It’s ‘the hottest year on record’, as long as you don’t take its temperature
Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker The Telegraph, 18 December 2010
Much of the data cited to support warmist claims is pure conjecture, says Christopher Booker
We have lately heard much of the claim that 2010 will turn out to have been “the hottest year on record”. No one has done more to promote this belief than Dr James Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), responsible for one of the four main official global temperature records.
As reported by the US blogs Real Science and Watts Up With That, in a post headed “GISS temperatures out of line with the rest of the world”, the GISS record has in recent months been diverging wildly from the others. While three have shown global temperatures dropping sharply, by as much as 0.3C, the GISS figures (based, despite the link to Nasa, on surface temperatures) have shot up by 0.2C.
In a second post (“Hansen’s ‘Hottest Year Ever’ is primarily based on fabricated data”), Real Science demonstrates that the parts of the world which GISS shows to be heating up the most are so short of weather stations that only 25 per cent of the figures are based on actual temperature readings. The rest are simply conjectured by GISS. This is not the first time Dr Hansen’s temperature record has come under expert fire. Three years ago, GISS was forced to revise many of its figures when it was shown that wholesale “adjustments” had been made, revising older temperatures downwards and post-2000 figures upwards.
On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer’s day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.
He wrote later in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989), that “the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders”.
Hansen’s testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.
Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that “Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic”.
This conversion to honesty came too late, however, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train. Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of more than US$10 billion annually.
James Hansen wants us to take a stand on Global Warming
James Hansen wants us to protest against the dangerous carbon dioxide produced from coal.
I wonder if he’ll will be walking/cycling to the protest?
I also wonder what the weather, in Washington D.C, will be like on March 2nd?
Those coal “death trains” have in fact saved millions of lives this winter, Mr Hansen
By the blogowner, honestclimate, February 16, 2009
Oh dear, another alarmist rant from James Hansen:
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has already risen to a dangerous level. The pre-industrial carbon dioxide amount was 280 parts per million (ppm). Humans, by burning coal, oil and gas, have increased this to 385 ppm; it continues to grow by about 2 ppm per year.
The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.
This from the same man who flies half way across the globe in a carbon emitting aircraft to defend those who vandalise coal power plants. The hypocrisy is astounding.
Dr Hansen, if you believe what you preach I challenge you to stop using electricity, stop driving your car, stop flying etc.
And most importantly thank goodness for coal, for the northern hemisphere is experiencing one of its coldest winters in memory. How many millions of lives would have been lost in this exceptionally coldwinter without the heating from coal-generated electricity?
James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic – Says Hansen ‘Embarrassed NASA’, ‘Was Never Muzzled’, & Models ‘Useless’
From Watts Up With That, January 28, 2009
This is something I thought I’d never see. This press release today is from the Senate EPW blog of Jame Inhofe. The scientist making the claims in the headline, Dr. John S. Theon, formerly of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Arlington, Virginia, has a paper here in the AMS BAMS that you may also find interesting. Other papers are available here in Google Scholar. He also worked on the report of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident report and according to that document was a significant contributor to weather forecasting improvements:
The Space Shuttle Weather Forecasting Advisory Panel, chaired by Dr. John Theon, was established by NASA Headquarters to review existing weather support capabilities and plans and to recommend a course of action to the NSTS Program. Included on the panel were representatives from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Air Force, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
For those just joining the climate discussion, Dr. James Hansen is the chief climate scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and is the man who originally raised the alarm on global warming in 1988 in an appearance before congress. He is also the keeper of the most often cited climate data.
Washington DC, Jan 27th 2009: NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.
Dr Hansen, please drop the blowtorch and step away from the Temperature Station
Man-Made Global Warming
By the blogowner, honestclimate, December 1, 2008
Well, we’ve reached the end of another month and eagerly await the November temperature anomalies.
What surprises will the November GISS data hold? What convenient “oversights” will be found by bloggers this month?
With record cold and snow records set in November, how “hot” will the November GISS data be? What excuses will be made for the fraudulent data? How will errors be downplayed?
The alarmist in chief is back on form in an interview for AFP, reported in the Brisbane Times, which clearly has no idea about Hansen’s well-known record for being a global warming fruitcake and massaging the GISS temperature record to fit his own agenda:
A half-dozen climate experts told AFP, ahead of international climate talks starting on Monday, that current rates of greenhouse gas emissions, if unchecked, would unleash devastating droughts, floods and huge increases in human misery by century’s end.
But the new studies, they say, indicate that human activity may be triggering powerful natural forces that would be nearly impossible to reverse and that could push temperatures up even further.
…
“The most recent IPCC report was prior to … the measurements of increasing mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica, which are disintegrating much faster than IPCC estimates,” said climatologist James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
Unlike the Arctic ice cap, which floats on water, the world’s two major ice sheets – up to 3km thick – sit on land.
Runaway sea level rises, Hansen said, would put huge coastal cities and agricultural deltas in Bangladesh, Egypt and southern China under water, and create hundreds of millions of refugees.
Were Greenland’s entire ice block to melt, it would lift the world’s sea levels by almost seven metres, while western Antarctica’s ice sheet holds enough water to add six metres.
This is something I thought I’d never see. This press release today is from the Senate EPW blog of Jame Inhofe. The scientist making the claims in the headline, Dr. John S. Theon, formerly of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Arlington, Virginia, has a paper here in the AMS BAMS that you may also find interesting. Other papers are available here in Google Scholar. He also worked on the report of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident report and according to that document was a significant contributor to weather forecasting improvements:
An Honest Climate Debate 