AGW is alive and well in the USGS.

All Jim Hansen needs is someone with a geologist’s sense of time to point out he needs to look a timeframe that is 1000X longer.

I think geologists have accepted that the Sun is the cause of the global warming which will destroy life on Earth when the Sun turns into a red giant. I doubt Hansen’s computers can handle geological time scales…or contemporary time scales.

I’m not a geologist, but I like to claim that the biggest catastrophe that has affected life on Earth was the development of photosynthesis. The shift from a reducing atmosphere to an oxidizing one forced the dominant lifeforms (bacteria) underground. They’re still around as anaerobic bacteria, and still play a vital role, but their niche became a lot smaller.

Photosynthesis also made CO2 a trace gas.

You’ve got that right. One of my previous self-employment careers was auditing hospitals for overcharges for clients (insurance companies). I told daughter when she was expecting her first child to keep a close eye on her bills and hold on to her wallet, because she was going to be egregiously overcharged even with insurance. She did not believe me and was not sufficiently motivated to audit her charges.

With her second child, money was tighter. She went over every charge for medication, procedures, etc. She was shocked to discover that her obstetrician’s office alone had overcharged her by $800 that she had paid out of her own pocket.

I shudder to think of the errors, some deliberate and some by incompetence, that are not challenged in areas that are not audited.

James Hansen.

The USA’s own Trofim Lysenko.

“Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the Democrats believe every day is April 15th.”
~Ronald Reagan

Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute in this country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and by private philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must be pooled, so that investigators do not know who is paying them. The institute must fund more than one team to do research in a particular area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In many cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze it. If we were to address the land temperature records with such rigor, we would be well on our way to an understanding of exactly how much faith we can place in global warming, and therefore what seriousness we must address this.

http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html

And I’d add, independent third party audits.

These kinds of separation of responsibility are legally required in business to prevent errors and outright fraud.

Whether or not errors or fraud occur in climate science is irrelevant. The purpose of the procedures is to prevent it happening.

In business, if you told an auditor that you didn’t need these procedures, because there is no fraud in your company, they would roll around the floor laughing. And trust me, auditors don’t laugh often.

Thanks for your well organized reading of the article. And your quote from Tolstoy is a gem. I saw it long ago but it had escaped my memory.