I received this presentation of the “Bjerknes Lecture” that Dr. James Hansen gave at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on December 17th. There are the usual things one might expect in the presentation, such as this slide which shows 2008 on the left with the anomalously warm Siberia and the Antarctic peninsula:
Source: James Hansen, GISS
Off topic but relevant, NASA has recently “disappeared”updated this oft cited map showing warming on the Antarctic peninsula and cooling of the interior:
There is also some new information in Hansen’s presentation, including a claim about CO2 sensitivity and coal causing a “runaway greenhouse effect”.
Hansen makes a bold statement that he has empirically derived CO2 sensitivity of our global climate system. I had to chuckle though, about the claim “Paleo yields precise result”. Apparently Jim hasn’t quite got the message yet that Michael Mann’s paleo results are, well, dubious, or that trees are better indicators of precipitation than temperature.
In fact in the later slide text he claims he’s “nailed” it:
He adds some caveats for the 2xCO2 claim:
Notes:
(1)
It is unwise to attempt to treat glacial-interglacial aerosol changes as a specified boundary condition (as per Hansen et al. 1984), because aerosols are inhomogeneously distributed, and their forcing depends strongly on aerosol altitude and aerosol absorbtivity, all poorly known. But why even attempt that? Human-made aerosol changes are a forcing, but aerosol changes in response to climate change are a fast feedback.
(2)
The accuracy of our knowledge of climate sensitivity is set by our best source of information, not by bad sources. Estimates of climate sensitivity based on the last 100 years of climate change are practically worthless, because we do not know the net climate forcing. Also, transient change is much less sensitive than the equilibrium response and the transient response is affected by uncertainty in ocean mixing.
(3)
Although, in general, climate sensitivity is a function of the climate state, the fast feedback sensitivity is just as great going toward warmer climate as it is going toward colder climate. Slow feedbacks (ice sheet changes, greenhouse gas changes) are more sensitive to the climate state.
Hansen is also talking about the “runaway” greenhouse effect, citing that old standby Venus in part of his presentation. He claims that coal and tar sands will be our undoing:
Hansen writes:
In my opinion, if we burn all the coal, there is a good chance that we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale (a.k.a. oil shale), I think it is a dead certainty.
That would be the ultimate Faustian bargain. Mephistopheles would carry off shrieking not only the robber barons, but, unfortunately and permanently, all life on the planet.
I have to wonder though, if he really believes what he is saying. Perhaps he’s never seen this graph for CO2 from Bill Illis and the response it gives to IR radiation (and thus temperature) as it increases:
It’s commonly known that CO2’s radiative return response is logarithmic with increasing concentration, so I don’t understand how Hansen thinks that it will be the cause of a runaway effect. The physics dictate that the temperature response curve of the atmosphere will be getting flatter as CO2 increases. Earth has also had much higher concentrations of CO2 in past history, and we didn’t go into runaway then:
Late Carboniferous to Early Permian time (315 mya — 270 mya) is the only time period in the last 600 million years when both atmospheric CO2 and temperatures were as low as they are today (Quaternary Period ).
There’s lots more in this paper to behold in wonderment, and I haven’t the time today to comment on all of it, so I’ll just leave it up to the readers of this forum to bring out the relevant issues for discussion.
I’m sure Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit will have some comments on it, even though his name is not mentioned in the presentation. My name was mentioned several times though. 😉
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Richard Sharpe
December 21, 2008 10:56 am
That wasn’t me who pointed you at that graphic. That was someone else, I was simply pointing out that I got a 404 with one of the URL’s he offered. REPLY: You pointed out it was missing now, that is what I was referring to. – Anthony
Richard Sharpe
December 21, 2008 11:06 am
OK, I must have made a mistake. It was actually Steven Goddard who pointed out it was missing.
I tried to point out that I got a 404 on one of the URLs he posted, but I might have screwed up or misunderstood what he meant.
Richard Sharpe
December 21, 2008 11:08 am
Yes, it was Steven Goddard who gets priority on pointing out the missing graphic.
I misunderstood what he was saying. I clicked on the link he had already said was missing and confirmed it, but thought I had found a mistake in what he was saying.
Sorry.
John Cooper
December 21, 2008 11:11 am
Hansen is becoming a real embarrassment to NASA, but I don’t think he should be fired. He’s doing more to discredit AGW than anyone else, with the exception of AlGore himself, of course.
