CORCORAN … The minister vs. the scientist,

It takes a rare politician to stand up and take shots at a climate scientist who’s the darling of the global warmist movement. Even more uncommon is to see a politician take on such a climate scientist—and win the contest. And so unfolded events last week when Joe Oliver, Canada’s natural resources minister, flew into Washington to build support for the Keystone XL pipeline. Before speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Oliver pointedly took aim at James Hansen, the former NASA scientist and one of the godfathers of climate catastrophism. Instead of a gooey marshmallow capitulation on the issue of climate change, Mr. Oliver pointedly questioned Mr. Hansen’s tendency to make claims that are at least exaggerations and often outright beyond-the-fringe.

Mr. Oliver said Mr. Hansen was “crying wolf ” and, among other things, said this: With respect to James Hansen, recently with NASA, I mean, he was the one who said, I think four years ago, that if we go ahead with the development of the oil sands it’s “game over for the planet.” It’s frankly nonsense. I don’t know why he said it, but he should be ashamed of having said it. It’s one-one thousandth of global emissions. Coal fired electricity in the U.S. is well over 30 times that. I wonder why the focus on an area when there are 999 more important areas to focus on. Quite frankly, I think that kind of exaggerated rhetoric, that kind of hyperbole, doesn’t do the cause any good at all. People are sensible. Americans and Canadians are logical people. When they are presented with predictions four years ago that in four years we are doomed – and we’re not — it frankly undercuts an issue that is very important.

Mr. Oliver said Mr. Hansen is using “exaggerated rhetoric and someone should call him on that.” And so Mr. Oliver did, a move that did not go over well in warmist circles but, when it came to the facts, scored major points against the scientist who has a bit of a history of extreme

Joe Oliver challenges James Hansen’s exaggerations and claims

statements on the climate. Back in 2007 he was advised by the warmist activists at desmogblog that he should “probably stay away from Holocaust metaphors and analogies, PERIOD.” That came after he sort of equated climate change with the Holocaust and said that crashing glaciers “serve as a Krystal Nacht, and wake us up to the inhumane consequences of averting our eyes.”

Mr. Hansen has dropped the genocide analogies, but he’s still pumping out extreme metaphors and wild claims, as in this New York Times commentary last year: “If Canada proceeds [with oil sands development], it’s game over for the climate.” He added that “If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would reach levels higher than the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at last 50 feet higher than it is now.”

In calling these and other claims exaggerations, Mr. Oliver took on one of the highest profile Keystone opponents. In response, Mr. Hansen called Mr. Oliver and Canada’s Conservatives a “Neanderthal government on this issue.”

That’s what Mr. Hansen said in an interview with Evan Solomon broadcast Saturday on CBC Radio. To his great credit, Mr. Solomon kept pressing the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute to respond to Mr. Oliver’s charges. After a string of repeated questions aimed at getting Mr. Hansen to explain his claim that the oil sands spelled “game over for the climate,” Mr. Solomon eventually gave up.

It turns out that the claim is based on the idea that if all the oil sands were developed, and all the shale oil and all the unconventional oil in the world were developed, then the world would eventually slide into some new Pliocene catastrophe. “The last time the world was two degrees warmer, the sea level was…20 feet higher.”

The 20-feet claim is less than the 50 feet he had claimed in his gameover commentary. That’s the kind of extreme prediction Mr. Hansen likes to deliver: If we build Keystone, we’re “opening the spigot” on a carbon-emissions explosion that will put most of the world’s coastlines under water.

Mr. Hansen’s economics is not much better. His pat solute on to carbon emissions is a “modest” carbon tax that starts $10 a barrel this year and rises $10 each year for the next 10 years, thereby doubling the price of oil. In his CBC interview, Mr. Hansen hailed British Columbia’s carbon tax as a model.

As carbon taxes go, the B.C. version is a non-event. It has done nothing to curb energy use, in part because the economics of energy does not follow the simplistic version followed by Mr. Hansen. Putting a tax on carbon does not guarantee a comparable reduction in fossil fuel. The claims of success in B.C. are wrong: The market price of fuel has not gone up as a result of the tax, and no conclusion can be drawn from the experiment.

We already knew Mr. Hansen is given to exaggeration. By touting a carbon tax, Mr. Hansen is now proving to be not much of an economist. Score a win for Joe Oliver.