The Temperature of Science (PDF available here)
James Hansen
My experience with global temperature data over 30 years provides insight about how the science and its public perception have changed. In the late 1970s I became curious about well known analyses of global temperature change published by climatologist J. Murray Mitchell: why were his estimates for large-scale temperature change restricted to northern latitudes? As a planetary scientist, it seemed to me there were enough data points in the Southern Hemisphere to allow useful estimates both for that hemisphere and for the global average. So I requested a tape of meteorological station data from Roy Jenne of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who obtained the data from records of the World Meteorological Organization, and I made my own analysis.
Fast forward to December 2009, when I gave a talk at the Progressive Forum in Houston Texas. The organizers there felt it necessary that I have a police escort between my hotel and the forum where I spoke. Days earlier bloggers reported that I was probably the hacker who broke into East Anglia computers and stole e-mails. Their rationale: I was not implicated in any of the pirated e-mails, so I must have eliminated incriminating messages before releasing the hacked emails.
The next day another popular blog concluded that I deserved capital punishment. Web chatter on this topic, including indignation that I was coming to Texas, led to a police escort.
How did we devolve to this state? Any useful lessons? Is there still interesting science in analyses of surface temperature change? Why spend time on it, if other groups are also doing it? First I describe the current monthly updates of global surface temperature at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Then I show graphs illustrating scientific inferences and issues. Finally I respond to questions in the above paragraph.
Current Updates
Each month we receive, electronically, data from three sources: weather data for several thousand meteorological stations, satellite observations of sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research station measurements. These three data sets are the input for a program that produces a global map of temperature anomalies relative to the mean for that month during the period of climatology, 1951-1980.
The analysis method has been described fully in a series of refereed papers (Hansen et al., 1981, 1987, 1999, 2001, 2006). Successive papers updated the data and in some cases made minor improvements to the analysis, for example, in adjustments to minimize urban effects. The analysis method works in terms of temperature anomalies, rather than absolute temperature, because anomalies present a smoother geographical field than temperature itself. For example, when New York City has an unusually cold winter, it is likely that Philadelphia is also colder than normal. The distance over which temperature anomalies are highly correlated is of the order of 1000 kilometers at middle and high latitudes, as we illustrated in our 1987 paper.
Although the three input data streams that we use are publicly available from the
organizations that produce them, we began preserving the complete input data sets each month in April 2008. These data sets, which cover the full period of our analysis, 1880-present, are available to parties interested in performing their own analysis or checking our analysis. The computer program that performs our analysis is published on the GISS web site.
Responsibilities for our updates are as follows. Ken Lo runs programs to add in the new data and reruns the analysis with the expanded data. Reto Ruedy maintains the computer program that does the analysis and handles most technical inquiries about the analysis. Makiko Sato updates graphs and posts them on the web. I examine the temperature data monthly and write occasional discussions about global temperature change.
Scientific Inferences and Issues
Temperature data – example of early inferences. Figure 1 shows the current GISS
analysis of global annual-mean and 5-year running-mean temperature change (left) and the hemispheric temperature changes (right). These graphs are based on the data now available, including ship and satellite data for ocean regions.
Figure 1 illustrates, with a longer record, a principal conclusion of our first analysis of temperature change (Hansen et al., 1981). That analysis, based on data records through December 1978, concluded that data coverage was sufficient to estimate global temperature change. We also concluded that temperature change was qualitatively different in the two hemispheres. The Southern Hemisphere had more steady warming through the century while the Northern Hemisphere had distinct cooling between 1940 and 1975.