Bruce Cobb
December 21, 2008 11:16 am
So, if he’s “nailed” it, that means he’s willing to debate, right?
After reading Hansen’s comparison of the Earth and Venus, I notice that he made no mention of the fact that Venus is much closer to the Sun than the Earth is. Or that Mars’ atmosphere is mostly CO2, and Mars is freezing cold.
It really appears that Hansen has gone off the deep end. I’ve read a lot of of scientific journals, and I don’t recall any credible papers that intersperse pix of the author’s grandkids, and AGW protesters, and lots of pictures of melting glaciers, etc., supposed to be really scary. Those pictures are apparently intended to take the place of the science that Hansen believes he has “nailed.”
This guy is crying “Wolf!” way too much.
Noblesse Oblige
December 21, 2008 11:26 am
I have seen at least a half dozen empirical estimations of the climate sensitivity done by a variety of different methods, and their range runs from less than 1 to ~ 1.7 deg C for doubling. They use a variey of correlation techniques (e.g., Douglass and Christy) or estimates of the temperature relaxation time (Schwartz, Scafetta). Therefore the ‘consensus’ (ha, ha) is that the climate sensitivity is far less than Hansen’s claim.
Paul Wescott
December 21, 2008 11:37 am
John (11:11:31),
If he isn’t discredited among the movers and shakers, the folks with the agendas and the MSM it won’t matter if he’s discredited among the rest of us who have functioning BS meters no matter how numerous. There remain too many regular folks with the sensitivity of their BS meters dialed way back, turned off even.
Off topic but relevant, NASA has recently “disappeared” this oft cited map showing warming on the Antarctic peninsula and cooling of the interior:
It’s not disappeared, it’s here: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_detail.php?id=17529 REPLY: Thanks for pointing out that link, which finally resolves to this URL: http://veimages.gsfc.nasa.gov//17529/antarctic_temps.AVH1982-2004.jpg
The point is that this graphic was removed from that server in my original URL. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/antarctic_temps.AVH1982-2004.jpg
Which is part of the NASA “Newsroom”
The one you cite is a completely different server, perhaps even at a different NASA facility.
The antarctic graphic has come under attack recently by those that disagree with it. So why then should it be removed rather than either updated or with a caveat attached? As we’ve seen with the NANSEN sea ice graph recently, changing things with no notice is not conducive to building trust, nor is it good practice. – Anthony
Tallbloke
December 21, 2008 11:39 am
RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EFFECT?
Who Ya Gonna Call?
The A(GW) TEAM
Call Hannibal Hansen on:-
910841-ALARM
Richard deSousa
December 21, 2008 11:41 am
Hansen also fails to mention Venus’s atmosphere is 97% CO2… how he can jump from Earth’s atmosphere of .03% CO2 to runaway global warming is beyond comprehension… he’s completely an imbecile…
Re: Grandkids in presentation — Reminds me of the old National Lampoon magazine with a dog on the cover “Buy This Magazine Or We’ll Kill This Dog” was the satirical headline (complete with dog looking at gun pointed at dog’s head) — so yeah, personalizing the Global Warming thing is playing to the heartstrings. Perhaps it was a toss-up between putting in pics of his grandkids vs pics of cuddly polar bears on shrinking ice floes.
Re: Ocean heat issue: Funny, the only way the ocean can take up the heat is for some “Quick Mixing” of the warmth pulled in by the shallow ocean and the deep ocean, because there’s little evidence of the shallow ocean holding in this missing heat before it gets mixed with that deep ocean we have trouble monitoring. That’s a shame.
Also, no chatter about the ocean expanding upon heat up. No more sea level issues to deal with?
Re: Lack of atmospheric modeling success — Uh, where is that, because I missed that part. Hansen talks about the lack of ocean heat, where’s the talk about the lack of atmospheric heat, specifically in the equatorial regions? I’ll have to re-read the presentation. Or has Hansen nailed that atmospheric issue so well we no longer need to discuss things?
To sum Hansen, there’s still a lot of missing heat out there, and the forcing of the carbon dioxide is being held in check by man-made aerosols. And the forcing we are witnessing is being hidden by the oceans so quickly we can’t actually trace the heat transfer. Do I have this correct?
