Guest post by James Padgett
If the average person was asked to describe the runaway greenhouse effect, and given a bit of prep time, how would they do it? Most people would type it into their favorite search engine which would lead them to the Wikipedia article on the subject. They would read through it, try to memorize the basics, understand the fundamentals and then prepare a summary for their audience.
But how would a climate scientist do it? Specifically, how would the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies describe it? I expect he would rely on his past work, his models of Venus’ atmosphere, which he jerry-rigged to apply to Earth (yes, I learned about that from Wikipedia). Most assuredly he would cite the latest peer-reviewed work on the subject.
Right? Let’s take a look:
“…it gets warmer and warmer then the oceans begin to evaporate and water vapor is a very strong green house gas, even more powerful than carbon dioxide. So you can get to a situation where, it just, the oceans will begin to boil and the planet becomes, uhh, so hot that the ocean ends up in the atmosphere, and that happened to Venus…” (1)
Now compare James Hansen’s words with this passage:
“increasing the temperature and consequently increasing the evaporation of the ocean, leading eventually to the situation in which the oceans boiled, and all of the water vapor entered the atmosphere”
That certainly looks rather similar now doesn’t it? That second passage is from Wikipedia’s article on the runaway greenhouse effect – in the Venus section.
Of course, if Mr. Hansen had read down to the section about the Earth, then he would’ve noticed this:
“Potential runaway greenhouse effects on Earth may involve the carbon cycle, but unlike Venus will not involve boiling of the oceans.”
I know many schools and teachers will fail students who use Wikipedia as their source, but what does NASA do with employees that scare people by misquoting Wikipedia with the authority and prestige of their agency?
In any case, I look forward to the IPCC naming Wikipedia as a lead author and NASA using Wikipedia as a lead engineer. Well, that isn’t entirely fair, NASA depends on real flight, while the IPCC relies on “when pigs fly.”
Cheers,
James Padgett
References:
Origin of the Passage on Wikipedia – Apparently written by NASA employee and sci-fi writer Geoffrey Landis
Full Video of Hansen’s interview
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As I recall, George Bush was given sheer hell for trying to control this idiot. Should have fired him.
…..And I read, you can add this to the text: “The real survivors on Earth will
be the Penguins, because they can breed on the rocks of the Antarctis by
holding their eggs between the legs….
and I remember some time ago that they were honored with a festival: Rock
for the Penguins ….so its time for us to die out….the trilobites suffered it before….
Cheers JS
The new president should fire all the global warming kooks in the EPA, NASA, Energy Dept., ETC.
One shouldn’t try to muzzle old Jimmy. His effusive mumbling is mightily efficient at rendering him useless, all on its own. Is there any dross in the public record about the Penguin Summer Cruise? I notice a peculiar absence of any stories on the subject….perhaps the realization of the reversal of the Austral seasons?
When I was a government employee, one arrest would have resulted in a suspension, and two would have resulted in dismissal. How many times has this guy been arrested? Why is he still a government employee?
Having done an admittedly brief rummage on the topic of water on Venus a little while ago, my personal impression was that the science available regarding whether there ever was much more water on Venus than at present is mostly vague, largely unsupported speculation. The papers I found took data from quite brief satellite missions and attempted to apply the dubious science of paleoclimate proxy reconstructions, without of course any actual proxy variable, to try to justify wonderfully imaginative narratives of events which would have occurred long before humans even existed. Modern science hasn’t been able to provide a reasonably certain version of what was happening on this planet even a millennium ago, yet Mr. Hansen et al are sure they know what happened on a far distant planet possibly as far back as the birth of the solar system. Me, I’m not so sure.
The irritating part of this entire scam is that it’s creating a lot of paranoid ‘preppers’ and the attendant ‘prepper’ industry to supply them with whatever their doomsday fantasy demands. There are even TV shows that pander to this insanity – Doomsday Preppers, Doomsday Bunkers, etc. It’s like a giant Carny sideshow.
When do these guys spontaneously combust???
I have a similar concern about all the claims regarding the icecaps and glaciers “melting”.
We’re talking about ice at 40 degrees below freezing.
We’re talking about air temperatures rising a few tenths of a degree.
We’re NOT talking about “melting” in this conversation.
Set aside that ice at 39 to 35 degrees below freezing isn’t going to melt. We’re talking about how much heat can be extracted from AIR to provide heat-of-fusion to solid WATER.
