Rural Utilities Service Funds Smart Grid, Noted Physicist Jim Hansen Correlates Climate Changes to Global Warming

The USDA has announced that rural electric cooperative utilities in 10 states will receive loans to install smart grid technologies and make improvements to generation and transmission facilities. Examples of funding include a $102.8 million guaranteed loan to the Jackson Electric Membership Corporation in Jefferson, Georgia, to build and improve over 850 miles of distribution line and make other system improvements. The loan also includes $7.2 million in smart grid projects. 

Jim Hansen, a noted NASA Physicist and climatologist, has heretofore refrained from direct cause and effect of climate change.  However, in a peer-reviewed paper, which has been submitted to a leading Scientific Journal and made available to Time.com, Hansen indicates that may be changing. According to the paper Hansen states that scientists can now state “with a high degree of confidence” that some extremely high temperatures are in fact caused by global warming, simply because they occur much more frequently than they used to.  In the paper, the authors show that extreme outliers of more than three standard deviations above the mean temperature covered between six and thirteen percent of the globe during the years 2003 to 2008. If they were normally distributed and similar to the climactic record, that should have been just a 0.1-to-0.2 percent frequency of an extreme heat event.