It required more than a year to publish the 1981 paper, which was submitted several times to Science and Nature. At issue were both the global significance of the data and the length of the paper. Later, in our 1987 paper, we proved quantitatively that the station coverage was sufficient for our conclusions – the proof being obtained by sampling (at the station locations) a 100-year data set of a global climate model that had realistic spatial-temporal variability. The different hemispheric records in the mid-twentieth century have never been convincingly explained. The most likely explanation is atmospheric aerosols, fine particles in the air, produced by fossil fuel burning. Aerosol atmospheric lifetime is only several days, so fossil fuel aerosols were confined mainly to the Northern Hemisphere, where most fossil fuels were burned. Aerosols have a cooling effect that still today is estimated to counteract about half of the warming effect of human-made greenhouse gases. For the few decades after World War II, until the oil embargo in the 1970s, fossil fuel use expanded exponentially at more than 4%/year, likely causing the growth of aerosol climate forcing to exceed that of greenhouse gases
Flaws in temperature analysis. Figure 2 illustrates an error that developed in the GISS analysis when we introduced, in our 2001 paper, an improvement in the United States temperature record. The change consisted of using the newest USHCN (United States Historical Climatology Network) analysis for those U.S. stations that are part of the USHCN network. This improvement, developed by NOAA researchers, adjusted station records that included station moves or other discontinuities. Unfortunately, I made an error by failing to recognize that the station records we obtained electronically from NOAA each month, for these same stations, did not contain the adjustments. Thus there was a discontinuity in 2000 in the records of those stations, as the prior years contained the adjustment while later years did not. The error was readily corrected, once it was recognized. Figure 2 shows the global and U.S. temperatures with and without the error. The error averaged 0.15°C over the contiguous 48 states, but these states cover only 1½ percent of the globe, making the global error negligible.
However, the story was embellished and distributed to news outlets throughout the country. Resulting headline: NASA had cooked the temperature books – and once the error was corrected 1998 was no longer the warmest year in the record, instead being supplanted by 1934.
This was nonsense, of course. The small error in global temperature had no effect on the ranking of different years. The warmest year in our global temperature analysis was still 2005.
Conceivably confusion between global and U.S. temperatures in these stories was inadvertent. But the estimate for the warmest year in the U.S. had not changed either. 1934 and 1998 were tied as the warmest year (Figure 2b) with any difference (~0.01°C) at least an order of magnitude smaller than the uncertainty in comparing temperatures in the 1930s with those in the 1990s.
The obvious misinformation in these stories, and the absence of any effort to correct the stories after we pointed out the misinformation, suggests that the aim may have been to create distrust or confusion in the minds of the public, rather than to transmit accurate information. That, of course, is a matter of opinion. I expressed my opinion in two e-mails that are on my Columbia University web site
Click to access 20070810_LightUpstairs.pdf
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2007/20070816_realdeal.pdf.
We thought we had learned the necessary lessons from this experience. We put our
analysis program on the web. Everybody was free to check the program, if they were concerned that any data “cooking” may be occurring.
Unfortunately, another data problem occurred in 2008. In one of the three incoming data streams, the one for meteorological stations, the November 2008 data for many Russian stations was a repeat of October 2008 data. It was not our data record, but we properly had to accept the blame for the error, because the data was included in our analysis. Occasional flaws in input data are normal in any analysis, and the flaws are eventually noticed and corrected if they are
substantial. Indeed, we have an effective working relationship with NOAA – when we spot data that appears questionable we inform the appropriate people at the National Climate Data Center – a relationship that has been scientifically productive.
This specific data flaw was a case in point. The quality control program that NOAA runs on the data from global meteorological stations includes a check for repetition of data: if two consecutive months have identical data the data is compared with that at the nearest stations. If it appears that the repetition is likely to be an error, the data is eliminated until the original data source has verified the data. The problem in 2008 escaped this quality check because a change in their program had temporarily, inadvertently, omitted that quality check.
The lesson learned here was that even a transient data error, however quickly corrected provides fodder for people who are interested in a public relations campaign, rather than science.
That means we cannot put the new data each month on our web site and check it at our leisure, because, however briefly a flaw is displayed, it will be used to disinform the public. Indeed, in this specific case there was another round of “fraud” accusations on talk shows and other media all around the nation.
