UPDATE 1/28: Full text of Dr. Theon’s letter has been post on the Senate website and below.
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.
EPW press release below – Anthony
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.
“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results,” Theon, the former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA Headquarters and former Chief of the Atmospheric Dynamics & Radiation Branch explained.
“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” Theon wrote. [Note: NASA scientist James Hansen has created worldwide media frenzy with his dire climate warning, his call for trials against those who dissent against man-made global warming fear, and his claims that he was allegedly muzzled by the Bush administration despite doing 1,400 on-the-job media interviews! – See: Don’t Panic Over Predictions of Climate Doom – Get the Facts on James Hansen – UK Register: Veteran climate scientist says ‘lock up the oil men’ – June 23, 2008 & UK Guardian: NASA scientist calls for putting oil firm chiefs on trial for ‘high crimes against humanity’ for spreading doubt about man-made global warming – June 23, 2008 ]
Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” he added.
“As Chief of several of NASA Headquarters’ programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research,” Theon wrote of his career. “This required a thorough understanding of the state of the science. I have kept up with climate science since retiring by reading books and journal articles,” Theon added. (LINK) Theon also co-authored the book “Advances in Remote Sensing Retrieval Methods.” [Note: Theon joins many current and former NASA scientists in dissenting from man-made climate fears. A small sampling includes: Aerospace engineer and physicist Dr. Michael Griffin, the former top administrator of NASA, Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology, and formerly of NASA, Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut, Award-Winning NASA Astronaut/Geologist and Moonwalker Jack Schmitt, Award-winning NASA Astronaut and Physicist Walter Cunningham of NASA’s Apollo 7, Chemist and Nuclear Engineer Robert DeFayette was formerly with NASA’s Plum Brook Reactor, Hungarian Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Ames Research Center, Climatologist Dr. John Christy, Climatologist Dr. Roy W. Spencer, Atmospheric Scientist Ross Hays of NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility]
Gore faces a much different scientific climate in 2009 than the one he faced in 2006 when his film “An Inconvenient Truth” was released. According to satellite data, the Earth has cooled since Gore’s film was released, Antarctic sea ice extent has grown to record levels, sea level rise has slowed, ocean temperatures have failed to warm, and more and more scientists have publicly declared their dissent from man-made climate fears as peer-reviewed studies continue to man-made counter warming fears. [See: Peer-Reviewed Study challenges ‘notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming’ & New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears ]
“Vice President Gore and the other promoters of man-made climate fears endless claims that the “debate is over” appear to be ignoring scientific reality,” Senator James Inhofe, Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee.
A U.S. Senate Minority Report released in December 2008 details over 650 international scientists who are dissenting from man-made global warming fears promoted by the UN and yourself. Many of the scientists profiled are former UN IPCC scientists and former believers in man-made climate change that have reversed their views in recent years. The report continues to grow almost daily. We have just received a request from an Italian scientist, and a Czech scientist to join the 650 dissenting scientists report. A chemist from the U.S. Naval Academy is about to be added, and more Japanese scientists are dissenting. Finally, many more meteorologists will be added and another former UN IPCC scientist is about to be included. These scientists are openly rebelling against the climate orthodoxy promoted by Gore and the UN IPCC.
The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists’ equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. Reports from the conference found that Skeptical scientists overwhelmed the meeting, with ‘2/3 of presenters and question-askers hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC’ ( See full reports here & here ] In addition, a 2008 canvass of more than 51,000 Canadian scientists revealed 68% disagree that global warming science is “settled.” A November 25, 2008, article in Politico noted that a “growing accumulation” of science is challenging warming fears, and added that the “science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation.” More evidence that the global warming fear machine is breaking down. Russian scientists “rejected the very idea that carbon dioxide may be responsible for global warming”. An American Physical Society editor conceded that a “considerable presence” of scientific skeptics exists. An International team of scientists countered the UN IPCC, declaring: “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate”. India Issued a report challenging global warming fears. International Scientists demanded the UN IPCC “be called to account and cease its deceptive practices.”
The scientists and peer-reviewed studies countering climate claims are the key reason that the U.S. public has grown ever more skeptical of man-made climate doom predictions. [See: Global warming ranks dead last, 20 out of 20 in new Pew survey. Pew Survey: & Survey finds majority of U.S. Voters – ‘51% – now believe that humans are not the predominant cause of climate change’ – January 20, 2009 – Rasmussen Reports ]
The chorus of skeptical scientific voices grow louder in 2008 as a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments challenged the UN’s and former Vice President Al Gore’s claims that the “science is settled” and there is a “consensus.”
