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.)
First: “The Temperature of Science”: It all depends on where you stick the thermometer…
Second: 7 references, 6 of them his. Guess that he couldn’t find any other papers that agreed with him.
Third: “The GISS analysis, which extrapolates temperature anomalies as far as 1200 km, has more complete coverage of the polar areas.”
So you can tell the temperature of an unknown region by looking at a thermometer 1200km away. That’s 745 miles.
Start with a center at Death Valley and see if it corresponds to the temps in Oregon. If you use current temps, there’s a 23 degree difference (53 in Death Valley CA, and 30 degrees in Baker City OR).
Fourth: They’re still hanging on to the “1951-1980” time period, even though the WMO suggests use of a 30 year period ending with the latest decade (in this case, 1971-2000). Of course, if they use that time period, the anomalies will appear lower.
And they can’t have that…
Hansen is running scared now. A worried Hansen is a rational Hansen to the extent that he can put together a rather convincing (to the novice observer) account of his activities. A puffed up Hansen is a raving lunatic who makes confident, near-term predictions such as monster El Ninos that do not come to pass, testifies on behalf of eco-terrorists and produces hysterical “tipping point” scenerios that have no basis in fact.
Will the real Jim Hansen please stand up?
CH
Hanson is perhaps the single most responsible individual for politicizing climate science to the point where so many have lost confidence in it. He cannot have it both ways and claim that he is the innocent scientist who is now being attacked by political “contrarians”. He “woe be me” attitude toward Freedom of Information requests sounds a bit trite.
And I agree with the previous post that the most significant element of this piece is his acknowledgment that perhaps the sun does play a role in climate change after all. That in fact may be the real purpose of this message. He may be trying to provide cover for himself as models fail to respond as planned and researchers broaden the scope of their work beyond the CO2 shackles and on to the many other realms of factors that affect climate change.
Hansen may be attempting to rise above the tempest that he created. He is a pretty clever man and will succeed at this effort unless he is challenged. It had never dawned on me before, but I suppose it is plausible that he threw the Brits under the bus to save his own scalp. I cannot imagine anyone being that self serving, but who knows? Time will tell.
Dr. Hansen doesn’t seem to learn from his mistakes. Rather he “adjusts” reality to massage his ego, and prove he wasn’t mistaken. I believe this hints at self-delusion.
I originally became skeptical because the MWP vanished. It was my hobby to read about Greenland Vikings, and to have the MWP become “local” to Greenland involved an extraordinary twisting and looping of the Gulf Stream, and jet streams, all of which seemed impossible to recreate.
However it was when McIntyre forced NASA to readjust adjusted data, and then when NASA re-readjusted the readjusted data, that my mind began to focus on the behind-the-scenes tweaking of raw data.
When Hansen states, “There are lessons from our experience about care that must be taken with data before it is made publicly available,” I imagine we glimpse his dislike of the public. Rather than conceding that scrutiny of his tweaking and “adjusting” might be a good thing, (and true peer review,) he clings to the haughty attitude that the public is ignorant, and has no business asking to see what he is up to.
In this manner he is disdainful of the idea the public has a Right To Know. He feels we are too stupid to see the truth for ourselves, and must be spoon-fed truth in an adjusted form. This not only expresses contempt for ordinary citizens; it expresses contempt for democracy itself.
All people want is the truth, Dr. Hansen. You don’t need to adjust truth for us, especially the truths we believe are self-evident.
nanuuq (23:38:36) :
Nice try at being the “voice of reason”, but the time for that has long passed.
These same people have undermined the scientific method, fabricated results, locked legitimate researchers out, and taken down at least one journal, marginalizing others. The “gloating” you see is the enjoyment of watching someone get back, in a SMALL measure, what they’ve done to hundreds of others.
Been there, done that, done with “playing nice”. It’s STILL the responsibility of the cAGW crowd to demonstrate that a problem EVEN EXISTS. They have failed.
