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Climate expert sees drought, floods for Texas
Climate expert says drought, flooding threaten Texas
By Eric Berger | October 25, 2007
Photo By Mayra Beltran/ChronicleClimate researcher James Hansen expressed concern Wednesday about an accusation that the White House diluted Senate testimony on climate change. The White House has denied the accusation.
A top climate scientist warned Wednesday that Texas faces a dual threat from floods and drought if global warming is left unchecked.
"Texas is in the line of fire for double-barreled climate impacts," said Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "What we said in the 1980s, and is beginning to come true now, is that both ends of the hydrological cycle get intensified by global warming."
A warmer climate increases evaporation, he said. It both sucks moisture from the ground, intensifying drought, and increases atmospheric humidity, which causes more rain to fall during extreme events.
Hansen gained attention in the 1980s by testifying to congressional committees about the perils of global warming and again in 2005 and 2006 by claiming that NASA administrators sought to influence his public statements about the causes of climate change. Because of this, he is arguably the world's most well-known climate researcher.
On Wednesday, Hansen again spoke out on a political issue. He expressed concerns about an Associated Press report that the White House had significantly edited a draft of testimony prepared for a Senate hearing on the impact of climate change.
The White House denied that it had "watered down" the congressional testimony that Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had given Tuesday to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
"The whole idea of democracy that our Founding Fathers had was that the public is educated, and that they are informed honestly," Hansen said.
'Offices of propaganda'He said the White House review of statements by government scientists testifying to Congress does no good, adding that the unneeded oversight exists elsewhere in government as well.
"The public affairs offices have become offices of propaganda," he said. "They should be under professional civil servants, not political appointees who change each time a new election occurs"
Hansen said it remains possible — and not entirely painful — for nations to tackle global warming.
The most important step, he said, would be to prohibit the construction of coal-fired power plants until technology is developed to capture carbon dioxide produced during the coal-burning process.
Coal remains a popular energy source with electricity providers, because it is a cheap source of power and the United States has abundant supplies. However, coal burning is also the worst producer of the greenhouse gases that, scientists say, are causing the planet to warm.
A second step, Hansen said, would be to gradually adopt a fee for carbon dioxide emissions. Although this would raise the price of energy, he said, it would spur companies to develop alternative energy sources such as wind and solar.
'More extreme events'Hansen declined to blame global warming directly for recent disasters, such as the present wildfires in Southern California or hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005.
"There is a connection only in a statistical sense," he said. "You can't attribute individual events to global warming, but you can look at the statistics. We expect more droughts and fires with global warming.
"And another thing, physics tells us that storms which are driven by latent heat will tend to get stronger, will tend to have more extreme events. Storms driven by latent heat include thunderstorms, tornadoes and tropical storms."