NASA scientist James Hansen [pictured] is at it again. This time in an open letter to US president elect Barack Obama he calls old-style coal plants “factories of death” and condemns Australia’s reliance on the resource. In the letter he writes:
“Australia exports coal and sets atmospheric carbon dioxide goals so large as to guarantee destruction of much of the life on the planet,”
Hansen’s claim defies logic as Brendan Pearson points out .
Minerals Council of Australia deputy chief executive Brendan Pearson last night dismissed Professor Hansen’s comments as “characteristically long on hyperbole and short on facts”.
“If Australia disappeared off the face of the earth, our carbon footprint would be replaced by one country, China, within three weeks,” Mr Pearson said.
“As to his claim about the targets that Australia has set, in part that’s for the Government to respond to, but in our view, a 20 per cent reduction in Australia’s emissions by 2020 would reduce global emissions by 0.2per cent.
Hansen’s letter is of course nothing more than his own personal eco fundamental lobbying. He did exactly the same thing last year when on the 27th of March he wrote an open letter to new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Here is part of what he wrote:
“Global climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to …. progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise, shifting of climatic zones with extermination of many animal and plant species, reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but also heavier rains and floods, and stronger storms driven by latent heat, including tropical storms, tornados and thunderstorms.”
Since that time temperatures world wide have continued to dip, sea levels have stopped rising, the US just completed another low activity Hurricane season, water supplies in Brisbane have gone from 19% to 46%, the drought has eased across most of Australia and on and on it goes.
How does Hansen have any credibility left with the worlds media, let alone world leaders?
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