Update: Ok, I see now why Hansen's picking on Australia; it's the coal exports. Sorry, Aussies, but I still think we've got you beat.
The marvelously playful Tim Blair is claiming bragging rights for Australia in the Great Global Warming Demolition Derby on the strength of an open letter to President-Elect Obama from NASA scientist James Hansen. In this letter, Hansen states that Australia’s size 13 EEE carbon footprint is likely to lead to the “destruction of much of the life on the planet.” Apparently, Hansen’s open letter to Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd fell on deaf (perhaps wax-filled) ears.
Hansen, one of our better known climate alarmists, has not only frequently been criticized for artfully manipulating his own data, and reacting hysterically to his critics, but also for recommending that the CEOs of oil and coal companies be tried for felonious assault on Gaia. Now, it’s human nature to get a little hot under the collar when you’re criticized, especially when you’re famously fisked by a 15-year-old girl; however, calling for the trial and (it naturally follows) imprisonment of executives who are employed in not only perfectly legitimate, but vitally important, industries tends to undermine your credibility, and even to make people wonder if you are not actually typing your open letters to government magnificoes in the computer room of an asylum.
Australia’s contributions to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions amounts to something under 2% of the total, so it’s difficult to see why Hansen would single out our friends in the antipodes for such a scathing denunciation. Perhaps he’s been to Australia and a waggish acquaintance fed him Vegemite. Or maybe he was once startled by a bandicoot. Difficult to say, and I’d rather not speculate (unlike Hansen). But it’s very definitely the reddest of red flags when a government employee starts sending open letters to prime ministers and presidents (even to mere presidents-elect), because it is the true sign of the inveterate careerist, of the philosopher-king on the make, of the self-serving climber who, having savored the fleshpots of the Atlantic seaboard, has vowed never again to hoe corn rows and slop hogs under the hot Iowa sun.
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As a government employee, Hansen ought to be reprimanded for going around his supervisory chain.
ReplyDeleteAnd he can hardly claim protection under "The Whistleblower Act".
Hmmm... I too am a government employeee. Perhaps I ought to write a public letter to Mr. Rudd advising him to ignore Hansen. I would hate to see all of Oz hauled up before a Nuremburg style tribunal, and the highly skilled diplomatist Rudd might not realize that Hansen's subpoena, being scrawled in crayon on a kiddie menu from Denny's, is not legally binding. And that's even before we get into Hansen's lack of standing.
ReplyDeleteO/T but Kate has a cool picture
ReplyDeleteNASA is a joke. Any administrator with half a brain would've fired this idjit by now, just on GP.
ReplyDeleteSB: lopprion
The particle released when a head is chopped off.
Actually this puts our local Aussie Greenies in quite a spot since they are big fans of Hansen.
ReplyDeleteBut I'll happily stand proudly for coal, the stuff which brought us the industrial revolution and much of the modern world.
I live down the rail line from one of the big coalmines. Next time I see a coal-train going through my town I'll salute.
(They're on their way to the dock to be loaded onto boats for Asia. They're huge - 80 trucks long - and they go every day and night. Hansen may be right that we are one of the big coal-sellers. But the Asians will just mine their own if they don't buy ours, and ours is cleaner and better for the environment.)
Jeff: "As a government employee, Hansen ought to be reprimanded for going around his supervisory chain."
ReplyDeleteThat's the thing that ticked me off about the guy probably more than anyone else - that he seemed to consider himself an independent operator, unbound by any chain of command.
"...he seemed to consider himself an independent operator, unbound by any chain of command."
ReplyDeleteI've known guvmint employees like Hansen; not of the same notoriety, I'm glad to say. But I've worked with them, and they are genuine pains in the a$$.
They generally end up causing more problems than they solve, all due to a super-inflated ego and supreme selfishness.
G'day, Bruce! I visited Gladstone once back in 1997, and was amazed first of all that coal was still such a huge industry, and second by the scale of the operations there for shipping it out.
ReplyDeleteWe wuz framed I tells ya.
ReplyDeleteIrobot: I don't know, dude; the science looks pretty solid to me...
ReplyDeleteSure, we, ourselves only amount for one or two per cent of nasty CO2 emissions but we are ze evil overloads exporting much of the world's to to the, er, world.
ReplyDeleteThe world's coal that is.
ReplyDelete