Another lesson learned. Subsequently, to minimize the chance of a bad data point
slipping through in one of the data streams and temporarily affecting a publicly available data product, we now put the analyzed data up first on a site that is not visible to the public. This allows Reto, Makiko, Ken and me to examine maps and graphs of the data before the analysis is put on our web site – if anything seems questionable, we report it back to the data providers for them to resolve. Such checking is always done before publishing a paper, but now it seems to be necessary even for routine transitory data updates. This process can delay availability of our data analysis to users for up to several days, but that is a price that must be paid to minimize disinformation.
Is it possible to totally eliminate data flaws and disinformation? Of course not. The fact that the absence of incriminating statements in pirated e-mails is taken as evidence of wrongdoing provides a measure of what would be required to quell all criticism. I believe that the steps that we now take to assure data integrity are as much as is reasonable from the standpoint of the use of our time and resources.
Strong correlation of global SST with the Nino index is obvious. Global land-ocean
temperature is noisier than the SST, but correlation with the Nino index is also apparent for global temperature. On average, global temperature lags the Nino index by about 3 months.
During 2008 and 2009 I received many messages, sometimes several per day informing me that the Earth is headed into its next ice age. Some messages include graphs extrapolating cooling trends into the future. Some messages use foul language and demand my resignation. Of the messages that include any science, almost invariably the claim is made that the sun controls Earth’s climate, the sun is entering a long period of diminishing energy output, and the sun is the cause of the cooling trend.
Indeed, it is likely that the sun is an important factor in climate variability. Figure 4 shows data on solar irradiance for the period of satellite measurements. We are presently in the deepest most prolonged solar minimum in the period of satellite data. It is uncertain whether the solar irradiance will rebound soon into a more-or-less normal solar cycle – or whether it might remain at a low level for decades, analogous to the Maunder Minimum, a period of few sunspots that may have been a principal cause of the Little Ice Age.
The direct climate forcing due to measured solar variability, about 0.2 W/m2, is
comparable to the increase in carbon dioxide forcing that occurs in about seven years, using recent CO2 growth rates. Although there is a possibility that the solar forcing could be amplified by indirect effects, such as changes of atmospheric ozone, present understanding suggests only a small amplification, as discussed elsewhere (Hansen 2009). The global temperature record (Figure 1) has positive correlation with solar irradiance, with the amplitude of temperature variation being approximately consistent with the direct solar forcing. This topic will become clearer as the records become longer, but for that purpose it is important that the temperature record be as precise as possible.
Frequently heard fallacies are that “global warming stopped in 1998” or “the world has been getting cooler over the past decade”. These statements appear to be wishful thinking – it would be nice if true, but that is not what the data show. True, the 1998 global temperature jumped far above the previous warmest year in the instrumental record, largely because 1998 was affected by the strongest El Nino of the century. Thus for the following several years the global temperature was lower than in 1998, as expected.
However, the 5-year and 11-year running mean global temperatures (Figure 3b) have continued to increase at nearly the same rate as in the past three decades. There is a slight downward tick at the end of the record, but even that may disappear if 2010 is a warm year.
Indeed, given the continued growth of greenhouse gases and the underlying global warming trend (Figure 3b) there is a high likelihood, I would say greater than 50 percent, that 2010 will be the warmest year in the period of instrumental data. This prediction depends in part upon the continuation of the present moderate El Nino for at least several months, but that is likely.
Furthermore, the assertion that 1998 was the warmest year is based on the East Anglia – British Met Office temperature analysis. As shown in Figure 1, the GISS analysis has 2005 as the warmest year. As discussed by Hansen et al. (2006) the main difference between these analyses is probably due to the fact that British analysis excludes large areas in the Arctic and Antarctic where observations are sparse. The GISS analysis, which extrapolates temperature anomalies as far as 1200 km, has more complete coverage of the polar areas. The extrapolation introduces uncertainty, but there is independent information, including satellite infrared measurements and reduced Arctic sea ice cover, which supports the existence of substantial positive temperature anomalies in those regions.
In any case, issues such as these differences between our analyses provide a reason for having more than one global analysis. When the complete data sets are compared for the different analyses it should be possible to isolate the exact locations of differences and likely gain further insights.
