But what about this version of Hansen?
Scenario C?
CO2 emissions reduced to year 2000 levels.
As can be seen in that little box in the corner, CO2 emission growth has only
increased.
Conclusion: Hansen does not belong in the proponent's toolbox.
I was at a colloquium yesterday, watching a
scientist from the U of Chicago, tell us all about his work in search of Dark Matter.
Using an elaborate setup, deep underground at SNOLAB (eh...) "the finest underground facility IN THE WORLD", he and his team have looked for reactions of WIMPs with liquified Xenon (they make gas bubbles accompanied by sound,
theoretically). As it stands, his intuition is telling him they are on a wild goose chase and believes he's going to spend the rest of his career just calibrating the experiment
. The poor guy is literally looking at statistical pimples in data and desperately trying to prove they exist as a unique third branch.
There was also an entertaining debate in the Q&A between him and probably the biggest bad-ass in Canadian particle physics over the subject of how trivial his detection threshold 'success' was in comparison to the sensitivity of the ATLAS collider. I should have whipped out my camera for that exchange. It was funny...
Yet, despite all of that, positive results for industry have come out of their research. They had to build their own piezoelectric acoustic sensors to literally
listen for these supposed WIMP collisions. As it turns out, these devices happen to be useful as general environmental sensors due to their
extreme fidelity.
$$$!!!
KACHING!!!$$$
So the moral here is, even though one has to potentially face the conclusion
they are wrong, it doesn't mean some positive externality won't result.
Or more contextually stated, even though alarmists/deniers may have to admit their error, their work and infrastructure will reap dividends in other fields of study for years to come.
But that's science.