James Hansen is a mixed bag. In important areas, he speaks truth to power and is a thorn in the side of “magical thinking” wind-and-solar “environmentalists.”
But the blinders are on when it comes to climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases; market entrepreneurship for adaptation/resiliency; the benefits of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for Global Greening; and the positive effect of moderate warming for many people in many places of the world for most of the year.
Here are some examples of Hansen at his best:
“Imagine if the media was reversed on the climate/energy issue, supporting and promoting a free-market, classical-liberal position. They could look at my boxes of files from the Enron days (1990s) and produce an exposé, Enron Knew.”
Back at Enron Corp., I had “email wars” with the company’s climate lobbyist, John Palmisano, the author of the infamous “This agreement will be good for Enron stock” Kyoto Protocol memo. Enron had at least a half-dozen profit centers that stood to benefit from CO2 restrictions, inspiring the activism that led Jeremy Leggett [The Carbon War (Penguin: 1999), p. 204] to identify Enron as “the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business.”
The Palmisano/Bradley exchanges concerned regulating and pricing carbon dioxide. I was against; Palmisano for.…
“The global cooling scare was real from some leading climate scientists and leading environmentalists. And it was promoted in the mainstream media heavily as is well documented. So was the ‘Population Bomb’ (from food shortages) and ‘Peak Oil’/’Peak Gas’.”
In response to a LinkedIn post on the global cooling scare of the 1970s, one comment was:
It’s a myth that the climate science community was predicting global cooling and an imminent ice age in the 1970s. The media was all over a few proponents of cooling the way they’ve been all over the rare climate science contrarians, so their voices were overamplified, the way the voices of the science denier scientists have been overamplified in the media.
To which I replied:
…Stephen Schneider was a leading climate scientist who sounded the cooling scare.