Ed Scott
December 21, 2008 11:42 am
Web sites, such as WUWT, are dangerous and an impediment to political consensus of AGW.
Read John’s commentary and then consider where the danger lies.
John Holdren Commentary: Convincing the Climate-Change Skeptics http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/commentary/climate-change-skeptics
The extent of unfounded skepticism about the disruption of global climate by human-produced greenhouse gases is not just regrettable, it is dangerous. It has delayed – and continues to delay – the development of the political consensus that will be needed if society is to embrace remedies commensurate with the challenge. The science of climate change is telling us that we need to get going. Those who still think this is all a mistake or a hoax need to think again.
Bill Illis
December 21, 2008 11:44 am
He’s nailed the CO2 doubling climate sensitivity of 3.0C per doubling by calculating the following for the ice ages:
-2.25C for the decline in CO2/GHGs from 280 ppm to 180 ppm.
-2.625C for ice sheet albedo and vegetation.
First, where is the solar reduction part of the equation due to the Milankovitch cycle. This formula says it doesn’t even play a part including kicking off the ice albedo in the first place.
Second, his math is wrong if the sensitivity is 3.0C per doubling because a reduction to 180 ppm from 280 ppm only results in a decline of 1.9C (picky I know but he is the one who says he has nailed it empirically – the formula doesn’t even work).
Retired Engineer
December 21, 2008 11:47 am
(with apologies to Ernest Thayer)
Somewhere people laugh
Somewhere people shout
There is no joy in Warmville
James Hansen has struck out
Les Johnson
December 21, 2008 11:48 am
Hansen should try to publish that, in a peer reviewed journal. It would be, shall we say, interesting?
Ed Scott
December 21, 2008 11:51 am
“My name was mentioned several times though. ;-)”
Watch your six!
REPLY: That was a tongue in cheek reference to Steve McIntyre’s “he who must not be named” issue. My name is “Watts” which is sprinkled throughout the radiative forcings section.
crosspatch
December 21, 2008 11:56 am
Hansen’s grid maps have absolutely no credibility. First of all there is no integrity in the input data set. Stations go “missing”, data from stations that do report is incomplete causing all sorts of mathematical contortions to “backfill” the missing data with calculated “averages” (even though the “missing” values and data from the “missing” stations seem to be available for download from other sources).
Hansen’s results are a prime example of “garbage in, garbage out” and should not be used as any representation of reality.
To be fair, not all of this is Hansen’s fault as NOAA is the one providing the data and they are the ones providing incomplete sets. Stations go “missing” never to return even though data for those stations is readily available for download over the net. Stations the do report often have many missing values even though more complete data sets are available from other sources. So we seem to have a synergy of errors where sloppy data collection on NOAA’s part leads to sloppy calculation of missing values on Hansen’s part and the sum of all this sloppiness is output that is pretty to look at but doesn’t really mean much.
Hansen could, if he cared for the integrity of his work, find the “missing data”. NOAA could, if they cared for the integrity of their product, do the same. But there is no incentive to do so because the current sloppy procedure provides the “desired” result and validates their hypothesis. Since the output looks exactly what they expect it to look like, the missing data must not matter. Right?
One disturbing element is that most of the stations that have gone “missing” from the NOAA data set over the years are rural stations. This results in a greater influence of urban sites in the output. Missing data in stations that do report provide an opportunity for Hansen to manufacture values for the “missing” information.
I am not going to say that Hansen’s output is a big lie, but it does appear to be “made up facts”.
Ed Scott
December 21, 2008 11:59 am
Lorne Gunter: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/10/20/lorne-gunter-thirty-years-of-warmer-temperatures-go-poof.aspx
In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.
An analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, Michael J. Myers of Hilton Head, S. C., declared, “Man-made global warming is junk science,” explaining that worldwide manmade CO2 emission each year “equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration … This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun’s radiation. This is an insignificantly small number.”
For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, “variations in global temperatures since 1978 … cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide.”
It may be that more global warming doubters are surfacing because there just isn’t any global warming.
The Engineer
December 21, 2008 12:02 pm
“Nailed it” – Is that a scientific term ????
And if so, does Hansen supply the science.
How does one empirically prove a state that doesn’t actually exist.
