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If the United States wants to avoid falling like the Roman Empire, it must avoid “overconsumption” and distribute resources equally, according to a study funded by NASA. “The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent,” reads the NASA-funded report published in the Ecological Economics journal. “Two important features seem to appear across societies that have collapsed,” the study adds. “The stretching of resources...

At a hearing Thursday on the Keystone oil pipeline, James Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before Congress that 100 percent of the proceeds from a proposed carbon tax should go to the public, because liberals will try to use part of it to “make the government bigger.” “An important point is that such legislation I think needs to be introduced by conservatives, because I’m afraid liberals will try to take part of the money to make the government bigger. Not one dime should go to the government. 100 percent should go to the public,”...

As ugly as this was, it is worse than it seems. Briffa’s trees did match Hansen, 1981. The next graph overlays Briffa on Hansen, 1981 northern latitude temperatures. The match was almost perfect.

A noted climatologist and recently-retired NASA research chief has entered the EU’s energy policy debate, with a warning that any re-industrialization strategy that increases fossil fuels use can only be short-term, irrational and economically wasteful. In a wide-ranging interview with EurActiv, James Hansen branded the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) “ineffectual” and flawed, and accused energy firms of preferring government bribes over investments in clean technology. Hansen, whose Congressional testimony on climate change in 1988 first popularized the issue in the United States, also said that approving the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to bring tar sands fuel from Canada to...

Climate Change: The man who once compared coal trains to Nazi boxcars headed to crematoria leaves government service to fight what he calls the "pipeline to disaster" and promote his brand of climate quackery. In 2007, Dr. James Hansen testified before the Iowa Utilities Board not in his capacity as a government employee but, in his words, "as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pa., on behalf of the planet, of life on Earth, including all species." Hansen told the board, "If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains...

......................Organized science has become another special interest group lobbying for government favors. The temptation to present special-interest appeals as urgent public necessities has become not just irresistible, but commonplace. It is well-known that global warming skeptics are shut out...... ....The true believers in the threat of global warming use "education" and "communication" as euphemisms for suppressing and marginalizing dissenters. This crowd is strongly tempted by totalitarian solutions. The leading advocate of global warming fear, Dr. James Hansen, wants to put people who don't toe the line on trial for crimes against humanity. Peter Gleick, a scientist, a well-known advocate of...

This is sure to get some enviros in a tizzy.Fukushima I nuclear power plant before the 2011 explosion. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) From Chemical and Engineering News of the American Chemical Society:Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It CausesClimate Change: Study estimates that nuclear energy leads to substantially fewer pollution-related deaths and greenhouse gas emissions compared with fossil-fuel sourcesBy Mark SchropeUsing nuclear power in place of fossil-fuel energy sources, such as coal, has prevented some 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths globally and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes a study. The researchers also find that nuclear energy...

I checked first, thinking this was some April Fools joke, it appears legit. (h/t to Tom Nelson and Skiphil)Climate Alarmist Jim Hansen leaving NASA on Wed. to devote himself to legal and political activism:Hansen retiring from NASA to press legal and activist efforts At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted...

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! NASA’s James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a controversial and highly vocal voice of alarm about the planet’s changing climate, will retire as the director of the space institute, NASA announced Tuesday -- and plans to immediately sue his former employer. Hansen will step down from his $180,000 a year position to join a number of lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments for their failure to police industry over man’s effect on the climate, the New York Times reported. Hansen was clearly aware of the irony....

Last Friday, at 3:40 p.m., the State Department released its “Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement” for the highly contentious Keystone XL pipeline, which Canada hopes to build to move its tar sands oil to refineries in the United States. In effect, the statement said there were no environmental impediments that would prevent President Obama from approving the pipeline. Two hours and 20 minutes later, I received a blast e-mail containing a statement by James Hansen, the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA — i.e., NASA’s chief climate scientist. “Keystone XL, if the public were to allow...

James Hansen puts an interesting spin on reports of the ninth warmest year on record 2012 was a kind of glass-half full, glass half-empty year in terms of global temperature.   I. Climate Chief: Don't Worry, We're Still Doomed The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) in-depth analysis of satellite and other forms of climate data ruled the year was the ninth warmest on record.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) independent analysis of ground and sea-based climate stations reported that the year was the tenth warmest on record. The NASA report states that the average global temperature was 58.3 degrees Fahrenheit (14.6...

This week the United Nations begins two weeks of climate talks in Doha, Qatar. The primary goal of these meetings is to draw President Obama into accepting a redistribution plan designed extract money from the U.S. economy in the form of a global warming tax and doling out the cash to Third World nations. "There will be expectations from countries to hear a new voice from the United States," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute in Washington...... [SNIP of information] ...The lame duck Obama administration will likely be all over this...

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week. The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012,there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures. This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose,1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years. The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on...

The amount of floating ice in the Arctic's Bering Sea - which had long been expected to retreat disastrously by climate-Cassandra organisations such as Greenpeace - reached all-time record high levels last month, according to US researchers monitoring the area using satellites. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center announced last week that ice extent in the Bering for the month of March has now been collated and compared, and is the highest seen since records began.

UPDATE: 11:30AM 4/12/12 Predictably, Andrew Revkin from the New York Times joins in with the poo-pooing consensus saying it is “utterly unremarkable ” (yet he writes a article about it – go figure). From Revkin’s shuttered in world of living in the woods (he didn’t even know what the TV show Seinfeld was until I brought it to his attention in Climategate2), that’s probably true, but Andy, here is one of your favorite consensus buzzphrases that can be applied: it is an unprecedented letter. There’s no denying that. – Anthony ==========From the Daily Caller, in my opinion, a load of...

The Obama administration was more vocal about the supposedly dire need to combat climate change toward the beginning of their oh-so-eminent reign, with President Obama out championing the cause at such august events as the U.N. climate conference in 2009. There’s been a bit of a lull in their alarmist-enthusiasm rhetoric in the past year or so (maybe they’ve figured out that concern for climate change is a luxury good during times of economic recession), but it looks like they may be thinking about bringing back the meme to help sell their horrendous energy polices in the run-up to November....

NASA is swiping back at a group of nearly 50 of its former scientists and astronauts who wrote to accuse the space agency of advocating the “extreme” position that global warming is the result of man-made carbon dioxide.In a March 28 letter addressed to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, 49 former employees said the “unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.” But NASA responded on Wednesday by saying they don’t “draw conclusions and issue ‘claims’...

Joint letter from 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts to the current NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidence about global warming.

Looks like another GISS miss, more than a few people are getting fed up with Jim Hansen and Gavin Schmidt and their climate shenanigans. Some very prominent NASA voices speak out in a scathing letter to current NASA administrator Charles Bolden, Jr.. When Chris Kraft, the man who presided over NASA’s finest hour, and the engineering miracle of saving Apollo 13 speaks, people listen. Former NASA scientists, astronauts admonish agency on climate change positionFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEContact: Blanquita Cullum 703-307-9510 bqview at mac.comJoint letter to NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidenceHOUSTON, TX – April 10, 2012.49 former NASA...

March 28, 2012 The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr. NASA Administrator NASA Headquarters Washington, D.C. 20546-0001 Dear Charlie, We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from...