Summary
The nature of messages that I receive from the public, and the fact that NASA
Headquarters received more than 2500 inquiries in the past week about our possible “manipulation” of global temperature data, suggest that the concerns are more political than scientific. Perhaps the messages are intended as intimidation, expected to have a chilling effect on researchers in climate change.
The recent “success” of climate contrarians in using the pirated East Anglia e-mails to cast doubt on the reality of global warming* seems to have energized other deniers. I am now inundated with broad FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests for my correspondence, with substantial impact on my time and on others in my office. I believe these to be fishing expeditions, aimed at finding some statement(s), likely to be taken out of context, which they would attempt to use to discredit climate science.
There are lessons from our experience about care that must be taken with data before it is made publicly available. But there is too much interesting science to be done to allow intimidation tactics to reduce our scientific drive and output. We can take a lesson from my 5- year-old grandson who boldly says “I don’t quit, because I have never-give-up fighting spirit!”
Click to access 20091130_FightingSpirit.pdf
There are other researchers who work more extensively on global temperature analyses than we do – our main work concerns global satellite observations and global modeling – but there are differences in perspectives, which, I suggest, make it useful to have more than one analysis. Besides, it is useful to combine experience working with observed temperature together with our work on satellite data and climate models. This combination of interests is likely to help provide some insights into what is happening with global climate and information on the data that are needed to understand what is happening. So we will be keeping at it.
*By “success” I refer to their successful character assassination and swift-boating. My interpretation of the e-mails is that some scientists probably became exasperated and frustrated by contrarians – which may have contributed to some questionable judgment. The way science works, we must make readily available the input data that we use, so that others can verify our analyses. Also, in my opinion, it is a mistake to be too concerned about contrarian publications – some bad papers will slip through the peer-review process, but overall assessments by the National Academies, the IPCC, and scientific organizations sort the wheat from the chaff.
The important point is that nothing was found in the East Anglia e-mails altering the reality and magnitude of global warming in the instrumental record. The input data for global temperature analyses are widely available, on our web site and elsewhere. If those input data could be made to yield a significantly different global temperature change, contrarians would certainly have done that – but they have not.
References
Frölich, C. 2006: Solar irradiance variability since 1978. Space Science Rev., 248, 672-673.
Hansen, J., D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, and G. Russell, 1981: Climate
impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Science, 213, 957-966.
Hansen, J.E., and S. Lebedeff, 1987: Global trends of measured surface air temperature. J.
Geophys. Res., 92, 13345-13372.
Hansen, J., R. Ruedy, J. Glascoe, and Mki. Sato, 1999: GISS analysis of surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 104, 30997-31022.
Hansen, J.E., R. Ruedy, Mki. Sato, M. Imhoff, W. Lawrence, D. Easterling, T. Peterson, and T. Karl, 2001: A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 106, 23947-23963.
Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, R. Ruedy, K. Lo, D.W. Lea, and M. Medina-Elizade, 2006: Global
temperature change. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 103, 14288-14293.
Hansen, J. 2009: “Storms of My Grandchildren.” Bloomsbury USA, New York. (304 pp.)
Hansen is bragging about smearing UHI contaminated data across 1200km.
The climate of Ullapool, Scotland is not influenced greatly by Catania, Sicily, and most people would be clever enough to recognize that.
michel (23:34:00) :
…
Prof Hansen, unfortunately, in his role as activist, is a contributor to this problem. He needs to get back to science and away from activism.
If he’s right about the science then under the circumstances the activism is justified, isn’t it? In that case he’s part of the solution, not a problem.
Hansen assembles a cogent argument, but there is one huge point that he avoids. When he began urging people into civil disobedience and engaging in it himself he damaged his credibility as a dispassionate scientist.
“… Capitol Climate Action, planned for March 2 in Washington, D.C., calls for “Mass Civil Disobedience at the Coal-Fired Capitol Power Plant,” and leading climate scientist James Hansen has just issued a video inviting mass participation.”
