"We’ve already reached the dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," says James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
This "tipping point" is, according to Hansen, 385 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere.
Hansen and those who support the idea of AGW, or anthropocentric global warming, allege that this 100-parts-per-million increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is responsible for "global" warming, although there have been dissenting voices raised among scientists concerning whether the observed warming in some parts of the planet is a "global" phenomenon, in addition to what the exact effects of global warming–or what some prefer to call "climate change"–really are.
According AGW theorists, mankind’s industrial activity since about the mid-1700s and especially since 1940 is what has caused what some scientists would actually characterize as the small increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.
While cited by AGW supporters as the most dangerous of the "greenhouse gasses", or gasses that absorb and hold outgoing infrared radiation in the atmosphere and allegedly cause the dangerous global warming, scientists have noted that carbon dioxide’s presence in the atmosphere is next to nothing compared compared with that of water vapor.
Water vapor makes up 95% of the Earth’s troposphere and is also considered to be a "greenhouse gas".
Hansen blames big business such as major oil companies for deliberately misleading the public, a good portion of which does not believe global warming or climate change should be on a top 10 list of priority problems in need of redress.
"The problem is that 90 percent of energy is fossil fuels. And that is such a huge business, it has permeated our government. 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," he insists.
However, there were many scientists who worked for the government as well as for private industries outside of the tobacco industry in the 1950s and early 1960s who did not believe that cigarette smoking could be directly linked to any cancers. This was actually due to the fact that animal testing of hypotheses about tobacco linked to carcinogens could not—and still cannot—induce tobacco-linked cancers in lab mice, which were used as the basis for the study.
This journalist has previously written on serious problems that many thinkers on the matter have with the AGW theory, including the fact that global warming, at least for now, stopped after 1998.
This past summer, when I wrote on NASA being forced to admit that 1934, and not 1998, was the hottest year ever recorded, I quoted H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) as saying:
"Much of the current global warming fear has been driven by Hansen’s pronouncements, and he routinely claims to have been censored by the Bush administration for his views on warming. Now that NASA, without fanfare, has cleaned up his mess, Hansen has been silent — I guess we can chalk this up to self-censorship."