By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor, UK Independent
Humanity must urgently embark on a massive programme to power civilisation from wood to stave off catastrophic climate change, one of the world’s top scientists has told The Independent on Sunday. Twenty years ago, Professor James Hansen was the first leading scientist to announce that global warming was taking place. Now he has issued a warning that a back-to-the-future return to one of the oldest fuels is imperative because the world has exceeded the danger level for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Growing trees, which absorb the gas from the air as they grow, burning them instead of fossil fuels to generate electricity, and capturing and storing the carbon produced in the process is needed to get the greenhouse effect down to safe levels, he says.
Professor Hansen’s assertion that there is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will alarm governments and environmentalists, who are concentrating on the already daunting task of limiting its build-up, while allowing it to rise well above present levels. However, his views will command respect because, as director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies for the past 27 years, he has been one of the few climate scientists ready to risk his reputation by openly stating what many suspect to be true.In 1988 Professor Hansen put global warming on the political agenda by telling the US Congress that he was “99 per cent certain” that human activities were warming up the planet. It took the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change until last year to catch up, by which time nearly two vital decades had been lost. In the UK last week, his evidence helped to secure the acquittal of six Greenpeace activists charged with causing criminal damage to the Kingsnorth power station in Kent.The level of carbon dioxide stands at 385 parts per million (ppm), about 100ppm above what it was at the start of the Industrial Revolution. It is rising by about 2 ppm a year. The most ambitious international efforts focus on stabilising it at 450 ppm, though few see this as achievable. But Professor Hansen says this goal “is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation” and that present levels have already “brought us to the precipice of a planetary tipping point”.
He adds: “If we go over the edge we will transition to an environment far outside the range that has been experienced by humanity, and there will be no return within any foreseeable future generation."He is convinced that 350 ppm is the absolute maximum that will avoid the loss of the polar ice sheets and other disasters. He says that all coal power stations must be phased out by 2030, unless they are equipped with special “carbon capture and storage” equipment that stops the gas escaping into the atmosphere. If that was done, the level could be stabilised at 400 ppm. After that, a vigorous programme of planting trees to suck up carbon dioxide – coupled with the use of carbon capture equipment when the trees are burnt, and improvements in agricultural practices – could get levels down to 350 ppm “within a century”.
Global temperatures 20 years after his famous testimony was significantly colder despite the fact both years were strong La Nina years. See larger image here.
Icecap Note: If you develop technology for scrubbing CO2 from emissions what difference is there between burning readily available coal and trees? Environmental groups would not allow for the logging on a scale necessary to provide the wood needed. By the way thanks to the very high costs of heating oil, many more people are buring wood or wood pellets in their home which emit CO2 and many other pollutants and particulates than are emitted using clean burning fossil fuels. Another example of the law of unintended consequences. Read more nonsense here. Meanwhile, Hansen continues his evil twin to Chauncey Gardner imitation tour.
By Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times in UK Telegraph
Friedman has converted to the Green faith and to environmental trumpery, but in a more nuanced and optimistic way than most of his fellow travellers. In Hot, Flat and Crowded, he aims to reclaim ‘greenness’ from the liberal, tree-hugging, sissy and unpatriotic ghetto into which it has been forced by critics, adopting instead a realistic and economically literate position.
Encouragingly, he avoids the misanthropy that characterises much environmentalist rhetoric, in which, to quote Reginald Heber’s famous hymn, From Greenland’s Icy Mountains, ‘only man is vile!’ Friedman states: ‘This is not about the whales any more. It’s about us. And what we do about the challenges of energy and climate…’
He further rejects environmentalist utopias in which economic growth has no place, correctly observing that ‘without economic growth as part of the mix, you cannot even begin to have a conversation with China, India, or Brazil’.
Lastly, he rightly identifies energy as the core issue. Accordingly, we are left seeking the holy grail of successfully de-coupling economic growth from increasing environmental pressures.
Friedman argues that we are entering what he terms the ‘Energy-Climate Era’; today’s date should be, in true Jacobin fashion, 1 ECE. He believes that we are no longer post-anything, such as post-colonial, post-war or post-Cold War, because we are now ‘pre-something totally new’, his ECE. In this, Friedman has somewhat naively rediscovered one of the ‘hybrids’- those ‘modern’ systems mixing politics, science, technology and nature, of which ‘global warming’ is a prime example.
The five elements of Friedman’s particular ‘hybrid’ are energy and natural resources supply and demand; the ‘petrodictatorship’; climate change; energy poverty and biodiversity loss. For him, ‘the convergence of global warming, global flattening (ie the technological revolution and the levelling of the global economic playing field), and global crowding’ is driving these problems ‘well past their tipping points into new realms we’ve never seen before, as a planet or as a species’. Read more here.
By Vaclav Klaus
I think I have to start with expressing my deep and ever-deeper conviction that the recently created panic as regards dramatic, in the past allegedly unknown global climate changes and their supposedly catastrophic consequences for the future of human civilization must not remain without a resolute answer of the - until now - more or less silent majority of rationally thinking people, especially classical liberals, libertarians and other freedom loving men and women. Not everyone is silent but the current dominance of climate alarmism practically in the whole world can’t be disputed.
Many of us know (or at least should know) that this panic doesn’t have a solid ground, that it has not been set off by rational arguments, that it demonstrates an apparent disregard of the past experience of mankind, and that its substance is not science. It is based, on the contrary, on the abuse of science by a non-liberal, extremely authoritarian, freedom and prosperity despising (and destroying) ideology which I, together with many others, call environmentalism.
We have to touch also upon the so called precautionary principle, one of the main arguments of the environmentalists. The people are and should be cautious. It is quite natural. Every rational human being minimizes risk – but not at all costs. The world is full of trade-offs and any policy analyst knows that he or she has to evaluate the costs and benefits of any policy before judging whether or not the policy should be pursued. The precautionary principle, this dogma of environmentalists, leads to an unjustifiable maximization of risk aversion. Attitudes of that kind can finally succeed in blocking and prohibiting everything. Prof. Sternhell ("The Abused Science of Climate Change”, Quadrant, June 2008) says correctly that the precautionary principle “requires a quantitative judgment as otherwise we never cross roads, sit in a bus or even get out of bed?. And this “quantitative judgment” is a cost-benefit analysis.
I did not speak here about climatology or IPCC assessment reports. Without using strong words and lengthy arguments, it is enough to say here now that I do agree with Prof. Sternhell that “climate-anthropogenic carbon dioxide nexus justifies watching and research, but it does not justify the currently proposed expensive, probably unnecessary, disruptive and probably futile measures.”
I conclude with my request (made at the International Conference on Climate Change, organized in March 2008 in New York City by the Heartland Institute) that “we have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society,” because as I said many times: the current dispute is not about climatology, it is about freedom. And I would add “about prosperity and living conditions of billions of people.” To avoid a disaster, “we should trust in the rationality of man and in the outcome of spontaneous evolution of human society, not in the virtues of political activism.” See full talk here.