A CLOSER LOOK AT CLIMATE CHANGE (PART 2)

THE EVANGELICAL ZEAL OF ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING PROPONENTS 

Dr. James E. Hansen, 69, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), is one of the world’s most passionate advocate of apocalyptic climate change, who, with messianic fervor, proselytizes aggressively against the evil black demon rock, coal, and it’s use as a fuel in the generation of electricity. According to Dr. Hansen, “death trains” are crisscrossing the country transporting coal to power-generation facilities nationwide where carbon dioxide effluent saturates the atmosphere and threatens all life on Earth. "Coal" says Hansen "is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on the planet".  Pretty strong stuff. Early in Barack Obama's first term as President, Dr. Hansen issued a dire warning to the new president  – 
"We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead".

Wow! Pretty strong stuff. Pretty dire, indeed!

Despite Dr. Hansen’s hyperbole, he has a devoted following of atmospheric researchers, politicians, and media types who hang on his words, do his bidding, and trumpet his proclamations. One of his most devoted disciples is Al Gore, who consulted extensively with Hansen in the making of his Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

Dr. Hansen holds a PhD. in Astrophysics and is a high ranking NASA scientist specializing in atmospheric science. He got his start studying the greenhouse effect on Venus as part of his Doctoral Dissertation at the University of Iowa in the 1960s, and published several papers on the subject in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

When the Solar System was young, Venus, Earth, and Mars all were thought to have had thick atmospheres, oceans consisting of liquid water, and relatively moderate temperatures that allowed water to exist in its liquid state. The oceans on Venus and Mars came from the same place as Earth’s oceans – fusillades of comets and icy planetesimals that pummeled the four terrestrial planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, during the Late Heavy Bombardment period some four billion years ago.

Mercury, being too close to the Sun, never retained any of its water - any water left over from the icy planetesimals that survived their trip to Mercury boiled off into space immediately.
As for the Earth, it orbits the Sun at just the right distance, the so-called Goldilocks Zone, where the temperature, currently at a worldwide average 14° C (57° F) is at a temperature where most of the water on our planet is in liquid form. Mars wasn’t so lucky – because of its small size it cooled off to a tectonically inactive state after a few hundred million years and it wasn’t able to hold on to its volatile atmospheric gasses, like nitrogen and methane (a greenhouse gas that, if it was present in substantial quantities, originally helped to keep Mars warmer). Another ramification of Mars' small size and early interior inactivation was that it lost its magnetosphere and thus lost its protection against energetic particles born by the solar wind. Constituents of the Martian atmosphere would have been dissociated into ionic moieties and carried off by the solar wind. So Mars exists today as a cold, dry, inhospitable desert world. As for Venus, it was too close to the sun to hold on to its liquid water forever. Venus receives twice as much irradiance from the sun as Earth, and even in the early Solar System when the Sun was only about 70% as hot as it is now, Venus still received 40% more irradiance four billion years ago than Earth does now. Before long, copious amounts of water vapor - a potent greenhouse gas - evaporated out of Venus' oceans and seas and saturated the atmosphere. As the planet got hotter and hotter over time the oceans reached a  boil - and eventually boiled away. As the oceans boiled, the steam and water vapor molecules that had been in the oceans migrated into the upper reaches of Venus' atmosphere and underwent dissociation (became ionized) because of the intense ultraviolet radiation coming from the Sun. The hydrogen components of the water molecules sailed off into interplanetary space on the solar wind, along with some of the oxygen – whereas the rest of the oxygen was taken up by Venus’ crust. Meanwhile, as the oceans were boiling away in the searing heat, CO2 was being baked out of the crust and entering the atmosphere as a major constituent. Eventually, the water was gone and all that was left was CO2. CO2 is a much weaker greenhouse gas than water vapor (about one-fifth as potent), but by the time all the water was gone the damage had been done. There was so much CO2 in Venus’ atmosphere that the atmospheric pressure at the surface is ninety-three times that of Earth – 1,367 pounds per square inch! That’s the same pressure you would experience at a depth of over 3,000 feet in the ocean. And how hot is the temperature at the surface? A toasty 460° C (860° F)?



Dr. Hansen did study Venus in the Late 1960s and early 1970s, and contributed a great deal to contemporary knowledge of the planet, but most of what we now know about Venus has come from space probes that have visited the place. The upshot of this accumulated knowledge is that water vapor – a potent greenhouse gas – created the original greenhouse effect on Venus and that CO2 – a weak greenhouse gas – was a usurping opportunist. But that’s not what Hansen and other alarmist climate scientists want you to hear.


His position is that what happened billions of years ago on Venus resulting in the greenhouse effect that made it such a brutally hot, hellish place is now happening here on Earth, or will happen soon if we don't shut down coal-fired power generation facilities - like - yesterday! He’s assumed a prominent position at the forefront of scientific research on the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the warming of our home planet and carries a very large megaphone. Thousands of credentialed scientists worldwide, some at the top of their respective fields, are participating in this endeavor. But whether or not the burning of coal is ruining the planet is still an open question from a scientific point of view, according to many other atmospheric scientists with impeccable credentials of their own. On a broader level, human activity, whether it’s the burning of fossil fuels, the runaway urbanization of global real estate, the decimation of tropical rain forests, or natural processes may, or may not be the cause of global warming, if, in fact, global warming is really happening. From the available evidence and the mainstream interpretation of that evidence, the Earth does appear to be heating up. Whether or not it’s being caused by burning coal to generate electric power, or by some other factors, is being hotly debated by climate scientists throughout the world. The next installment of this series will explore some competing outlooks on climate change, its causes, and the degree to which it’s happening. Stay tuned.