In June 1986, Dr. James Hansen made a prediction to an AP newspaper reporter, which was carried in Oxnard, CA, of a 2 degree temperature rise by 2006. This was two years before, almost to the day before he and Senator Tim Wirth duped a bunch of Washington legislators with stagecraft on a hot June day by turning off the a/c in the hearing room while complaining about global warming and urging the need for “immediate action” (translation: cash).
Like Dr. Hansen’s 20 year sea level prediction, it hasn’t come true. In honor of the 80’s, when a popular TV commercial for a fast food restaurant had inspired a whole nation to say the catch phrase, I ask Dr. James Hansen, regarding your claims of global warming, “Where’s the Beef”?!
Let’s have a look at Exhibit A: Hansens’ GISTEMP graph, distributed worldwide from the GISS headquarters above Jerry Seinfeld’s favorite Monk’s Restaurant in New York City. Annotations in blue mine.
Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
Exhibit B: The GISS Data, available here. Let’s do the math.
Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index (C) (Anomaly with Base: 1951-1980) ---------------------------------- Year Annual_Mean 5-year_Mean ---------------------------------- 1986 0.13 0.18 1987 0.28 0.20 1988 0.33 0.26 1989 0.21 0.31 1990 0.36 0.28 1991 0.35 0.24 1992 0.13 0.24 1993 0.14 0.25 1994 0.24 0.24 1995 0.39 0.30 1996 0.30 0.39 1997 0.41 0.40 1998 0.58 0.40 1999 0.33 0.43 2000 0.35 0.46 2001 0.48 0.46 2002 0.56 0.49 2003 0.55 0.54 2004 0.48 0.55 2005 0.62 0.56 2006 0.55 0.53
Finding the difference: 0.55C – 0.13C = 0.42C
Predicted change 2.0C compared to Actual change 0.42C = Climate Fail
Exhibit C: Where’s the Beef?!
Note: I realize that I could have placed the top prediction at 2.13C, but why pile on? 😉 What’s 0.13C between friends? Besides he said “nearly” and it is near well enough.
Don’t believe me? Read for yourself. The Press-Courier – Google News Archive Search
Big h/t to Steve Goddard at Real-Science for finding this one.
UPDATE: Some commenters suggested Hansen may have given the 2 degree number in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius. Another article on the same day suggests he did.
Read article here: http://news.google.com/newspapers
So at 4F we have 2.2 C If the reporter in the first story took the middle between 2-4F as 3F we have 1.67C or “nearly 2 degrees higher in 20 years” as the reporter from Oxnard states.
The 2010 Annual Mean Temperature anomaly from GISS is 0.63 C
So, no matter how you look at it, Hansen’s 1986 prediction has not come true,
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It was a projection not a prediction dont you guys know anything!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
REPLY: Read the newspaper article, the word is predicted. – Anthony
That Wirth & Hansen can sit, and smugly admit that it was theatre (and nothing else), with impunity, is simply beyond all reason. Of all the arrogance.
Ummm… a few issues here:
1) what units do US newspapers usually use for temperature? Don’t think it’s celcius.
2) this is a report from testimony before the House, not an interview – the testimony itself is part of the public record and so Hansen’s statements can be checked directly
3) the projections are almost certainly a preliminary version of the Hansen et al 1988 paper – and nothing there suggests 1 degC/decade.
Conclusion? a confused journalist on deadline.
REPLY: But remember, the reporter is quoting Dr. Hansen, and he always works in Celsius. But let’s say Hansen is using F, he would say 3.6 degrees F if he meant 2C.
And just two years later, Hansen used degrees C in his predictions presented before congress. Given that the USA is not on the metric system, you’d think he would.
Typically, scientists work in degrees C. I can’t imagine Dr. Hansen would say otherwise.
I don’t doubt the reporter was confused, but I’ve never seen Hansen use degrees F in any paper or prediction without some qualification – Anthony
Yeah, but we know so much more now and the future will be even worse than we originally predicted. /sarcasm
Really? It clearly says in yellow hight lighter “Hansen predicted” not “Hansen projected” or did you just not bother reading the article?
highlighter my bad fat fingers…
Sen. TIMOTHY WIRTH (D-CO), 1987-1993: We knew there was this scientist at NASA, you know, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify.
DEBORAH AMOS: On Capitol Hill, Sen. Timothy Wirth was one of the few politicians already concerned about global warming, and he was not above using a little stagecraft for Hansen’s testimony.
TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.
DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.[Shot of witnesses at hearing]
WIRTH: Dr. Hansen, if you’d start us off, we’d appreciate it. The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving this remarkable testimony.[nice shot of a sweaty Hansen]
JAMES HANSEN: [June 1988 Senate hearing] Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe, with a high degree of confidence, a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.
J Stafford,
I was just getting in early to take the piss out of the warmbots like JPY
Cheers
“Nearly 2 degrees” suggests 9/5 * 1 °C, or 1.8 °F. We are still well below that, and may be going the other way now.
