Climate change roundup – Hansen challenges Big Oil, cataracts, EU pollution

NASA’s James Hanson, the prophet of global warming, says Big Oil is using tactics taken from Big Tobacco to mislead the public.

“Whats become clear to me in the past several years is that both the executive branch and the legislative branch are strongly influenced by special fossil fuel interests,” he said, referring to the providers of coal, oil and natural gas and the energy industry that burns them.

In a recent survey of what concerns people, global warming ranked 25th.

“The industry is misleading the public and policy makers about the cause of climate change. And that is analogous to what the cigarette manufacturers did. They knew smoking caused cancer, but they hired scientists who said that was not the case.” …

While he recognizes that he has stepped outside the traditional role of scientists as researchers rather than as public policy advocates, he says he does so because “in this particular situation we’ve reached a crisis.”

The policy makers, “the people who need to know are ignorant of the actual status of the matter, and the gravity of the matter, and most important, the urgency of the matter,” he charged.

“It’s analogous to an engineer who sees that there’s a flaw in the space shuttle before it is to be launched. You don’t have any choice. You have to say something. That’s really all that I'm doing,” he explained.

Actually, as he has at times before, I think Hansen is being too generous to BushCo officials. They’re not ignorant. They’re willing denialists, and there’s no other way to put it.

Meanwhile, WWF is criticizing EU carbon trading.

Power companies in just five EU nations could reap windfall profits of up to 71 billion euros over five years thanks to Europe's emissions trading scheme, the green group WWF claimed Monday.

It said the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) gives no incentive to move away from the most polluting coal-fired power stations and warned that Poland and other eastern European members were lobbying against a planned overhaul of the system after 2012.

Up until that time, EU polluting permits are given away for free; they’re supposed to be sold after that.

Interestingly, 2012 is when the current Kyoto Treaty expires. The EU isn’t a babe in the woods.

And, climate change may cause more cataracts. Australian doctors think it could also increase some respiratory diseases.