Watts Up With That?

He’s got the whoooole woorld in his hands…

This troubling news from the Guardian, UK

“James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress – in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming – to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the “perfect storm” of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.”

complete story

I suspect he’ll be calling for the jailing of bloggers like myself next. I think Mr. Hansen has lost all sense of reason, and his last shred of credibility.

UPDATE: Apparently Mr. Hansen has made the claims above on live radio on the Dian Rehm show this morning, audio files of the interview will be up shortly here:

http://wamu.org/programs/dr/08/06/23.php#20635

When the audio file is up, I’ll post a direct link.

AUDIO CLIPS NOW AVAILABLE:

Listen to this segment

• Real Audio
• Windows Media

Joe D’Aleo created this graph this morning:

click for a larger image.
Satellite measured global temperature trend from the University of Alabama, Huntsville show sthat it is cooler now than when he made his testimony in 1988.

UPDATE2: See the reader poll on this issue here

Lucia at Rank Exploits poses this thought:

“I always think it’s best to ask yourself: Do I really think a particular method of looking at data is meaningful? Would I still believe this if the answers turned out “wrong” from my POV? Or, will I eventually find myself explaining my own method gives uncertainty bounds that are “too small”, when my method suddenly gives “wrong” (in my eyes) answers?

So, in this regard, I need to ask Tilo: Why throw out GISS Temp”?

Thanks, Lucia, for taking a different look at this. It is true that one can make arguments for and against GISTEMP as a valid/not valid data set.

My view is that this is a lot like voting for a company wide policy change on a company board of directors.

Let’s say this issue was on a company board of directors decision to choose to make changes to policy related to employee comfort. Some employees complain that the work environment is too hot and they have been suffering a long term effect. The board decides to hire four consultants with the mandate: “tell us if we should expend the money to replace all of our a/c units company wide in all of our world locations. The cost will be huge, so we need to know before we make a policy change to do this.”

One of the consultants to members of the board who strongly advocates the policy change also has been lobbying company staff worldwide and other board members with the data he has collected and collated that shows that the trend is shifting in the direction that he advocates. As consultant, he is also the creator of one of the datasets used to evaluate the policy change. Read the rest of this entry »