I was stunned by Dr. James Hansen’s response in this article in the Virgina Informer
Excerpt:
“For this fall,” the organizer wrote in his e-mail to Mr. Hansen, “we are hoping to host a debate on global climate change and its implications. Patrick Michaels has agreed to come, and my organization would like you to come and debate Dr. Michaels in Williamsburg. The date is very flexible, and we can tailor the day of the debate completely to your schedule. We will be able to pay for your travel expenses and offer you an honorarium for your time. Please let me know if you would be interested.”
Mr. Hansen’s response was, simply, “not interested.”
His reply — devoid of any salutation, punctuation, capitalization or signature — came an hour after Mr. Katz sent his original e-mail.
I suppose for Dr. Hansen, debating and defending your work is “futile“?
In my opinion, demonstrating arrogance in correspondence and ignoring reasonable debate doesn’t do much to bolster confidence in the man’s work.
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What are we all worried about? As Hathaway says about the lack of sunspots to date; ‘We have already observed a few sunspots from the next solar cycle,” he says. (See Solar Cycle 24 Begins.) “This suggests the solar cycle is progressing normally.”
Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, Ph.D. has already put a big hole in the data that has been used by the IPCC from Ice Core samples relating to CO2 (essentially around cherry picking 53% of the readings for the “early” CO2 levels) and I’m sure Hansen will know this too. It’s hard to debate against the correct analysis of the facts.
thirdrobot if you want to believe in space aliens it is of no concern to me. No debate is necessary. Its a free country and you can believe whatever you want. However if you start convincing congress to extract trillions of dollars from taxpayers for an alien defence system, well then we need to have the debate.
Has anyone heard of a guy called Lyndon LaRouche?
Perhaps science should be debated primarily in journals and conferences, but climate science has unquestionably been dragged into the public/political/policy realm. Hansen himself is partly responsible, if only by calling for prosecution of oil execs. It’s only fitting that he defend his views in a public forum.
“Has anyone heard of a guy called Lyndon LaRouche?”
Isn’t he Ron Paul’s twin that was separated at birth?
REPLY: Ok let’s leave all the political folks out of this thread please
Hansen spoke at a small private college in my town earlier this year. I’m not sure what he was paid, but I’m sure it was more than a thousand dollars. I did not attend as I knew he would not take questions.
@Pierre
Funny how we keep coming back to Theodor Landscheidt and the approaching solar minimum.
Landscheidt predicted minimum solar output for 2030 with 2045-2050 as the global temperature bottom as the oceans lose their thermal inertia.
Both Abdussamatow and Landscheidt are in the same ballpark.
Worrisome.
As a tax payer, I just got ripped off again…..Dear Mr. President, fire Jim Hansen on Monday morning.
Leebert,
You make a good point about pooring (sic) the money into computer simulations rather than data collection and analysis.
It’s so much easier to surf at a desktop than do real work. And, the bureaucrats forking out the monies get computer proof that things were done. Imagine these scenarios:
1. EPA bureaucrat to GISS guy: “What do I have to show for that $25 million? GISS guy: “Here’s the code, it’s yours. Also, look at these curves (hmmmm, nice, shuffles papers) no, these curves. See how they show …
2. EPA bureaucrat to field geologist: “What do I have to show for that $25 million? Field geologist “I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense. Theory sez but I’m puzzled…Perhaps I should have gone a couple of miles South
3. Oceanographer to EPA bureaucrat: “Here’s my application for the Rachel Carson scholarship to study nematodes EPA guy: “Do they cause global warming?”
[…] Hansen: “not interested” I was stunned by Dr. James Hansen’s response in this article in the Virgina Informer Excerpt: “For this […] […]
Joel Shore: “The appropriate forum to debate science is the peer-reviewed literature. Usually it is the losing side in the debate in this venue that then asks for debates in the public sphere instead.”