While it is heartening to see people get so caught up in an issue that they will go to extreme measures, when a person descends into civil disobedience they have to accept that the conclusion that others will draw is that a person willing to break the law will have no problem willfully adjusting data and overlooking counterarguments to make their points and achieve their aims. Based on what medical researchers know about how bias can creep into drug trials unless double blind studies are conducted; it is an unavoidable scientific conclusion that James Hansen political views about the importance and urgency of his research has compromised his ability to competently handle, adjust, archive, share, contemplate, analyze, or homogenize data without introducing unwitting bias if not outright willful manipulation.
Those that use civil disobedience have to expect and be prepared accept the consequences of their acts, be it fines, jail or a diminution of reputation. It is safe to disregard any statement James Hansen makes other than that he feels passionately about what he thinks.
To Bob Tisdale (02:13:37) :
So that’s why Mr. Hanson uses the example for dummies: “New York” as being comparable in trend to “Philadelphia”, to demonstrate the “high correlation” between “neigboring stations”. These costal stations are unlikely affected by the multiyear effects caused by climate shifts caused by the sun -El-Nino – La Nina – cloud cover machine [my simplification] as discribed so well in your blog. But how about Arctic, Asian, African and South American stations, and so on…
So why should we laymen trust Mr. Hanson and his correlation demonstration for dummies when people like Bob Tisdale and Anthony Watts discuss so many facts that seem to be ignored by Hanson:
God’s creation = natural climate variability = chaff?
Global warming by human activities = wheat? Trouble is there seems to be far too much noise – err – ignored chaff blurring the view for that wheat they are looking for since the invention of the threshing machine IPCC.
The line about “frivolous FOI requests” has come up in a number of MSM stories. Strange that they never found frivolous requests newsworthy when Democrat supporters were inundating the Alaska government with 20 to 30 a day as a means of harassing Sarah Palin.
–“there is a high likelihood, I would say greater than 50 percent, that 2010 will be the warmest year in the period of instrumental data.”
I’d feel pretty confident making statements like this when I can change the actual temperature to match my predictions.
Dr Hansen deftly played the Victim Card. He won’t be the last, I guarantee it.
….oh and then of course it was only when an amateur 9 year old climatologist pointed out that on Youtube that the US rural sites show no warming whereas the urban sites do. So we’ll have to correct for that and learn the lessons. And don’t talk to me about no warming in New Zealand in the raw data but present in the processed data, nothing to do with me mate. Nah, Darwin was a one off, anyone can make a mistake. Only 25% of Russian sites (the most warming) used in the Global reconstructions, not my fault….
And then there was the Grand Old Duke of York. He marched his men up the the top of the hill and he marched them down again … and when they were going up they were on average going up and when they were coming down they were on rolling average still going up and in fact in rolling average terms coming down they were higher than they were when they got to the top of the hill.
Isn’t Hansen the one who said that climate skeptics should be jailed, and compared coal trains to Nazi death trains?
If so, he doesn’t have much room to complain.
Hansen:
“The most likely explanation is atmospheric aerosols, fine particles in the air, produced by fossil fuel burning. Aerosol atmospheric lifetime is only several days, so fossil fuel aerosols were confined mainly to the Northern Hemisphere, where most fossil fuels were burned.”
I find this argument unconvincing. In the period between 1920 and 1942 industrialization was well under way in the Northern Hemisphere. And yet Northern Hemisphere temperature was increasing more rapidly than Southern Hemisphere temperature. Since the NH was producing much more aerosols than the SH at the time, the reverse should have been true. Also, the temperature acceleration that happens in the NH around 1976 would need explanation. I don’t think that the new laws in themselves cover it. There would need to be a very strong change in aerosol concentrations that correlates to the acceleration. I think there is some correlation, but the change in aerosols was just not enough to explain it.