JPY says:
March 8, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Ummm… a few issues here:
1) what units do US newspapers usually use for temperature? Don’t think it’s celcius…..
=========================================
Uhmmm……. so you think 2°F = 0.5°C ? Try again sparky.
The prediction was worse than we thought!
Seriously, does Hansen have a response for this?
The worst part of it is that GISS cheated to get the 0.37C. If it hadn’t been for the adjustments and selective dropping of sites that didn’t fit the narrative there would have been much less “warming”. What does it say about your position when you cheat and still lose. Badly.
Al ‘D’ Gore, Sir Richard ‘punk rockers don’t like heroine’ Branson and James ‘Lonesome Dove’ Hansen have banded together to convince the queen of England that their trio is needed to save the earth from the ‘global warming’ menace with ‘tax credits’ and all to stem the tide of Britannia liquidation to the highest bidders. Them empires is expensive, and since the queen is slow enough to follow these three meteorkateers with their ‘global warming’ rap, she has chosen them as her ‘global warming’ champions. Unfortunately for us all, a huge industry has cropped up around this fraud and we must babysit the lot of them. Such is the power of the central bank. i weary of the whole barrel full.
Isnt an an increase of 2F only 1.1C.
an increase of 2C is an increase of 3.6F ???? or is my math wrong?
Goddard had this a year ago.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/hansen-1986-2-to-4-degrees-warming-from-2001-2010/
Note also that since that testimony not only has the temperature failed to rise 2 degrees by any format but the CAGW lobby has also reduced their 100,000 year comparison to a mere 30 years.
And of that 30 years, only 15 were actually warming.
That chart that you have there (created by the warmistas undoubtedly) makes it look like the global temperatures have sky rocketed. But then I did the math. According to the figures on the chart the mean global temperature has increased by 0.01% since 1980.
We’re Doomed!!!!! /sarc
Call out the Chicken Littles!
I also point out Hansen’s 1988 testimony, very especially the final graph. We are basically tracking his temperatures in Scenario C, except for the inconvenient fact that emissions are as high or higher than Scenario A.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/ClimateChangeHearing1988.pdf
He wants so desperately to live on Venus…
crakar24 says:
I think you were being ironic, but for those who think you meant it:
If you make a prediction:
You can be wrong and it will count against your scientific hypothesis, or you can be right and the prediction counts as confirmatory evidence (NB for certain readers: yes I know about Popper).
If you make a projection:
It won’t count against your hypothesis but neither will it count to your credit if it comes true. Your work is unverifiable and we might as well get our science from reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I guess I’m just plain stupid because I don’t know the difference between “projection” and “prediction”. Seems to me that both are trying to tell us what the future is going to be. ?
Anthony, It’s not a quote, it’s a paraphrase, and it is quite possible that the journalist converted something they heard into F from C. However, the figure you show does not support the idea that Hansen was projecting a ~1.1degC rise in twenty years – even scenario A only has ~0.8 deg C increase in 2005 compared to 1985. It is very likely that the journalist saw this figure, saw the anomaly scale, converted the temperature and missed out some ‘up to’ caveat that was almost certainly used in the testimony. But check the testimony – that should be available somewhere.
REPLY: The math still doesn’t work – and then there’s this article from Miami on the same day, where it is now 2-4 degrees.
Here Fahrenheit is used, but taking the middle of 3F for the following decade, we still haven’t reached that level either.
– Anthony
Does this not all fit in with the other predictions from the 1980’s such as southern Europe turning into a desert, climate refugees heading away from the tropics, New York and London flooding etc etc etc?
If Hansen were honourable he should resign, his predictions are not only out by 300% but are based on the incorrect premise that man made CO2 is to blame. If CO2 is to blame then the warming would be accelerating, not stopping and certainly not reversing.
Finding the difference: 0.55C – 0.18C = 0.37C
I don’t quite understand where that calc came from (subtract first five year average from the final aunnual average? huh?), but at any rate it is not correct.
The method to calc temp rise over a period is to fit a linear trend to the data, and use the slope of the line X the time period to get the rise. This results in 0.386 C or 0.695 F.
Hansen is still sucking wind on this, but it is important to be correct when pointing it out.
I’m waiting for his next Super El Nino prediction. If he makes it soon, we might get that triple dip La Nina we’ve been dreaming about.
REPLY: I’m using the column “Annual_Mean”, which is the yearly Annual Mean Temperature for each year.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.txt
But I see now, I made a typo I used .18 instead of .13 in the text of the article calc, but it is correct on the graph. Fixed now. Thanks for pointing it out.
– Anthony
James Hansen correctly predicted the Earth’s 2006 temperature to within 1.45C, that’s an approximate error margin of 1.45/288 which equates to just 0.5%.
That looks pretty darned good to me. Give the man a break!