Very true. I have no particular problem with public debates about scientific subjects as long as they are not confused with the actual practice of science. In this regard, sceptics who demand debate typically claim a desire for the public audience to hear ‘both sides’ but fail to mention the aim of such an exercise.
Since the science is not going to be decided by public debate, the aim must be to demonstrate to onlookers that there are dissenting views and to gain support for those views. In other words, such demands are a political exercise, and not a desire to clarify the science.
Other evidence that scepticism is on a losing streak scientifically are hoax claims, when no sceptic has any intention of following through these claims, and revenge fantasies, which offer a type of comfort to losers as they imagine all the bad stuff that could happen to their enemies.
(As an aside, it’s interesting that Hansen is the climate scientist who most resembles the sceptics’ paragon of the scientific method: Galileo. Both men offer a positive, counter-intuitive theory, both are certain of their position, somewhat acerbic and dogmatic, and ready to mix it in non-scientific fields — religion for Galileo and politics for Hansen. Hansen should make sure he has friends in high places in case the political tide turns against him.)
What are Dr. Hansen’s theories ?????
NOT INTERESTED.
There is nothing wrong with models, IF you treat them as models and not oracles. Economic models are useful but you’ll probably lose your shirt if you use them to bet on the stock market. Climate and weather models have too many ill defined parameters to make the kinds of predictions that Hansen is espousing.
And why would anyone with total faith in their belief (Hansen) debate? Someone with that kind of faith accepts only facts that support their beliefs and anything that does not is either wrong or irrelevant, so how can there be a debate? Hansen’s only interest is be in proselytizing not discussion.
Sorry, I was trying stay in my old thread, but I could not resist- just one post here.
From what one can find from William and Mary and other sources, Mr. Katz is a student, not a staff person (to graduate in 09). I cannot find a society named “Academic Freedom and Diversity” in their web; it could be an unofficial society established by a few students (which of course anyone can do). The title “Director of the WM Society for Academic Freedom and Diversity” seems highly misleading to me – usually those titles are for paid staff, not for students. I have a fear that there is more here than what we know.
I strongly advise caution (like requiring pdf letter with appropriate letterhead), before the AGW skeptics in this forum to give their support on this issue. Of course, I could be wrong, but I don’t like to see the potential to diminish your cause by being in the wrong side with an issues unrelated to the main scientific theme.
In any case, if Hansen accepts every invitation from informal student organizations for debates (if that is what this is), he will not have any time to do anything else.
Way off the topic (or maybe on the metatopic)….
There were 114 comments when I started this one. That seems a lot.
Anthony, do you know off the top of your head what the biggest attractor was? What the topic was?
Seems like you are being quoted around in a number of places.
Good stuff. (Too bad it won’t buy groceries.)
REPLY: I’m not sure I understand your question.
Gore is already considered a laughing stock for his comments about inventing the Internet. Once the full gravity of the failure of Global Warming is widely understood, Gore will be remembered by history as nothing more than a joke. And with him, Jim Hansen.
Brendan H,
The trouble is that Galileo has been empirically shown to be right. Whereas Hansen has been empirically shown to be wrong.
” if Hansen accepts every invitation from informal student organizations for debates (if that is what this is), he will not have any time to do anything else.”
Eureka! Problem solved.
I lost respect for Jim Hansen when I discovered that he mischaracterized portions of an earlier paper of his (circa 1988) presenting model scenarios of future tempeartire changes, so as to make it appear that the model was more accurate than it was. Specifically, in the late 1980s, Hansen published a paper presenting the results of three model runs, each run assuming a particular forcing scenario. Going from memory here, the first, scenario A, assumed continued CO2 growth at the then exponential rate along with no major volcanic eruptions. Scenario B assumed a couple volcanic eruptions and modest CO2 curtailment efforts. Scenario C assumed serious CO2 curtailment efforts. Hansen also testified before Congress that scenario A was the “business as usual” scenario.
Michael Crichton wrote a book about 15 years later comparing scenario A in the model study to what actually occured and said that Hansen was 600% off and inquired why anyone would continue to give him any credence.