On a range of issues, 2008 proved to be challenging for the promoters of man-made climate fears. Promoters of anthropogenic warming fears endured the following: Global temperatures failing to warm; Peer-reviewed studies predicting a continued lack of warming; a failed attempt to revive the discredited “Hockey Stick“; inconvenient developments and studies regarding rising CO2; the Spotless Sun; Clouds; Antarctica; the Arctic; Greenland’s ice; Mount Kilimanjaro; Global sea ice; Causes of Hurricanes; Extreme Storms; Extinctions; Floods; Droughts; Ocean Acidification; Polar Bears; Extreme weather deaths; Frogs; lack of atmospheric dust; Malaria; the failure of oceans to warm and rise as predicted.
# # #
ORIGINAL FULL TEXT LETTER SENT VIA EMAILS:
From: Jtheon [mailto:jtheon@XXXXXXX]
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009 10:05 PM
To: Morano, Marc (EPW)
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 12:50 PM
To: Morano, Marc (EPW)
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C’mon now, we all know James Hansen is a top of the line scientist without a politically motivated bone in his body.
So I guess this guy admits he failed to muzzle Hansen which in turn caused Gore to be taken in by Hansen.
The house of cards is really beginning to tumble………………
Embarrassed NASA?
What an understatement. Hansen’s words and actions have cast a noxious cloud so large that it has sullied the reputation of the “Scientific Community” in general.
An article in our local paper by Seth Borenstein an AP Science Writer, states that 2008 was tied for the 8th warmest year in records that go back to 1880 according to the US NOAA. Stories of this ilk are all over the internet. What’s up with this?
George
This is quite big isn’t it? Upstageing Mr Gore before he gives his speech.Oh dear, how embarasing.
Not entirely accurate, he does have one bone that is politically motivated. Unfortunately it is his jaw bone.
The parade to the exit is beginning. All aboard.
But now you have Barack Obama and Steven Chu, two men in power, determined to following the ideology, even though it’s ‘tumbling down’… it should tumble faster, before serious commitments are made!
Wow. He annihilated Hansen. He is very well spoken and clear. His point about the models is what I tried to explain a while back. He’s just much better at it than I am.
Definitely refreshing to read. Wonder if anyone’s going to put a copy of this on O’s desk in the morning? He wanted to get elected, but he also doesn’t want to be wrong, becuase on something of this scale, you could measure the time it takes for the second 4yrs to disappear with an egg timer.
JimB
“there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit…”
Can someone explain what this means?
Thanks in advance.
Just a note to commenters here. I realize this is a piece of news that will tend to play on emotions a bit, but please maintain civility and decorum in comments. Any that do not, will be deleted. – Anthony
“Fresh Air” seems to be “leaking” from inside the NASA “hot air” balloon! It’s about time.
“Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. … “
Damning. Just damning!!!
If this is really true its got to be the biggest story of the year re AGW see if the NYT publishes this…
Psi:
there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit…”
Can someone explain what this means?
What is meant is that the models are useless.
Unfortunately, this is another sterling example of NASA’a dysfunctionality; boss fails to discipline underling. Probably to keep the funds rolling in. Sad, isn’t it? Maybe the oil companies should buy NASA. See how that sits with the greenies.
Wow. Just…wow.
While I agree with the arguements in this article and personally derive great pleasure from calling global warming supporters alarmists and fear mongers, etc., I can’t help but cringe at the biased style of writing chosen by the author. By inserting subjective jargon such as “man-made global warming fear soothsayer, etc.,” the article undermines its objectivity – unnecessarily. Let the story speak for itself!
My skepticism usually peaks when I read the sensationalized accounts of doom and gloom from the AGW crowd. In order to win support for true skepticism, objectivity is a must. Any unnecessary display of bias makes us no better than them. When “scientists” become political, they often resort to hyperbole, insults, fear mongering and name-calling to support inconvenient scientific results… Let them be the side that does that. Time, science and history will ultimately settle the score.
Please accept this as humble/respectful, constructive criticism. I absolutely enjoyed this story and visit WATTSUPWITHTHAT daily.
Pffft. None of this will make into the MSM.
The MSM will print what it sees fit, and ignore what it does not.
The problem is the media, and not the scientists. It was never the scientists. There have always been far far more sceptical scientists that believer scientists. The AGW hoax cannot and will not be exposed until people takle the media. And the only way this will happen if political parties have the guts to stand up and threaten criminal action against the editors and journalists who have deliberately created this hoax. There is a very simple and very good argument to say the actions of the media are an act of treason against our country – and as such, the journalists and editors who created this hoax will face the full force of treason laws. But no politician will ever do that, so we will continue to see these things happen ::
-global temps cooling for a decade
-far more sceptical scientists than believers
-weekly new studies/science refuting AGW
-weekly growing absurdity of the junk science that believers use
-MSM will ignore the above and continue printing lies
And so it goes.
