Climate expert says drought ,., flooding threatens Texas

A top climate scientist warned Wednesday that Texas faces a dual threat from floods and drought if global warming is left unchecked.

James Hansen, in Houston to speak before the Progressive Forum on Wednesday night, said predictions made two decades ago about the effects of a warming world are now beginning to come true.

"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.