I mean the CO2 hasn’t doubled yet, so how does one test the doubling
empirically ?
jae
December 21, 2008 12:09 pm
I quit reading Hansen’s junk a long time ago. It is a waste of time. He is simply an ex-scientist, who has turned into a looney politicial hack.
David L. Hagen
December 21, 2008 12:09 pm
Hansen opines:
In my opinion, if we burn all the coal, there is a good chance that we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale (a.k.a. oil shale), I think it is a dead certainty.
I wonder if he every thought of where the coal, tar sands and tar shale came from in the first place if not from the atmosphere/ocean?!
Thus how could putting back into the atmosphere what came from the atmosphere cause a runaway greenhouse effect that was not there in the first place?
He also states that:
Estimates of climate sensitivity based on the last 100 years of climate change are practically worthless, because we do not know the net climate forcing.
I wonder if he officially applies that to Mann’s work?
Does he mean that “we do not know the net climate forcing”
or
that “we do not know what the net climate forcing was during that period”?
The uncertainty in today’s climate, especially the contributions and feedbacks from water, is likely so large as to invalidate all his assumptions and models.
All in all a very curious perspective.
Andrew
December 21, 2008 12:09 pm
REPLY: That was a tongue in cheek reference to Steve McIntyre’s “he who must not be named” issue. My name is “Watts” which is sprinkled throughout the radiative forcings section.
I think the description “peppered” more accurately describes the disbursement of your name in this case.
Andrew ♫
Ben Kellett
December 21, 2008 12:16 pm
Although new to this site, I’ve been following some of the commentry for some time. Hansen is clearly one of the main champions of AGW and obviously believes he has some compelling evidence here! The claim by skeptics however, often relies heavily on the claim that there have been some major warming periods in the last 1000 years – a claim generally rejected by IPCC et al. One of the main corner stones of their contempt for such claims is the lack of sediment in ice core data.
A little off topic I know but can anyone show me any science which challenges this ice core data? I am aware of the work of Prof Easterbrook where he clearly points to the activity of the sun being the main culprit behind climate change, but I would also like to find out if/where the challenge to ice core data exists.
Ben
stephen richards
December 21, 2008 12:26 pm
When I was a young whippersnapper if you had ‘nailed’ something empirically it meant that you had indisputable data from a physically reproducable experiment which you could put before you colleaques with total confidence of confirmation and verification.
Sorry Hansie, don’t see that here on anywhere else at NASTY.
That wasn’t me who pointed you at that graphic. That was someone else, I was simply pointing out that I got a 404 with one of the URL’s he offered.
REPLY: You pointed out it was missing now, that is what I was referring to. – Anthony
OK, I must have made a mistake. It was actually Steven Goddard who pointed out it was missing.
I tried to point out that I got a 404 on one of the URLs he posted, but I might have screwed up or misunderstood what he meant.
Yes, it was Steven Goddard who gets priority on pointing out the missing graphic.
I misunderstood what he was saying. I clicked on the link he had already said was missing and confirmed it, but thought I had found a mistake in what he was saying.
Sorry.
Hansen is becoming a real embarrassment to NASA, but I don’t think he should be fired. He’s doing more to discredit AGW than anyone else, with the exception of AlGore himself, of course.
So, if he’s “nailed” it, that means he’s willing to debate, right?
After reading Hansen’s comparison of the Earth and Venus, I notice that he made no mention of the fact that Venus is much closer to the Sun than the Earth is. Or that Mars’ atmosphere is mostly CO2, and Mars is freezing cold.
It really appears that Hansen has gone off the deep end. I’ve read a lot of of scientific journals, and I don’t recall any credible papers that intersperse pix of the author’s grandkids, and AGW protesters, and lots of pictures of melting glaciers, etc., supposed to be really scary. Those pictures are apparently intended to take the place of the science that Hansen believes he has “nailed.”
This guy is crying “Wolf!” way too much.
I have seen at least a half dozen empirical estimations of the climate sensitivity done by a variety of different methods, and their range runs from less than 1 to ~ 1.7 deg C for doubling. They use a variey of correlation techniques (e.g., Douglass and Christy) or estimates of the temperature relaxation time (Schwartz, Scafetta). Therefore the ‘consensus’ (ha, ha) is that the climate sensitivity is far less than Hansen’s claim.