Hansen:
“This was nonsense, of course. The small error in global temperature had no effect on the ranking of different years. The warmest year in our global temperature analysis was still 2005”
In yours alone. It was not the warmest year for UAH, RSS, HadCrut3. Your data set is the outlier.
“The obvious misinformation in these stories, and the absence of any effort to correct the stories after we pointed out the misinformation, suggests that the aim may have been to create distrust or confusion in the minds of the public, rather than to transmit accurate information.”
Along with your complaints about the government suppressing your work, people threatening you, the above quote, your complaints about death trains and your testimony of 25 meters sea level rise, etc. you have to be one of the biggest cry babies in the scientific community.
Hansen:
“The lesson learned here was that even a transient data error, however quickly corrected provides fodder for people who are interested in a public relations campaign, rather than science.”
Oh, good lord, I can hardly stand your eternal crying. You are on a permanant public relations crusade for AGW and you bawl like a baby about criticism. Spencer and Christy got the same kind of beating about their satellite drift error from people on your side of the fence. But they didn’t cry about it for years on end. Go look at William Connelley’s coverage of that error in Wikipedia where he tries to impune the correctness of UAH by pointing that error out again and again and again.
Hansen:
“True, the 1998 global temperature jumped far above the previous warmest year in the instrumental record, largely because 1998 was affected by the strongest El Nino of the century. Thus for the following several years the global temperature was lower than in 1998, as expected.”
This is simply a lie. The effect of 1998 on the slope of the trend for the following decade is completely canceled out by the 2 year La Nina that immediately followed the 1998 El Nino. You know very well that Gavin created a set of HadCrut3 ENSO corrected data that showed the trend from 1998 to 2008 to be flat. See the following:
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/07/gavin-schmidt-enso-adjustment-for.html
Hansen:
“There is a slight downward tick at the end of the record, but even that may disappear if 2010 is a warm year”
Nonsense. The majority of the 2.2C rise that would be expected from CO2 forcing is missing from the more reputable records like UAH and RSS. It is even missing from HadCrut3. And even your diverging record has half of it missing as shown here:
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/10/updated-11-year-global-temp-anomoly.html
There is no way that 2010 is going to make up for all of that absent warming. It is simply wishful thinking on your part. By the way, why use a 130 year chart to talk about a ten year time period. It makes it impossible to see the details when you give it less 8% of your chart.
Hansen:
“As discussed by Hansen et al. (2006) the main difference between these analyses is probably due to the fact that British analysis excludes large areas in the Arctic and Antarctic where observations are sparse. The GISS analysis, which extrapolates temperature anomalies as far as 1200 km, has more complete coverage of the polar areas.”
This is another fallacy that has been used on Real Climate many times. While temperature changes at the arctic may be amplified from temperature changes at lower latitudes, I don’t see how this is possible when there are no temperature changes at the lower latitudes. Multiply zero by some factor, and it is still zero. Instead of handwaving, why don’t you test this theory of divergence of yours and see if it is true by removing the polar temperatures that are not covered by HadCrut3, RSS, and UAH and see if a divergence still exists. Maybe you could take a little time off from making speeches to do some science.
Hansen:
“The recent “success” of climate contrarians in using the pirated East Anglia e-mails to cast doubt on the reality of global warming* seems to have energized other deniers.”
How do you know that the emails were not released internally by a whistleblower? And how can something that should be available to everyone under the FOI be pirated?
Wow! So reading thru thread — what is preferred term? Not “skeptics”? Certainly not “deniers.” Contrarians? Recognizing that some claims are real science, and some are fantasy and some are purely political, should there be a different label for each?
Is that me or the Fig.2 goes up to 2006 only?
