Say Anything Blog

Not just any climate scientist either, but rather the climate scientist.  The guy who who first “sounded the alarm” about global warming before Congress twenty years ago.

Good grief...

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.

Reminiscent of Galileo being put under trial by the Catholic Church for spreading rumors about the earth going around the sun instead of the sun going around the earth, no? 

Much like the Catholic Church of old, the Church of Global Warming will brook no dissent.

If oil companies are spreading disinformation about climate change they should certainly be called out on that.  But before that happens, I think a burden of proof needs to be met and that burden doesn’t just consist of doubting the theory of anthropomorphic global warming.  If anything, Hansen should be asked to substantiate his theories about climate change to a point beyond a reasonable doubt before anyone is put on trial for crimes against humanity for doubting those theories.

Scientists are just discovering that acid rain, for instance, was happening on earth hundreds of millions of years before humans even existed.  And we’ve also known for decades now that the earth has gone through several warming and cooling phases throughout its history.

Given that, how can Hansen be so certain that the current global warming trend is being caused by humans and not some perfectly natural global trend that is beyond our control?