Last Friday NASA climate specialist James Hansen, whose models on the earth’s climate sounded an early warning on the dangers of carbon emissions, was arrested for trespassing on the property of a major coal polluter in West Virginia. Elizabeth Kolbert, who penned an excellent profile of Hansen in a recent New Yorker, lends her thoughts to the arrest; and Dot Earth provides more details on the arrest.

What’s interesting about Hansen is that, based on Kolbert’s profile and other articles I have read about him, he is not an alarmist. He’s just an incredibly good scientist. Like most of his calling, he has a typically shy demeanor, and his more recent public activities of speaking out, fighting with the BushAdmin, appealing to Obama, and protesting are all out of character. So I drew the above caricature of him with some reservation, as he’s not a shouting type in real life. Call it artistic license, I guess.

Oh, and, yeah, I’m back. I completed my work projects — including an animation you can view here — and can return to a regular schedule of cranking out angry political cartoons. Next one is on Thursday. See ya then.

Tags: climate change, coal, environment, global warming, James Hansen, science, strip mining

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under In Contempt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.