I interviewed author Mark Bowen a year ago about James Hansen, the great climatologist, with whom Bowen wrote the book Censoring Science. The discussion turned to the intensity of reaction against Hansen from those who refuse to accept the reality of global warming.
Bowen mentioned that Hansen has gotten some death threats, though he considered them too flaky to be very worrying.
I didn't pursue the topic, but this week I was reminded of Bowen's remarks by a long thread of web comments notable for the disgust and hatred directed against Hansen and climate activist Danny Bloom.
Bloom has, according to Watts Up With That, filed a suit against national governments seeking $1 billion in damages from "all world leaders for intent to commit manslaughter against future generations of human beings."
Filing such a suit was a misguided idea, in my view, for the same reason that pursuing impeachment against Bush and Cheney this year would have been a misguided strategy for Democrats to pursue. Better to elect a President who really cares about the planet. And better to back ways and means of conserving energy, reducing carbon emissions, and increasing societal resilience, to protect us against the harms of global warming -- and other threats.
Nonetheless, the rawness and the viciousness of the hatred expressed on the thread can be quite shocking. Particularly since Hansen has absolutely nothing to do with this suit.
One has to wonder if this deeply thoughtful, thoroughly decent man really is at risk and should take precautions, in the same way that others in the public sphere have to guard against fanatics.
Here's an example of the hate from the thread:
Brooklyn Red Leg:
If I believed in Divine Retribution, I would think Dr. Hansen's plane would go down in a remote, frosty part of the world and his supporters on the trip would be forced to eat him to stay alive. Same with the other Blood Sucking Vampires and assorted Vultures that prey on us.
Troubling.
(h/t: Dan Bloom)
For McCain, it’s really all about the fake snow
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Tasermons Partner Posted 12:03 pm
01 Dec 2008
Just bask in the fact that someone feels inferior enough compared to him that they feel their ego is threatened to the point that they haveta shout and rave in order to vainly try and defend their wimpy and selfish selves (since its the only way they can get any sorta attention).
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:06 pm
01 Dec 2008
Do a search on "John Bailo" sometime and see how many people want set up a sniper rifle outside my 3rd floor window.
It comes with the terrority. And I have zero sympathy, after all, you are part of Aristocracy. And in all fields -- Software, Science, Medicine, Politics -- the Aristocrasy is being overturned.
Right now in Florida there's a guy taking homeless people and putting them in foreclosed homes. And you know what? Nobody is stopping him! It's Moscow 1919, baby, and the Proles are moving into the castles.
Get ready for Lumpen Science where the Esoteric Models of the Elite Scientists are hurled into the wheat fields!
Texeme.Construct.Questioner
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christophersj Posted 5:00 pm
01 Dec 2008
I do wish you would stop inhaling glue fumes, though.
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GreyFlcn Posted 10:26 pm
01 Dec 2008
And then turn around and say that following empirical science is "hysterical"?
-David Ahlport
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 2:12 am
02 Dec 2008
Something in all this hate speech is worrisome. It leads me to think that something unexpected and unwelcome is occurring.
At least to me, there appear to be people for whom the economy, in and of itself, is the primary object of their idolatry. This behavior is observable, obvious and flagrant. In many instances, these apparent worshippers make what they evidently believe are rational arguments that suggest manmade financial and economic systems are somehow essential to, and an integral part of, God's Creation; that indicate the growth of the global economy will occur from now on, even after the Creation is ravaged and its frangible climate destabilized by unbridled overproduction, unchecked overconsumption and unregulated overpopulation activities of the human species.
It seems to me that the financial system of the economic powerbrokers is collapsing like a "house of cards" and the real economy of the family of humanity is threatened. Experts in political economy are saying internally inconsistent and contradictory things. Communications about financials and the economy are generally confused and in disarray. Confidence and trust in the operating systems of finance and the global economy have been undermined by the invention of dodgy financial instruments and unsustainable business models as well as by the promulgation of con games and Ponzi schemes. Transparency, accountability and honesty in business activities have been largely vanquished. A great economic system is being undone by con artists, gamblers and cheats. In such circumstances, does the manmade colossus we call the global political economy remind you in some ways of a modern Tower of Babel?
Is the use of hate speech the only way to defend the "Economic Colossus"? The babblings of some people lead me to think so.
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
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dobermanmacleod Posted 7:27 pm
02 Dec 2008
"Few seem to realise that the present IPCC models predict almost unanimously that by 2040 the average summer in Europe will be as hot as the summer of 2003 when over 30,000 died from heat. By then we may cool ourselves with air conditioning and learn to live in a climate no worse than that of Baghdad now. But without extensive irrigation the plants will die and both farming and natural ecosystems will be replaced by scrub and desert. What will there be to eat? The same dire changes will affect the rest of the world and I can envisage Americans migrating into Canada and the Chinese into Siberia but there may be little food for any of them." --Dr James Lovelock's lecture to the Royal Society, 29 Oct. '07
NASA's top climate scientist, James Hansen, says that the release of methane clathrates from permafrost regions and beneath the seabed will unleash powerful feedback forces that could produce runaway climate change that cannot be controlled - the so-called methane time bomb - a prediction of radical environmental transformation far worse than the worst-case scenarios theorised by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Current climate models don't take into consideration melting methane hydrate emissions, which will soon overwhelm any cuts we make:
There is an area six times the size of Germany containing about 540 billion tons of carbon off the Siberian coast. That submarine permafrost is perilously close to thawing. Three to 12 kilometers from the coast the sea sediment is just below freezing. The permafrost has grown porous, there is a loss of rigor in the frozen sea floor, and the surrounding seawater is highly oversaturated with solute methane.
"If the Siberian (submarine) permafrost-seal thaws completely and all the stored gas escapes, the methane content of the planet's atmosphere would increase twelve fold. The result would be catastrophic global warming." --"A Storehouse of Greenhouse Gases Is Opening in Siberia," Spiegel, 17 April '08
Such powerful truth has an equal and opposite social reaction. People fear what they don't understand. God bless Dr Hansen and Mr Bloom, they may become martyrs trying to prevent a massive natural cull of humanity.
"The alternative (to geoengineering) is the acceptance of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself but in the hot state." --Dr James Lovelock, August 2008
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christophersj Posted 3:27 am
03 Dec 2008
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