[Vision2020] 4-1-13 NY Times: James Hansen: "Climate Maverick to Retire From NASA"

[Ted Moffett]

I did not even know about this till today... Yikes!

Consider this quote from the article below regarding putting a price on CO2
emissions, which contradicts the often held view that those promoting
regulations to address climate change are big government liberals or
socialists.... rather Hansen refers to "conservative principles:"

Dr. Hansen agrees that a price is needed on carbon dioxide emissions, but
he wants the money returned to the
public<http://www.citizensclimatelobby.org/node/444>in the form of
rebates on tax bills. “It needs to be done on the basis of
conservative principles — not one dime to make the government bigger,” said
Dr. Hansen, who is registered as a political independent.
----------------------------------
Climate Maverick to Retire From NASA By JUSTIN
GILLIS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/justin_gillis/index.html>
Published:
April 1, 2013

James E. Hansen<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/james_e_hansen/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
the climate scientist who issued the clearest warning of the 20th century
about the dangers of global
warming<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
will retire from
NASA<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_aeronautics_and_space_administration/index.html?inline=nyt-org>this
week, giving himself more freedom to pursue political and legal
efforts to limit greenhouse gases.

His departure, after a 46-year career at the space agency’s Goddard
Institute for Space Studies <http://www.giss.nasa.gov/> in Manhattan, will
deprive federally sponsored climate research of its best-known public
figure.

At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in
court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the
federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for
instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a
particularly dirty form of oil extracted from tar sands.

“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” he
said in an interview.

Dr. Hansen had already become an activist in recent years, taking vacation
time from NASA to appear at climate protests and allowing himself to be
arrested or cited a half-dozen times.

But those activities, going well beyond the usual role of government
scientists, had raised eyebrows at NASA headquarters in Washington. “It was
becoming clear that there were people in NASA who would be much happier if
the ‘sideshow’ would exit,” Dr. Hansen said in an e-mail.

At 72, he said, he feels a moral obligation to step up his activism in his
remaining years.

“If we burn even a substantial fraction of the fossil fuels, we guarantee
there’s going to be unstoppable changes” in the climate of the earth, he
said. “We’re going to leave a situation for young people and future
generations that they may have no way to deal with.”

His departure, on Wednesday, will end a career of nearly half a century
working not just for a single agency but also in a single building, on the
edge of the Columbia University campus.

>From that perch, seven floors above the diner
<http://tomsrestaurant.net/>made famous by “Seinfeld,” Dr. Hansen
battled the White House, testified
dozens of times in Congress, commanded some of the world’s most powerful
computers and pleaded with ordinary citizens to grasp the basics of a
complex science.

His warnings and his scientific papers have drawn frequent attack from
climate-change skeptics, to whom he gives no quarter. But Dr. Hansen is a
maverick, just as likely to vex his allies in the environmental movement.
He supports nuclear power and has taken stands that sometimes undercut
their political strategy in Washington.

In the interview and in subsequent e-mails, Dr. Hansen made it clear that
his new independence would allow him to take steps he could not have taken
as a government employee. He plans to lobby European leaders — who are
among the most concerned about climate change — to impose a tax on oil
derived from tar sands. Its extraction results in greater greenhouse
emissions than conventional oil.

Dr. Hansen’s activism of recent years dismayed some of his scientific
colleagues, who felt that it backfired by allowing climate skeptics to
question his objectivity. But others expressed admiration for his
willingness to risk his career for his convictions.

Initially, Dr. Hansen plans to work out of a converted barn on his farm in
Pennsylvania. He has not ruled out setting up a small institute or taking
an academic appointment.

He said he would continue publishing scientific papers, but he will no
longer command the computer time and other NASA resources that allowed him
to track the earth’s rising temperatures and forecast the long-run
implications.

Dr. Hansen, raised in small-town Iowa, began his career studying Venus, not
the earth. But as concern arose in the 1970s about the effects of human
emissions of greenhouse gases, he switched gears, publishing pioneering
scientific papers.

His initial estimate of the earth’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases was
somewhat on the high side, later work showed. But he was among the first
scientists to identify the many ways the planet is likely to respond to
rising temperatures and to show how those effects would reinforce one
another to produce immense changes in the climate and environment,
including a sea level rise that could ultimately flood many of the world’s
major cities.

“He’s done the most important science on the most important question that
there ever was,” said Bill McKibben, a climate activist who has worked
closely with Dr. Hansen.