Even if Hansen is right about some carbon-related warming , does he or one of his AGW friends offer a real workable solution for his apparent problem ? Nearly all heating and transport on earth is taking place with hydrocarbons . Wind or solar power can only replace at the most 15% of the energy-needs and are in a lot of places here on earth not workable solutions . Putting more carbons out of the hydrocarbons would increase the quantities of hydrogen burnt into water vapor in the atmosphere and consequently raise the quantities of this real greenhouse-gas in the atmosphere and especially of the airplane-exhaust in the upper atmospheric level ? Were the three fly-free nights after 9-11 not a lot cooler over the united states than normal ? Has there been any serious effort by mr Hanson or other scientists to look into this direction or has the AGW-crowd been capable to influence the agenda in the mind of our fellow-citizen . Do I make a mistake here , please tell me , I am a humble person and willing to listen to reason .From others of course as Mr Hanson should be willing to accept as well . His focus is obviously too narrow-minded and he is giving the impression that he is a puppet in the hands of others profiting from the mess and hiding in the dark , always prepared to change sides whenever it is looking appropriate . There will be a day that his friends will follow a new a new ratcatcher from Hameln and will be gone . Mr. Hanson still has the time to open up , show humbleness and find out who his real friends are ………
“Steve Goddard (08:41:21) :
Hansen is bragging about smearing UHI contaminated data across 1200km.
The climate of Ullapool, Scotland is not influenced greatly by Catania, Sicily, and most people would be clever enough to recognize that.”
Welcome back!
Catania to Ullapool is 2,700 km, while Hansen gave the temperature correlation distance as 1000 km, so unsurprisingly there’s not much similarity between the weather. Looks like you’re not quite clever enough to recognise that.
But full marks with trying to inject a little quantitative analysis into a thread which up to then had mainly just been a series of rants.
Better luck next time – I don’t think this is another dry ice moment for you.
Hansen claims his data and methods are publicly available. Commenters here claim his data and methods are not. If Hansen is lying, it is certainly a brazen lie. Can someone please clarify what information Hansen has posted, and what specifically is not posted, and how we can verify what is correct? This is an issue that even us non-scientists could understand.
Here are Hansen’s statements:
“The analysis method has been described fully in a series of refereed papers….”
“Although the three input data streams that we use are publicly available from the organizations that produce them….”
“These data sets, which cover the full period of our analysis, 1880-present, are available to parties interested in performing their own analysis or checking our analysis. The computer program that performs our analysis is published on the GISS web site.”
Is my memory wrong? I thought it was October ’08 that they trumpeted as the hottest October on record and “skeptics” found that they had recycled the September ’08 data from Siberia. He presents it as November and October and that the problem was identified internally. Is this an attempt to rewrite history?
James Hansen seems to misunderstand one point:
When your point of view is used by political bodies to propose dramatic changes to millions/billions of peoples livelihoods, lifestyles, and freedoms, your work absolutely needs to be put under withering criticism to protect against the damage of unnecessary policies.
Mr. Hansen, “fishing expeditions” are a small price to pay when the impact will be trillions of dollars in cost and years of politically forced change on the worlds populace. Any less of an expectation by you, would be pure arrogance on your part.
The GISS graph serves to confirm previous conclusions. For instance Fig. 1 shows temperatures over the period from 1940 to 1980 were little changed. However over this period there was a steady increase in CO2 emissions from 5 to 250 billion tonnes. Possible conclusions are:
1. That CO2 emissions have little effect; or
2. Other natural forces can predominate.
In the case of conclusion 2 presumably these natural forces may vary over time – sometimes having a negative effect, sometimes minimal effect and sometimes a positive influence.
Dr Hansen’s views would be appreciated.
Talk about moving the goal post Dr. Hansen.
Yes, based on your GISS records the world has continued to warm at a STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT rate (see figure 2 – Global (a) Hansen 2009) over the last 10 years. But that is NOT what you sold us! You testified to an alarming, unprecedented, exponential, run-away, warming leading to flames, famine, pestilence and floods (along with any other natural disaster Hollywood can dream up).
Now that there is NO evidence of that occurring you hide behind insignificant fractions of 10ths of a degree. Nice try… Thanks for playing!
Mr Hansen, do you have a comment to this here? ;
Here is a scenario of the world as the “alarmists” and “contrarians” end their last battle and form the Great Statement of Consensus of 20xx (fiction):
The Statement: “It is all vanity, and futility, mates, let’s give it a rest and go home.”