Psi – An example is convection… It’s hard to have a mile wide grid or cube (typically much larger) and expect a model to accurately simulate the effect of heat transferring through the cube’s faces the same as heat transfer in a natural space would. You need to know more about what’s behind the face rather than that one giant block of air. Another would be diffusion. A grid model just can’t hack it… There are countless downfalls of GCM’s, but they make pretty pictures if you’re into animations and know what parameters to set to achieve your political agenda. For modeling real world processes, there aren’t many who even know how to write such models for clouds, shadows, etc. The grids need to be infinitesimally small to work reasonably correctly.
I think small scale modeling of physical processes would be extremely cool to work on (I mean small as in the processes going on in the woods and lakes around my house on a sunny or cloudy or rainy day, or when a cloud passes by). That would be fun to work on and then scale up… Can you imagine the complexity?
Now imagine being constrained to HUGE blocks of real estate and imagine how you’re going to get the influences to transfer from one block to another correctly, in 50 MPH wind and driving rain… Too coarse. Now imagine the detail needed that would generate a stratus cloud that moves and ripples successfully over an hour, over a few hundred square miles, and what the shadows do to the evapotranspiration rate of trees below and evaporation rate of recent rain from wet ground? And the humidity and temperature layers that result from the sun & shadows, after being influenced by the effects of all the other small cubes all around the subject cube, just after they get influenced by the cubes next to them? And the convection currents that naturally erupt through chaotic motions of small cubes after a cumulus cloud moves by. You’re going to need a HUGE computer or worldwide distributed network to get anything useful for this small area. I would be truly impressed to see something like that…
So GCM’s are necessarily large-grid and somewhat incapable of detail small enough to model phenomena that we see every day. You’ll notice that even weather forecasts are quite large scale compared to the actual storms that develop, and they can do a pretty good job of forecasting a few days out, once you know the current state, even within a narrow band a hundred miles wide.
And as we’ve seen, doing it over hundreds or even thousands of years with great accuracy is evidently a far easier situation, you know, once you understand all those little factors like they do… Yep, uh-huh.
Anyone need $140 million for real data?
Psi (16:46:50) :
“there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit…”
Can someone explain what this means?
The models break the world into large squares, called a grid, and pretend that everything in that square is uniform. Then they look at energy flows into and out of the squares as a whole, ignoring ‘little things’ that happen inside the squares. The quote is saying that the ‘little things’ inside of the smallest resolution of the squares are, in fact, big things.
An example:
Hansen takes reasonably valid data from NOAA (within their accuracy of 1F) and ‘homogenizes’ it. This is done in a couple of steps. In one of them, he divides the world into 6 latitude zones of 30 degrees each. Then within each zone it is assumed that stations ‘near’ each other can tell you how to ‘correct’ or ‘adjust’ each other. So 30-60 degrees north covers just about the whole US. This implies that San Francisco is ‘fungible’ with Sacramento. That it can be treated as ‘the same’ for temperature curve fitting.
When San Francisco data are to be ‘corrected’ for their Urban Heat Island effect, reference is made to ‘local’ rural stations. The San Francisco historical temperature curve slope is ‘adjusted’ based on stations that are inland, sometimes a long ways. Hundreds of kilometers.
Why not? Well, in summer the fog comes in over San Francisco and the temperatures are very often 60F +/- 5F where inland is more like 95F +/- 10F or even +/- 15F and the hotter it is inland, the more SF cools as the rising inland hot air sucks more cold fog in from the ocean.
So not only is it wrong to say SF behaves like inland (it is negatively correlated) but it is clearly subject to a very flat temperature slope while inland is more volatile. Putting all this in one box hides these facts. It also hides the (roughly by my observation) 3 day cyclicality of the whole process. (Air inland heats and rises, dragging in cool marine layer, stopping rise in about 1.5 days, then starts heating again and 1.5ish days later is rising… the pump works in long slow pulses.)
These processes are very important! The models “don’t get it”. All that mass flow, all the energy in it, all the water flow dynamics, all the changes in albedo as fog flows in over SF, all ignored. How can you ‘get it right’ when you ignore most of what is happening?
This in the end, will mean next to nothing. Threr have been many instances where the “data” used by proponents of AGW theory, refuted, and yet we still continued our lemming-like march to the cliffs.
Folks, our leadership is convinced this is a real issue. There has already been legislation made into law (remember that “emergency” bill last year that was riddled with all kinds of issues including treating CO2 as a pollutant), with more to come. Just look at the agenda of the people who chair the various committees and sub committees in the Congress, heading regulatory agencies and our President. It’s a train wreck that has already happened – we just haven’t felt the effects in the last car.
I write to my Representatives and Senators regularly, and get responses from them, NOT staffers. I am holding them as accountable as I am able – and posting here without doing the same is just chatting. Let them hear you, clearly, concisely and without rancor.
It seems that only retired people are willing to speak their minds as they are now afraid that government policy will further ruin their retirement. People still employed by the government want a piece of that $140 million or more. I applaud Dr. John Theon’s candor I only hope that those currently employed by our government are listening. Hopefully they will not interpret this as a call to fix the models and spend more money without looking out the window.