That's the opinion of climate hysteric Jim Hansen of NASA who cooked the books on a study showing the rise of temperatures over the years.
Obama, Hansen says, must dramatically alter the economy of the US "as an example" for the rest of the world" and do away with "cap and trade" replacing it with draconian "carbon taxes."
Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.
Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global warming posed any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to take a lead as the world's greatest carbon emitter and the planet's largest economy. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal - the world's worst carbon emitter.
Hansen - head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and winner of the WWF's top conservation award - first warned Earth was in danger from climate change in 1988 and has been the victim of several unsuccessful attempts by the White House administration of George Bush to silence his views.
Hansen's institute monitors temperature fluctuations at thousands of sites round the world, data that has led him to conclude that most estimates of sea level rises triggered by rising atmospheric temperatures are too low and too conservative. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says a rise of between 20cm and 60cm can be expected by the end of the century.
Let us follow this scientific quack's logic. Carbon levels are "already too high" to prevent "runaway" greenhouse effect but we should destroy western industrialized civilization anyway?
The US should commit economic suicide by "leading the way" on reducing our emissions without getting similar reductions from the #1 emitter of CO2 on the planet - China? And we should impose a moratorium on building coal plants here while China builds 2 a month?
Hansen has proved that he is willing to falsify data to influence people to subscribe to his personal views. He has an agenda to promote, not scientific studies.
It is this kind of hysteria that gives science a bad name. Hansen should go back to making up data. He actually does less harm as a cheat than he does as a spokesman for the Obama Administration on global warming.
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