COMMENTARIES ON JAMES HANSEN

James Hansen has every reason to boast, for if anyone was ever in a position to say “I told you so,” it’s this NASA scientist who sounded the first alarm on global warming to Congress twenty years ago. Hansen’s return to Washington last week, to address the House Committee on Global Warming on the anniversary of his earlier speech, was trumpeted in the green blogosphere as a bittersweet triumph. No one, certainly not even Hansen, savors his earlier warning of climate change being vindicated. But as we’re well on our way to such a prospect, most eco-bloggers embraced Hansen’s 20th anniversary speech as the heroic missive of a reluctant prophet.

To mark this 20th anniversary with positive action, three high-profile, well-regarded blogs threw a five-day online symposium, dedicated to discussing “ideas the next president can adopt to take on climate change” (grist, UN Dispatch and On Day One). Dr. Hansen joined in on the last day, with his call for a moratorium on coal-fired power plants, and a carbon tax with a 100% dividend return. (To give an idea of his iconic stature in the green blogging community, grist labeled its coverage on the scientist’s appearance at the symposium “Tall, Dark and Hansen.”)

A grist blog by Kate Sheppard on Hansen’s anniversary House speech casts the scientist in a similarly dashing role, that of patriotic messenger. In “Paul Revere rides again,” she wryly recounts his first address, in 1988, when unseasonably warm 98 degree heat accompanied his testimony about “the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.” Sheppard then focuses on the radical solutions to climate change that Hansen proposed to the House last week, including the moratorium on coal-fired power plants and carbon tax. She concludes with an amusing quip by the House Committee Chair Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who also calls Hansen “a latter-day Paul Revere, warning of the dangers to our planet.” Markey jokingly observes, “When Al Gore wins a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for a slide show based on what Dr. Hansen has been saying for years, you know the debate is over.”

Two prominent bloggers on the NRDC’s blog “Switchboard” covered Hansen’s House speech as well, taking different tacks on his message—one historical, the other more pro-active:

Peter Lehner decries how “Hansen’s message has been ignored, and science distorted,” and offers what he calls “a little perspective.” He pinpoints the beginning of environmental crisis awareness to a President’s Science Advisory Panel statement back in 1965, and traces the sad pattern of denial and neglect through succeeding decades, including Congress’ lack of response to Hansen’s 1988 address.

In a more inflammatory vein, Phil Gutis weighs in on a controversial aspect of Hansen’s address to the House Committee—Hansen’s charge that “CEOs [of fossil energy companies] should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature,” for their self-interested dismissal of global warming. Gutis writes, “I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I do believe massive malfeasance is at work.” Unlike Hansen, Gutis sees signs of hope in corporate America, in organizations like the United States Climate Action Partnership, which brings together environmental groups like The Nature Conservancy and the NRDC, with big businesses like Mobile, Chrysler, Pepsi, and Alcoa. Gutis shifts the blame that Hansen puts on industry to “our political leaders,” whose crime against humanity and nature is their appalling failure to pass climate legislation this year. Gutis cites Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma with special contempt, for his “obstructionist roadblock” of that legislation. Forget the CEOs, Inhofe is saying—in the annals of American history, Inhofe and his “cabal” are “likely to be judged criminal in the broadest sense of the word.”

In his piece on Hansen’s House speech, blogger Tomgram of Canadian Dimension is critical of the entire lot of them—fossil energy CEOs, and politicians who thwart progressive environmental action:

“…while (Hansen) was at it, he probably should have thrown in George W., Dick C., and crew. What they haven’t done (and what they’ve blocked from being done) over these last eight years may turn out to be their greatest crime of all.”

If James Hansen’s climate predictions were heeded twenty years ago, the earth would no doubt be in much better shape now; this time around, as these bloggers suggest, his warnings are being taken much more seriously.