Don't miss this: Several fraudulent claims by James Hansen, along with this stunning admission about climate models: "it is a valid criticism-that there is a lot of physics that we may not even have in the models, and that which we do have in may be inaccurate"

House of Commons - Uncorrected Evidence - HC 60

Q3 Chair: To what extent is there consensus in the scientific community as to what constitutes dangerous climate change?
Professor Hansen: If you ask an authoritative scientific body-like our National Academy of Sciences or your Royal Society, or any of the geophysical unions or meteorological unions-there is a consensus that warming of 2°C or more would certainly be dangerous. There is not disagreement among the relevant scientific community. You can always find a few people who disagree, but in general there is consensus on that.
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Another fundamental piece of evidence-which, again, is a recent measurement and a very valuable one-is that we can now measure the earth’s energy imbalance. What we expect is, as you add a gas like carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, it is like putting a blanket on the planet, because it absorbs heat radiation and that reduces the heat radiation to space. Therefore you get an imbalance, with more energy coming in from the sun than going out in heat radiation. That is very clear; from the physical processes we expect that.
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Q5 Caroline Lucas: Thank you. Yesterday there were leaked papers-which I am sure you have probably seen-which appear to show that the UK is rejecting an EU proposal to classify oil from tar sands as highly polluting through the Fuel Quality Directive....
Professor Hansen: I would like to make clear why this is extremely important. It is based on very fundamental physics of the climate system, which there is absolutely no dispute about. We understand what we call the carbon cycle very well. When we burn fossil fuels and put the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that carbon dioxide will stay in the surface climate system for millennia. That is the problem.

We know, mainly from the history of the earth, how sensitive the climate system is to changes in the amount of carbon dioxide in the surface climate system. We have records over hundreds of millions of years of how the climate has changed over time and in response to changes in the boundary conditions, which include the atmospheric composition and the surface properties of the planet. That is our best measure of how sensitive the climate system is when you give it time to respond. That is where we come up with the limits on how much we can put into the atmosphere without guaranteeing huge impacts.

When we look at how much carbon there is in the conventional fossil fuels-that means oil, gas and coal-we realise that we cannot burn all those fossil fuels without going way beyond what we have agreed is a dangerous limit. In fact, if we burned all fossil fuels, we would head the planet back to the ice-free state, with sea levels 70 metres higher, 250 feet higher. We realised that we cannot do that.
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Professor Hansen: Five-year forecasts for global temperature are extremely speculative....We know there is more energy coming in so, on a decadal timescale, we know the planet is going to get warmer. We can say it with a high degree of confidence, not 100% certainty.
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To summarise, we can confidently say that the next decade is going to be warmer than this decade. This decade was warmer than the one before. That has been true now since 1970-each decade has been warmer, and, because of the rapid emissions growth in CO2, that is going to continue to be the case until we slow down our emissions of fossil fuels.
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Of course, there are interesting things that happen on short timescales, and we like to understand those, but it doesn’t change our overall understanding that humans have now become the dominant driving force for climate change on decadal timescales.

Professor Hansen: Right, so we need the thoughtful conservatives to understand that now. We cannot wait for Mother Nature to make it obvious. There is some progress in that. For example, George Shultz, who was the Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, has agreed to be a public spokesman [Did someone ask him to be a public spokesman?  If so, who asked, and is he being paid?]  for an approach of dealing with this problem that would be acceptable to conservatives-and, frankly, would be more effective than what the liberals are offering-and that is a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
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...The climate models often get criticised-and it is a valid criticism-that there is a lot of physics that we may not even have in the models, and that which we do have in may be inaccurate.
...The IPCC had prior estimates. The last report was that sea level this century would only go up a fraction of a metre. The new report is probably going to estimate more like a metre, but these are educated guesses.
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...The water off the United States’ east coast was about 2°C or 3°C warmer this past year. When the category 1 hurricane Sandy came up, it should have petered out before it got to New York, but, because the water was so warm, it stayed a category 1 hurricane and then combined with a frontal storm and moved inland. Whether that warming was a consequence of a human effect is unclear.
...Incidentally, on a per-capita basis, the United Kingdom is number one in responsibility because the industrial revolution began here. If you integrate over time, the United States is number two, Germany is number three and China is way down.