I just made the following comments on the NYT dot.earth blog:

James Hansen’s analogy lacks any semblance of science. He states: “If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.”

But what does that mean? How many “uncountable” species his he talking about? How many “species” fit in a boxcar…and how fast is the train moving?

Per Wikipedia, the 2006 International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) “Red List” of threatened species contains the following information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUCN_Red_List_of_Threatened_Species

“From the species evaluated as a whole, 16,118 were considered threatened. Of these, 7,725 were animals, 8,390 were plants, and three were lichen and mushrooms.”

Of those 16,118 species considered “threatened” in the 2006 IUCN Red List, how many is James Hansen predicting will go extinct in the next 100 years if we do not act to reduce CO2 emissions, and how many is he will go extinct if we do act?

Science is all about making quantifiable predictions that can be shown to be false or true. “Boxcars” of species isn’t science. Absent any quantitative and verifiable predictions from Dr. Hansen in this matter (both with and without actions to reduce CO2 emissions), he should simply be ignored.