John (11:11:31),
If he isn’t discredited among the movers and shakers, the folks with the agendas and the MSM it won’t matter if he’s discredited among the rest of us who have functioning BS meters no matter how numerous. There remain too many regular folks with the sensitivity of their BS meters dialed way back, turned off even.
Off topic but relevant, NASA has recently “disappeared” this oft cited map showing warming on the Antarctic peninsula and cooling of the interior:
It’s not disappeared, it’s here:
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_detail.php?id=17529
REPLY: Thanks for pointing out that link, which finally resolves to this URL:
http://veimages.gsfc.nasa.gov//17529/antarctic_temps.AVH1982-2004.jpg
The point is that this graphic was removed from that server in my original URL.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/antarctic_temps.AVH1982-2004.jpg
Which is part of the NASA “Newsroom”
The one you cite is a completely different server, perhaps even at a different NASA facility.
The antarctic graphic has come under attack recently by those that disagree with it. So why then should it be removed rather than either updated or with a caveat attached? As we’ve seen with the NANSEN sea ice graph recently, changing things with no notice is not conducive to building trust, nor is it good practice. – Anthony
RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EFFECT?
Who Ya Gonna Call?
The A(GW) TEAM
Call Hannibal Hansen on:-
910841-ALARM
Hansen also fails to mention Venus’s atmosphere is 97% CO2… how he can jump from Earth’s atmosphere of .03% CO2 to runaway global warming is beyond comprehension… he’s completely an imbecile…
Re: Grandkids in presentation — Reminds me of the old National Lampoon magazine with a dog on the cover “Buy This Magazine Or We’ll Kill This Dog” was the satirical headline (complete with dog looking at gun pointed at dog’s head) — so yeah, personalizing the Global Warming thing is playing to the heartstrings. Perhaps it was a toss-up between putting in pics of his grandkids vs pics of cuddly polar bears on shrinking ice floes.
Re: Ocean heat issue: Funny, the only way the ocean can take up the heat is for some “Quick Mixing” of the warmth pulled in by the shallow ocean and the deep ocean, because there’s little evidence of the shallow ocean holding in this missing heat before it gets mixed with that deep ocean we have trouble monitoring. That’s a shame.
Also, no chatter about the ocean expanding upon heat up. No more sea level issues to deal with?
Re: Lack of atmospheric modeling success — Uh, where is that, because I missed that part. Hansen talks about the lack of ocean heat, where’s the talk about the lack of atmospheric heat, specifically in the equatorial regions? I’ll have to re-read the presentation. Or has Hansen nailed that atmospheric issue so well we no longer need to discuss things?
To sum Hansen, there’s still a lot of missing heat out there, and the forcing of the carbon dioxide is being held in check by man-made aerosols. And the forcing we are witnessing is being hidden by the oceans so quickly we can’t actually trace the heat transfer. Do I have this correct?
Web sites, such as WUWT, are dangerous and an impediment to political consensus of AGW.
Read John’s commentary and then consider where the danger lies.
John Holdren Commentary: Convincing the Climate-Change Skeptics
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/commentary/climate-change-skeptics
The extent of unfounded skepticism about the disruption of global climate by human-produced greenhouse gases is not just regrettable, it is dangerous. It has delayed – and continues to delay – the development of the political consensus that will be needed if society is to embrace remedies commensurate with the challenge. The science of climate change is telling us that we need to get going. Those who still think this is all a mistake or a hoax need to think again.
He’s nailed the CO2 doubling climate sensitivity of 3.0C per doubling by calculating the following for the ice ages:
-2.25C for the decline in CO2/GHGs from 280 ppm to 180 ppm.
-2.625C for ice sheet albedo and vegetation.
First, where is the solar reduction part of the equation due to the Milankovitch cycle. This formula says it doesn’t even play a part including kicking off the ice albedo in the first place.
Second, his math is wrong if the sensitivity is 3.0C per doubling because a reduction to 180 ppm from 280 ppm only results in a decline of 1.9C (picky I know but he is the one who says he has nailed it empirically – the formula doesn’t even work).
(with apologies to Ernest Thayer)
Somewhere people laugh
Somewhere people shout
There is no joy in Warmville
James Hansen has struck out
Hansen should try to publish that, in a peer reviewed journal. It would be, shall we say, interesting?
