more than a "few samples" in the 3377 TR data sets [noaa.gov] 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.
Re:Let's just fix this problem (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, while trees and other land-dwelling plants certainly help, just like with oxygen production most of the heavy lifting is done by the oceans - atmospheric CO2 dissolves in the water and gets used by diatoms, algae, and plankton, which then die and carry their sequestered carbon to the ocean floor.
And when it comes to hemp roadblocks, don't forget the lumber industry which wouldn't be very profitable if hemp replaced wood waste for paper making and other uses, and the pharmaceutical industry which is none too pleased about the panacea of useful compounds found in hemp. I hadn't heard of the nutrient-leaching problem, but I doubt it's much worse than with cotton or other soil-destroying crops and could probably be handled similarly, with fertilizers or intelligent crop rotation. Talk to the folks currently farming it in other countries, I'm sure they've got it all worked out.