The Scene that led to the “consensus”:
While the climate scientists and statisticians were all becoming skilled in arguing, the glaciers receded and the sea ice became soft so the people of the North stopped capturing many seals and were hungry. Then the ice came back but it was far to the south and the freeze extended to the vacationlands in the breadbasket regions and the tourists stayed home and resort cities became starvation pits. Meanwhile in the Center the blizzards stranded all the old people in the train that went to the CRU Monument and caused the orange trees back home to freeze. Up north the tundra permafrost melted and subsided and the highway could no longer be travelled. The mosquitoes from the equator migrated to the North and spread malaria to all the caribou and reindeer. But the hardy beasts were unaffected by malaria. The climatologists there suffered, though.
The winds took the rain away so the people in the equatorial mountains saw their croplands go dry. The CO2 protected some of the species a little better, so when the rains returned, along with the smoke and fertilizer ash from all the newly erupting volcanoes made plants grow bigger than ever, the ideal conditions produced a big harvest. But most of the farmers mud huts collapsed because of the rain and mudslides that melted the glaciers on the volcanoes so many people died because it rained all harvest season and the crops rotted in the field. Meanwhile the long drought in the West disappeared and people had a record sugar beet crop and saw the flowers bloom in the desert for the first time in years. But the geo-engineered atmospheric screen of aluminum and barium that was controlling the temperature in the large cities became contaminated with carbon soot from the develping countries, who had unrestrained industries run by Deniers, pirated from the the funds of the Copenhagen Compromise of 2010. The economies of the former developed countries were caught up in the endless layers of carbon derivative financial instruments. And the other instruments –the atmospheric instruments of the climate scientists — were aimed everywhere. But the solar panels and wind turbines could not supply enough energy to run the Network any longer, because of the excessive contanination in the geo screen causing the sun’s energy to heat the Troposphere upward to the Ionosphere. So the ions up there heated up too much and pressure from the politically driven Greens caused the excess CO2 to transmute into diamond nano-dust and hydrogen and oxygen that was released formed water molecules. The water engulfed the carbon soot and the heavy droplets were too much in their weight and fell as heavy black rain. More people died. But lots of plants grew better. People that were picking mushrooms under the extensive forest canopy were spared.
The world was dying and being reborn all at the same time, and all the fears and hopes of Greens and Deniers were simultaneously realized. All scientific research that was stored in computers were erased by the excessive negative ions that were released and all was futile. But there was happiness in the air from the negative ions and the sweet smell of compost from all the rottenness of several centuries. The debate then ended in a stalemate. Yet there was a sweet irony to it all.
Tom P,
Hansen said 1200km. Do you think that the temperatures of Nice and Manchester should be smeared together?
From this layman’s perspective Hansen’s statement about the temperature station data and their interpretation seems balanced and credible. I was impressed by his calm and frank admission of errors. This is by far the best thing I have seen on the consensus side of the debate.
From a purely public relations point of view, however, I think Hansen would be better advised not to characterize all those who are skeptical of his data and conclusions as climate “deniers” with ulterior motives. He should accredit all criticisms in substance — and by name — if and when they have merit and ignore the rest. And he should definitely abandon his role as “citizen activist” in the public arena, which damages his credibility in the public mind.
Of course these are just my personal opinions as an educated bystander, one who, like thousands of others, has recently started following the debate.
tomkob (08:53:33) :
–“there is a high likelihood, I would say greater than 50 percent, that 2010 will be the warmest year in the period of instrumental data.”
I’d feel pretty confident making statements like this when I can change the actual temperature to match my predictions.
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…. oh, and how we laughed when we heard Merkel, Brown, Obama et al., say that they are going to keep the global temperature rise to below 2 degrees C.
Easy peasy to the omnipotent ones.
P.S. I think Hansen would also be well-advised to encouraged his colleagues to shut down their blog site RealClimate, which is a diplomatic disaster.