James Hansen's Political Science
By Investor's Business Daily
Investors Business Daily | Friday, March 06, 2009

NASA's James Hansen leads a protest against a District of Columbia power
plant in the middle of a snowstorm. Meanwhile, a scientist fired by Al Gore
says we need to emit more carbon dioxide, not less.

Speaking before Bill Clinton's Global Initiative in New York City last Nov.
2, Gore advocated the concept of civil disobedience to fight climate change.
"I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience
to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon
capture and sequestration," Gore said to loud applause.

Following Gore's lead, a group called Capitol Climate Action organized a
protest that took place Monday at the 99-year-old Capitol Power Plant in
southeast Washington, D.C. Its Web site invited fellow warm-mongers to "mass
civil disobedience at the coal-fired" plant that heats and cools the
hallowed halls of Congress.

The site features Gore's quote as well as a video by Hansen, head of NASA's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading global-warming activist,
urging attendance at the event. The storm that hit the Northeast and dropped
upwards of three inches of snow on the nation's capitol should not
discourage those attending the global- warming protest, he says on the
video.

Hansen has called such coal-fired facilities "factories of death" and
considers climate-change skeptics guilty of "high crimes against humanity
and nature." In the video he says what "has become clear from the science is
that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very
different planet" and that the "only practical way to solve the problem is
to phase out the biggest source of carbon - and that's coal."

What is clear is that Dr. Hansen has had problems with the facts. Last Nov.
10 he announced from his scientific perch that October had been the hottest
on record, and we were doomed. Except that it wasn't true.

Scores of temperature records used in the computations from Russia and
elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the
previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running,
something your high-school science teacher wouldn't allow.

Despite Dr. Hansen's hysterical animus toward carbon, the fact is that CO2
is still a mere 0.038% of the gaseous layer that surrounds the Earth, and
only 3% of that thin slice is released by man. According to Dr. William
Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton University, current atmospheric
CO2 levels are inadequate in historical terms and even higher levels "will
be good for mankind."

Happer, who was fired by Gore at the Department of Energy in 1993 for
disagreeing with the vice president on the effects of ozone to humans and
plant life, disagrees with both Gore and Hansen on the issue of the impact
of man-made carbon emissions. He testified before the Senate's Environment
and Public Works Committee (EPW) on Feb. 25 that CO2 levels are in fact at a
historical low.

"Many people don't realize that over geological time, we're really in a CO2
famine now. Almost never has CO2 . . . been as low as it has been in the
Holocene (geologic epoch) - 280 (parts per million) - that's unheard of,"
said Happer. He notes the earth and humanity did just fine when CO2 levels
were much higher.

"You know, we evolved as a species in those times, when CO2 levels were
three to four times what they are now," Happer said. "And, the oceans were
fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it's baffling to me that . . .
we're so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started."

"Jim Hansen has gone off the deep end here," one of Hansen's former
supervisors, Dr. John Theon, said. Theon, a former senior NASA atmospheric
scientist, rebuked Hansen last month in a letter to EPW. "Why he has not
been fired, I do not understand," Theon said. Neither do we.

Critics contend that Hansen's involvement in the protests is a violation of
the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from engaging in
partisan political activity. If he wants to agitate for policy changes, let
him do it on his own time and on his own dime. The science can speak for
itself.