Around the time Dr. Hansen switched his research focus, in the 1970s, a
sharp rise in global temperatures began. He labored in obscurity over the
next decade, but on a blistering June day in 1988 he was called before a
Congressional committee and
testified<http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html>that
human-induced global warming had begun.

Speaking to reporters afterward in his flat Midwestern accent, he uttered a
sentence<http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html>that
would appear in news reports across the land: “It is time to stop
waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the
greenhouse effect is here.”

Given the natural variability of climate, it was a bold claim to make after
only a decade of rising temperatures, and to this day some of his
colleagues do not think he had the evidence.

Yet subsequent events bore him out. Since the day he spoke, not a single
month’s temperatures have fallen below the 20th-century average for that
month. Half the world’s population is now too young to have lived through
the last colder-than-average month, February 1985.

In worldwide temperature records going back to 1880, the 19 hottest years
have all occurred since his testimony.

Again and again, Dr. Hansen made predictions that were ahead of the rest of
the scientific community and, arguably, a bit ahead of the evidence.

“Jim has a real track record of being right before you can actually prove
he’s right with statistics,” said Raymond T.
Pierrehumbert<http://geosci.uchicago.edu/%7Ertp1/>,
a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Hansen’s record has by no means been spotless. Even some of his allies
consider him prone to rhetorical excess and to occasional scientific error.

He has repeatedly called for trying the most vociferous climate-change
deniers for “crimes against humanity.” And in recent years, he stated that
excessive carbon dioxide emissions might eventually lead to a runaway
greenhouse effect that would boil the oceans and render earth
uninhabitable, much like Venus.

His colleagues pointed out that this had not happened even during
exceedingly warm episodes in the earth’s ancient past. “I have huge respect
for Jim, but in this particular case, he overstated the risk,” said Daniel
P. Schrag, a geochemist and the head of Harvard’s Center for the
Environment<http://environment.harvard.edu/>,
who is nonetheless deeply worried about climate change.

Climate skeptics have routinely accused Dr. Hansen of alarmism. “He
consistently exaggerates all the dangers,” Freeman Dyson, the famed
physicist and climate contrarian,
told<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?pagewanted=1>The
New York Times Magazine in 2009.

Perhaps the biggest fight of Dr. Hansen’s career broke out in late 2005,
when a young political appointee in the administration of George W. Bush
began exercising control over Dr. Hansen’s statements and his access to
journalists. Dr. Hansen took the fight
public<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/science/earth/29climate.html?ex=1296190800&en=51c46d7689bee520&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>and
the administration backed
down <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/science/04climate.html>.

For all his battles with conservatives, however, he has also been hard on
environmentalists. He was a harsh
critic<http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/james-hansen-hopes-waxman-markey-cap-and-trade-bill-fails-has-he-lost-the-plot.html>of
a failed climate
bill<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/climate-and-energy-legislation/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>they
supported in 2009, on the grounds that it would have sent billions
into the federal government’s coffers without limiting emissions
effectively.

Dr. Hansen agrees that a price is needed on carbon dioxide emissions, but
he wants the money returned to the
public<http://www.citizensclimatelobby.org/node/444>in the form of
rebates on tax bills. “It needs to be done on the basis of
conservative principles — not one dime to make the government bigger,” said
Dr. Hansen, who is registered as a political independent.

In the absence of such a broad policy, Dr. Hansen has been lending his
support to fights against individual fossil fuel projects. Students lured
him to a coal protest in 2009, and he was arrested for the first time. That
fall he was cited again after sleeping overnight in a tent on the Boston
Common with students trying to pressure Massachusetts into passing climate
legislation<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/climate-and-energy-legislation/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.


“It was just humbling to have that solidarity and support from this leader,
this lion among men,” said Craig S.
Altemose<http://www.betterfutureproject.org/who-we-are/staff/>,
an organizer of the Boston
protest<http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/articles/2009/12/07/sleep_outs_draw_to_a_close_on_eve_of_climate_summit/>.


Dr. Hansen says he senses the beginnings of a mass movement on climate
change, led by young people. Once he finishes his final papers as a NASA
employee, he intends to give it his full support.

“At my age,” he said, “I am not worried about having an arrest record.”

   A version of this article appeared in print on April 2, 2013, on
page D1of the New
York edition with the headline: Climate Maverick to Quit NASA.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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