“My name was mentioned several times though. ;-)”
Watch your six!
REPLY: That was a tongue in cheek reference to Steve McIntyre’s “he who must not be named” issue. My name is “Watts” which is sprinkled throughout the radiative forcings section.
Hansen’s grid maps have absolutely no credibility. First of all there is no integrity in the input data set. Stations go “missing”, data from stations that do report is incomplete causing all sorts of mathematical contortions to “backfill” the missing data with calculated “averages” (even though the “missing” values and data from the “missing” stations seem to be available for download from other sources).
Hansen’s results are a prime example of “garbage in, garbage out” and should not be used as any representation of reality.
To be fair, not all of this is Hansen’s fault as NOAA is the one providing the data and they are the ones providing incomplete sets. Stations go “missing” never to return even though data for those stations is readily available for download over the net. Stations the do report often have many missing values even though more complete data sets are available from other sources. So we seem to have a synergy of errors where sloppy data collection on NOAA’s part leads to sloppy calculation of missing values on Hansen’s part and the sum of all this sloppiness is output that is pretty to look at but doesn’t really mean much.
Hansen could, if he cared for the integrity of his work, find the “missing data”. NOAA could, if they cared for the integrity of their product, do the same. But there is no incentive to do so because the current sloppy procedure provides the “desired” result and validates their hypothesis. Since the output looks exactly what they expect it to look like, the missing data must not matter. Right?
One disturbing element is that most of the stations that have gone “missing” from the NOAA data set over the years are rural stations. This results in a greater influence of urban sites in the output. Missing data in stations that do report provide an opportunity for Hansen to manufacture values for the “missing” information.
I am not going to say that Hansen’s output is a big lie, but it does appear to be “made up facts”.
Lorne Gunter: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/10/20/lorne-gunter-thirty-years-of-warmer-temperatures-go-poof.aspx
In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.
An analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, Michael J. Myers of Hilton Head, S. C., declared, “Man-made global warming is junk science,” explaining that worldwide manmade CO2 emission each year “equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration … This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun’s radiation. This is an insignificantly small number.”
For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, “variations in global temperatures since 1978 … cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide.”
It may be that more global warming doubters are surfacing because there just isn’t any global warming.
“Nailed it” – Is that a scientific term ????
And if so, does Hansen supply the science.
How does one empirically prove a state that doesn’t actually exist.
I mean the CO2 hasn’t doubled yet, so how does one test the doubling
empirically ?
I quit reading Hansen’s junk a long time ago. It is a waste of time. He is simply an ex-scientist, who has turned into a looney politicial hack.
Hansen opines:
I wonder if he every thought of where the coal, tar sands and tar shale came from in the first place if not from the atmosphere/ocean?!
Thus how could putting back into the atmosphere what came from the atmosphere cause a runaway greenhouse effect that was not there in the first place?
He also states that:
I wonder if he officially applies that to Mann’s work?
Does he mean that “we do not know the net climate forcing”
or
that “we do not know what the net climate forcing was during that period”?
The uncertainty in today’s climate, especially the contributions and feedbacks from water, is likely so large as to invalidate all his assumptions and models.
All in all a very curious perspective.
REPLY: That was a tongue in cheek reference to Steve McIntyre’s “he who must not be named” issue. My name is “Watts” which is sprinkled throughout the radiative forcings section.
I think the description “peppered” more accurately describes the disbursement of your name in this case.
Andrew ♫
Although new to this site, I’ve been following some of the commentry for some time. Hansen is clearly one of the main champions of AGW and obviously believes he has some compelling evidence here! The claim by skeptics however, often relies heavily on the claim that there have been some major warming periods in the last 1000 years – a claim generally rejected by IPCC et al. One of the main corner stones of their contempt for such claims is the lack of sediment in ice core data.
A little off topic I know but can anyone show me any science which challenges this ice core data? I am aware of the work of Prof Easterbrook where he clearly points to the activity of the sun being the main culprit behind climate change, but I would also like to find out if/where the challenge to ice core data exists.
Ben
When I was a young whippersnapper if you had ‘nailed’ something empirically it meant that you had indisputable data from a physically reproducable experiment which you could put before you colleaques with total confidence of confirmation and verification.
Sorry Hansie, don’t see that here on anywhere else at NASTY.