James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.
Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his
groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.
Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.
In an interview with the
Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."
He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".
He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.
The current concentration is 385 parts per million and is rising by 2ppm a year. Hansen, who heads Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, says 2009 will be a crucial year, with a new US president and talks on how to follow the Kyoto agreement.
He wants to see a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, coupled with the creation of a huge grid of low-loss electric power lines buried under ground and spread across America, in order to give wind and solar power a chance of competing. "The new US president would have to take the initiative analogous to Kennedy's decision to go to the moon."
His sharpest words are reserved for the special interests he blames for public confusion about the nature of the global warming threat. "The problem is not political will, it's the alligator shoes - the lobbyists. It's the fact that money talks in Washington, and that democracy is not working the way it's intended to work."
A group seeking to increase pressure on international leaders is launching a campaign today called 350.org. It is taking out full-page adverts in papers such as the
New York Times and the Swedish
Falukuriren calling for the target level of CO2 to be lowered to 350ppm. The advert has been backed by 150 signatories, including Hansen.
Comment: The British professor, Frank Furedi,
elaborated on modern demonologists such as James Hansen:
Demonologists are intensely hostile to anyone who questions the way they interpret and talk about threats. As moral entrepreneurs, they regard their opponents, not only as irresponsible, but also as potentially evil. From this standpoint, dissidence comes to be seen as an act of moral subversion. The moralising of hazards serves to shut down discussion. At the very least, anyone who questions claims about the alleged gravity of a threat facing mankind is depicted as the stooge or accomplice of a malevolent agenda.
The act of raising questions about a 'warning' is now discussed as an insidious deed of denial. Increasingly, questioning things is seen as the moral equivalent of Holocaust Denial. In recent years, people who have questioned the warnings about climate change have been labelled 'deniers'. The allusion to Holocaust Denial is clear. The implication of this moral condemnation of questioners - the denouncement of critics as 'deniers' - is that disbelief itself is a sign of moral bankruptcy.
Believing in a statement of warning is considered to be morally principled; disbelieving the statement, or even just questioning it, is stigmatised as morally corrupt. This transformation of disbelief into a sin was also widespread during the witch-hunts that plagued Europe in earlier centuries. In the era of the witch-hunt, anyone who questioned the existence of demonic forces could be denounced as an 'associate of Satan'. Such was the power and influence of demonologists that few were prepared to question the existence of witchcraft.
...
Increasingly, the heretic is condemned because he has dared to question an authority that must never be questioned. Here, 'overwhelming evidence' serves as the equivalent of revealed religious truth, and those who question 'scientists of unquestioned reputation' - that is, the new priestly caste - are guilty of blasphemy.
Heresy-hunters who charge their opponents with 'ecological denial' also warn that the 'time for reason and reasonableness is running short' (9). Crusaders against denial don't only wish to silence their opponents. In the true tradition of heresy-hunting they also want to inflict punishment on those who deny the true faith. David Roberts, a journalist for the online magazine Grist, would like to see global warming deniers prosecuted like Nazi war criminals. In a vitriolic tone characteristic of dogmatic inquisitors, he argued: 'We should have war crimes trials for these bastards... some sort of climate Nuremberg.' (10) At the very least, it seems, these 'criminals' should be castigated as the moral equivalents of Josef Fritzl.
Far more dangerous to humanity is the Taurid meteor stream which we are passing through right now. Or perhaps
some other cyclic stream which may be coming our way. And with the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event on June 30th, and as the US enters it's 7th year of the so-called "War on Terror" astronomer
Victor Clube's comments are worth repeating:
I'd like to remind you now that one of these [meteor] peaks that you are looking at here-the 1601 occurs round about 1640 through 1680, and it coincides with the end of the Thirty Years War in Europe, and the Civil War in England. I mentioned this briefly last night. Cromwell, and others of that time-I only name him because, of course, he's a familiar name to you, but there are many others-described all the upheaval of the time, in millennarian terms, as due to "God's revolution" only a century after Copernicus' De Revolutionibus.
My point here is that the word "revolution" is popularly used nowadays in a social sense. It didn't have that at the time Copernicus was writing; it acquired it. It acquired it at the time of the English Civil War. And it was because of the perception that things in the sky were driving things, terrible things, that were happening on the ground. Only three hundred and fifty years ago, then, mankind was still in the era of an invisible sky god from a once visible heaven associated with angels, fallen angels, and dangerous demons hurling thunderbolts.
We have to get rid of the idea that our ancestors thought that space was empty. They didn't have [the] specialized astrophysical knowledge that has allowed me to build the Taurid stream for you; they just knew it was there. That's really rather a remarkable thing. We've had to unlearn that knowledge in the last three hundred and fifty years in order to put ourselves in the state of rediscovering it.
So, what was The Enlightenment only forty years after Cromwell? It was the pragmatic English decision to get rid of all the angels and demons, invisible sky gods, and a once visible heaven. It was the decision to stop worrying about the evidence of fireballs and the supposed behavior of comets. It was a decision to reconstruct the cosmos without heaven in the solar system and put it in the ether or outside the cosmos altogether of infinity al la Bruno. It was the decision to create a purified, less frightening cosmos in much the same way as Aristotle did after Plato. On both occasions we shifted from astrology to physics, and from a sky of foreboding to a sky of inspiration, from prison and terror to freedom and hope.
Indeed, the cry of the revolutionary periods of 1640 to 1680 and 1760 to 1800, the time of the American War of Independence, was the cry of freedom from heavenly oppression, demons, and fireballs.
For the last two hundred years of Enlightenment we have been rewriting history so that the cry of freedom is from earthly oppressors. No wonder the world has gone wrong and the astrophysicists today cannot come to terms with the Taurid torus. I'm really trying to say that this is just not an astrophysical discovery that we are talking about. Everything has got to, sort of, turn around in order to come to terms with what is being said. And this, in a way, is rather like what Irving was describing beforehand. There is a paradigm shift involved in recognizing that it's not just ancient history we have got wrong-it's all history.
So, what is my point? My point is that you do not have to dabble first in mythology and prehistory and geology, as Velikovsky did, in order to understand the sky. You first take the modern sky accessible to science, especially during the Space Age, and you look at its' darker debris with a view to relating its behavior to the more accessible human history which we can, in principle, really understand. And by this approach you discover from the dynamics of the material in space which I'm talking about that a huge comet must have settled in a Taurid orbit some 20,000 years ago, whose dense meteor stream for 10,000 years almost certainly produced the last Ice Age.
The fact that James Hansen is so blind to an extra-terrestrial influence on climate, known about at least 5000 years ago
(June 29 in the year 3123BC to be precise.) , preferring an anthropogenic, apocalyptic vision of doom and gloom on Earth, points to the same old program to hide the fact that we may be shortly entering a period of increased risk from cometary bombardment and gives the psychopathic masters an excuse to launch their not-so-original, but highly effective witch hunts.
Comment: The British professor, Frank Furedi, elaborated on modern demonologists such as James Hansen: Far more dangerous to humanity is the Taurid meteor stream which we are passing through right now. Or perhaps some other cyclic stream which may be coming our way. And with the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event on June 30th, and as the US enters it's 7th year of the so-called "War on Terror" astronomer Victor Clube's comments are worth repeating: The fact that James Hansen is so blind to an extra-terrestrial influence on climate, known about at least 5000 years ago (June 29 in the year 3123BC to be precise.) , preferring an anthropogenic, apocalyptic vision of doom and gloom on Earth, points to the same old program to hide the fact that we may be shortly entering a period of increased risk from cometary bombardment and gives the psychopathic masters an excuse to launch their not-so-original, but highly effective witch hunts.