Not much.
You want to talk about the increased probability of sublimation from warmer winds? Fine.
But let’s not pretend sea level will rise, polar bears will drown, and penguins will evolve flight due to “Melting”.
I couldn’t help but notice that creepy Jim-bo Hansen scarcely blinks during his video
They say that frequent blinking is a sign of evasion/prevarication
In this case, IN-frequent blinking while knowingly telling a lie must be a sing of pathology
And then there’s that stupid floppy hat – – – I rest my case
Venus,.. did you know that over the “equivalent pressure range” as Earth’s atmosphere, Venus’s atmospheric temperature is very close to 1.176x that of Earth (in K deg). This is EXACTLY what it should be if the distance from the sun was the ONLY DRIVER of global atmospheric temperature.
Yet Venus has 96.5% CO2 in its atmosphere, and Earth has 0.04%. !
hmmm !!!
The more I hear Hansen’s end of the world scenario repeated,
the more I think the guy handcuffing him needs to be wearing a white coat.
Very scary and untestable. From the Wikipedia article ‘Runaway greenhouse effect.
How did it start ?
What happened then ?
Our evidence is slipping away……
almost gone……
Bingo ! perfect scenario, scare the pants off people and get rid of the evidence.
Hansen MUST be fired by the next President. Mere retirement is not enough for this jerk.
It may be that Wiki was taking from the muppet, but same/same.
I wonder if science will ever quit using the term greenhouse gases as if they are all basically the same? H2O covers most of the IR spectrum…. all else, very narrow bands of little note.
My attention was drawn, earlier today, to this 1967 paper which explains surface temperatures on Venus, without the need to invoke the “greenhouse effect”
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1967ApJ…149..731S
The real kicker is the author of the paper…….
It is indeed a sad day when scientists become political activists, worse propagandists, or even worse, money whores.
WTF happened to science for science?
What happened to the pursuit of knowledge? Not for the knowledge that fit a preconceived notion?
How can anyone believe anything these money-grubbing, special-interest-funded, scientific whores ever have to say?
Wasn’t this EXACT same video already featured in a story on WUWT two months ago with reference to the EXACT same Wikipedia quote? This feels like déjà vu…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/12/quote-of-the-week-dr-james-hansen-of-nasa-giss-unhinged/
The only thing “boiling away” is Dr. Hansen’s reputation.
As the title of the book reads, “Men are from Mars, Hansen is from Venus”; or something to that effect…
Hansen is as Hansen does.
GEEZ you people are rank amateurs when you quote Hansen misquoting Wiki etc.
In Australia we have a Chief Climate change Commissioner appointed by our idiot govt who doesn’t need to quote anyone else because he really can dream up the most barking mad clueless nonsense all by himself. His name is Tim Flannery and in this interview he says GAIA ( the planet) will one day grow a brain and like ants it seems only some of us will be allowed to reproduce and others will just be workers etc etc.
Remember this specimen is the head man sent around OZ to explain AGW???? True I’m not lying, but anyway just watch this classic, it’s all there, the mad stare, the moronic smile, in fact the true blue totalitarian numbskull. Adolf, Mao, Stalin, PolPot, Lenin would all be so proud of our Timmy. But please after you’ve finished laughing say a little prayer for we poor Aussies and our economy when we introduce the co2 tax.
Call me a sceptic if you like, but isn’t Venus just a tad closer to the Sun than we are? And doesn’t the Sun’s radiation footprint vary according to inverse square of distance (at least from memory of school-day physics), so with Venus about 67 Million Miles versus Earth’s 93 Million Miles – that’s about 72%.
Inverse square logic using my pocket calculator yields 92% more heat reaching Venus than Earth – ie nearly twice as much heat input
Now why is it hotter there?
Someone please correct my schoolboy physics – or give me a grant !!!
Sorry about broken link in my post @ur momisugly 9:01pm.
Copy the url into your header bar, then click on Google search. The first link takes you to the paper. Any other way simply takes you to the adsabs main page. Weird.
The sheer arrogance.
@Daniel H Yes, the video was shown before, but not how he seemingly paraphrased wikipedia in his answer. There were two wikipedia quotes, one was shown before, but more importantly I also showed the one that uncannily tracked his spiel on the runaway greenhouse effect.
@GeologyJim IIRC Liars will often not blink while they are telling a lie and then rapidly blink right after telling a whopper. I’m going off memory here.