In response to Crichton’s book, Hansen published a paper accusing Crichton of taking his model results out of context. Hansen claimed that in his original paper, he specifically characterized scenario A as being “on the high side of reality” and that scenario B was the “most realistic.” Hansen then compared actual temperature data to the predicted scenarios and found a good fit with scenario B.
I actually went on line and got a hold of the original 1980s paper that presented the three scenarios. What it ACTUALLY said with respect to scenario A was that it “must EVENTUALLY be on the high side of reality DUE TO RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS.” In other words, and particularly taken in conjuntion with Hansen’s contemporaneous Congressional testimony about scenario A being the “business as usual scenario”, Hansen was saying that scenario A was the projected path of current emissions but that at some distant point in the future, as we run out of oil and other fossil fuels, the temperatures of emissions scenario A would be higher than what the real temperatures would be. But Crichton was evaluating the first 15 years of the model run when we certainly weren’t facing any resource scarcities. His comparison of actual temperatures to those of scenario A was therefore quite rational.
Aside from Hansen’s deceptiveness in characterizing his earlier study, what also struck me was that he didn’t dig up the model, plug in the actual emissions, the actual number of volcanic emissions, etc., so as to see how well the 1988 model correctly simulated the climate response to the forcings that actually occurred. In other words, he didn’t really test the capabilities of the model. Instead, he just plotted the actual temperatures as an overlay on the model projections and asserted that it was consistent with scenario B, without first establishing that the assumptions built into scenario B actually occurred. This omission spoke volumes about Hans’s confidence in the accuracy of the model itself. I also noticed that the actual temperatures were just as consistent with scenario C (drastic emissions cuts) as it was scenario B.
I left the experience with the impresison that Hansen was behaving, not like a scientist, but instead like a lawyer (and I would know, I am one).
Smokey, you say: “Next, for those in need of peer reviewed papers falsifying the CO2/AGW hypothesis, here is a good [and unrefuted] one to start with: click”. Wow! Talk about confirmation bias in action. There are hundreds of peer reviewed papers each year that support AGW but because you find one that doesn’t, you think this falsifies AGW? And, it is particularly strange how, amongst a group of people who are so suspicious of models, there would be so little questioning of a particularly simplistic one when it happens to give the result that you desire. As for Schwartz’s paper being unrefuted, it was only published last year, but here is a comment on it, apparently now in press (according to Annan’s website) that pretty much tears it to pieces: http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frsgc/research/d5/jdannan/comment_on_schwartz.pdf
Brendan H:
You’re just arguing. Where’s the science?
Here’s some pretty definitive scientific proof that Hansen is flat wrong: click
And here: click
And here: click
And here: click
Hansen is absolutely terrified of engaging in a real one-on-one debate because he would be publicly discredited; the empirical [real world] results directly contradict his falsified CO2 hypothesis. Yours too, by the way… unless you can demonstrate that the global temperature is rising with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. Good luck with that.
Oh…And, I just discovered that a preprint of Schwartz’s response to the various comments on his paper is available here: http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs/HeatCapCommentResponse.pdf
In it, he revises upward his estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity from the 1.1 +- 0.5 C to 1.9 +- 1.0 C, so while the central value is still on the low side of most estimates, it now overlaps significantly the IPCC range of 2 to 4.5 C. (My guess is that most of his critics would argue that Schwartz’s time constant for the system…and thus his climate sensitivity…still seems to be on the low side of what seems most realistic from other considerations.)
Jimmy Hansen’s opinion on AGW? Sorry, “not interested”.
it’s interesting that Hansen is the climate scientist who most resembles the sceptics’ paragon of the scientific method: Galileo. Both men offer a positive, counter-intuitive theory, both are certain of their position, somewhat acerbic and dogmatic, and ready to mix it in non-scientific field
Except that Galileo’s theories are holding up, and Hansen’s are collapsing badly, after a mere 2 decades. Hansen is a pop tart going down for the last time.