Hansen: "not interested"

OT on Geomagnetic Field by way of sondrak one of my favorite filters:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080630-earth-core.html

Can’t say I blame him. He’s probably not interested because he knows there’s no point in holding a debate when everyone in the room has already made up their mind. Would this be anything more than another occasion for personal attacks like the ones on this blog? Sounds about as interesting as a debate between Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump.

“There are very good reasons why policymakers have decided to use organizations like the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences to inform them on the state of the science in a given area rather than trying to glean it from debates or other such forums.”
There are also very good reasons for those groups to openly convey the uncertainties in the science. The subject of evolution has cropped up here, and no one seems to have remembered that many very BAD decisions were made by policymakers based on an incomplete understanding of that science. Have you forgotten that evolution was twisted by Hitler to justify his “Master race” ideal? Similar reasoning was advocated by certain policymakers in our own country. There were papers in scientific journals that gave “evidence” for the intellectual inferiority of certain races, based on the evolutionary principles of the time. Fortunately, that science has advanced, though I’m sure there were those who argued “the science is settled” 70 years ago.
When any government or academic body creates a policy which will have far-reaching impacts on the populace, it is the right and obligation of the populace to examine the veracity of that body’s evidence through any available forum. This elitist attitude that Hansen is too great a personage for debate, or that only a select few “climate experts” have the right to examine and comment on the data does nothing to advance understanding or increase the well-being of humanity. What special skill or talent does Hansen have that other scientists do not possess? He has access to data. He interprets data. He has access to really big NASA computers.

joel shore,
We’ve already been given the “smoking gun” by Hansen himself in his own words. This was “proof” of AGW. This was the basis for IPCC AR4 and is directly referenced.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2005/Imbalance_20050415.pdf
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2005/2005_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
“This energy imbalance is the ‘smoking gun’ that we have been looking for”
and
Our climate model, driven mainly by increasing human-made greenhouse
gases and aerosols, among other forcings, calculates that Earth is now absorbing
0.85 T 0.15 watts per square meter more energy from the Sun than it
is emitting to space. This imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of
increasing ocean heat content over the past 10 years. Implications include (i) the
expectation of additional global warming of about 0.6-C without further change
of atmospheric composition; (ii) the confirmation of the climate system’s lag
in responding to forcings, implying the need for anticipatory actions to avoid
any specified level of climate change; and (iii) the likelihood of acceleration of
ice sheet disintegration and sea level rise.
Now Hansen and IPCC must account for why Earth is NOT “absorbing 0.85 T 0.15 watts per square meter more energy from the Sun than it is emitting to space.”
The reason Hansen and other CO2 AGW demagogues will not publicly debate this issue is because observational evidence, the bane of “consensus”, disagrees with their conclusions.
It doesn’t matter how many “peer reviewed” articles exist for either side. If the hypothesis cannot be supported by experimentation and/or observational evidence, it is just that, a hypothesis. Many of the pro-AGW “peer reviewed” articles use climate models as evidence for which they themselves are a hypothesis.
Is using a hypothesis to form a hypothesis part of the scientific method? I think not.

I have several thoughts running around in the unscientific head of mine.
One is that Dr. Hansen is very rude to some one that has bent over backwards to attempt to accommodate him.
Dr. Hansen has been for years and still is attempting to conceal his methodology. (Yes he did produce some codes after waiting several weeks to make them more “readable to the public”) So far they have been unreplicable.
Dr. Hansen is a government employee spending government taxpayer funds and must be accountable for them. I expect that when the accounting comes there will be some short falls.
If the raw data is no longer available for the historical record where did it go. Was it destroyed by convoluted algorithmic corrections? Why were no data sets archived? GISS or NOAA
Why should I trust the peer reviewed process when I have read the Wegman report.
I can understand Why Dr. Hansen doesnt want to debate. He hasn’t had to answer any serious scientific questions thus far why start now. I believe that our government has let us down by not demanding that all the science be put on the table. There are other scientists that have views that do not agree with Dr. Hansen and in his public funded role he is responsible to look at all the science and he refused to at least publicly acknowledge that there is any. Dr Hansen should be directed to by his employers while he is supposed to be in the public trust to defend his conclusions against all questions leveled by other scientists. This hasn’t been done. It has been to long since this department has been audited. It is time that this director and his department should have to defend their position. Let the audit begin.
You never know he may be correct but let’s be sure.
Bill Derryberry

“PS – I challenge everyone on the internet to debate me on the existence and interactions of aliens. I am very flexible on the date, but it needs to be by my residence in Washington, DC. If you do not accept then clearly aliens are among us!”
In order for this to be a valid point, you must clearly be a world-reknowned expert in alien research at NASA, with numerous essays, papers, and reports in the peer-reviewed and popular literature. You must also have received large monetary awards from politicians and benefactors for your work in alien culture and communication. And I’m sure you have been warning us for over 20 years about the “alien tipping points”, and have recently excoriated public officials and private citizens for ignoring the alien problem. And you certainly have had a major role in popularizing your alien theories with you starring role in oscar winning documentaries (like, say, “The Inconvenient Truth … Is Out There!”).

I find it ironic that the similarities between the debate about AGW and the debate between materialistic evolutionary theories vs. design is lost on most people here.
Keith posted above about lack of evidence of gradualism, and was promptly put in his place by a moderator claiming punctuated equilibrium – as if the problem isn’t real. The crux of the debate though is about mechanism. What is causally adequate to produce the engineering marvels we see in the biological world (especially sub-celluar). In my opinion (and that of many others), material evolutionary processes are completely impotent to account for novelty and innovation.
However, there is such a strong Darwinian orthodoxy supported by political, cultural, academic and financial pillars that a defense of data is practically unnecessary. As in the AGW debate, it’s settled. Don’t tell that to the heretics in Altenberg this month…
Point taken~Charles the moderator, however, gradualism is a straw man and that’s all I pointed out. On another note, I’m guessing Anthony will prohibit a debate on evolution at this site.
REPLY: That’s correct, evolution and climate science are separate topics, and I have no interest in evolutionary debate here. – Anthony

“The appropriate forum to debate science is the peer-reviewed literature”
So what happens when one gathers a group of a dozen or so like-minded cronies who “peer review” each other’s work? We all give each other glowing praise and maybe point out an error in grammar or punctuation here. Any criticism from someone outside the group would be ignored or rejected outright. Oh, and we can forget about enforcing any data archival requirements by the core group, but anyone challenging our conclusions must abide by the rules to the letter and any failure to do so means the complete rejection of any points they might raise.
Now, how is that for “peer review” … it is fine as long as they get to select the reviewing peers.

Crosspatch is correct. The NAS chief statistician examined the inter-relationships of all the GW types involved in the hockeystick debacle, and guess what! In exceedingly non-scientific terms, it was a giant circle jerk! All the published papers were basically reviewed by others who then would go on to co-author papers with those whom they reviewed, who in turn would be reviewed by their former co-author! What a great racket!

I am not going to be able to persuade you to accept the science any more than I can persuade a creationist to accept the science behind evolution.
No, trollbot, you can’t persuade us to accept your AGW religion for the simple reason that it doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. Now, run back to your troll cave. There you go.

Brendan:
Amen comrade! (Oh wait, they weren’t religious)

Perhaps it’s simply that Dr. Hansen is not solely motivated by money, and therefore how much is offered is irrelevant; and doesn’t care to debate with “a vocal global warming skeptic” anymore than he cares to debate the sphericity of the planet with the Flat Earth Society?