You’re telling me that when the schoolyard bully, after years of beating the lunch money out of smaller kids, finally gets hauled away for some talking to by a teacher, you’re going to feel bad for said bully? I doubt it. Unless you’re the bully.
Unfortunately, I fear you have missed most of the point. What warming? What effects, exactly, do you feel we need to minimize? Where did anyone actually show, other than al-Gore’s fictional movie, that there are any negative effects?
We’ve seen here that an increase in CO2 is beneficial to plants, helping us feed the world. We’ve seen increases in evaporation from slight warming, providing precipitation in areas that haven’t seen it for a while. A warmer planet is LESS likely to have catastrophic hurricanes and cyclones. So where, exactly, do “we” need to spend any billions or trillions?
Again, the real bonus from Climategate is the return of DISCUSSION… the return of a DEBATE, the shattering (hopefully) of the ridiculous “science is settled” meme.
Dancing in the streets will commence when some of these system-manipulators are convicted…
Suzanne (23:56:20) : You should write your ‘me too’ again with chapter and verse else it’s just name calling to be forgotten by the time one reads the next comment. Pointless or is WUWT merely a stress relief aid for some?
A lot of people already obviously hate Jim Hansen. I don’t. I’m sure he has made huge contributions to climate science.
Personally I am skeptical of the disaster scenarios painted by the IPCC, due to their confidence in the computer models and I think climate science has become more politics than science. But that doesn’t mean everything one key figure within that movement says is tarnished.
Being a skeptic means asking questions.
I have a question – and have had for a while – hoping that someone here has a good understanding of the detail.
We’ve seen recently from the posts from Willis about North Australian temperatures that the adjustments to the raw data have a significant effect in the last 100 years temperature trend – at least in North Australia.
GISS now publish their data and their source code – hats off to them. Does this show how the *raw* data is processed and turned into the gridded temperatures or does it only show how “already adjusted” temperatures from each station are turned into the final gridded temperatures?
Thanks in advance for anyone who can explain this.
Steve
http://scienceofdoom.com – “Putting climate science in perspective”
Reply: Take a look here. And look through the other post on his site. More to come I’m sure. ~ ctm
nanuuq (23:38:36) :
“EVEN if humans are not responsible for global warming, how are we to minimize the effects of the REAL TRUE WARMING we are currently seeing? Even if CO2 is not the main culprit, could reducing the emiision reduce the overall warming going on?
PLEASE sit back and think a bit instead of behaving like a religious revival.”
One question. If the warming is entirely natural would you be concerned? And if we get natural cooling, would you be less concerned?
I believe, no, I know, that a warmer world is better for biodiversity, biomass and humans and this positive effect will be further enhanced by more CO2 since, geologically speaking, our atmosphere is CO2-impoverished. Thanks to human intervention this beautiful life giving trace gas is (unintentionally) put back into the atmosphere.
And aside from that, my take on Hansen’s little essay?
I laughed out loud.
Poor Jimmy, needing a police escort. I could name NAMES of people that Hansen et al’s actions have caused to require police escorts. How about the people that have lost careers, prestige, employment, grants, tenure? That’s from YOU and your buddies gaming the “science”, Jimmy boy.
Then again, I also got quite a laugh at Jimmy lad’s earlier whining about President Bush “muzzling” him, which was easily discredited just by counting the number of public appearances the Bush Administration did NOT stop him from making.
James appears delusional, but it’s probably just an appearance. I’ve never believed these people are stupid, but they believe everyone else is. This essay appears to be a demonstration of “if you can’t impress them with knowledge, baffle them with BS”. (bad science)
CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were relatively insignificant prior to WWII.
http://photos.mongabay.com/09/0323co2emissions_global.jpg
Dr. Hansen attributes the GISS series temperature dip c.1940-c.1980 to aerosols but he offers no explanation for the temperature rise c.1880-c.1940 which matches, in grade and magnitude, the rise 1980- 2001.
The GISS temperature series 1880-2009 is useful to the AGW hypothesis, only because the discredited ‘hockey stick’ graph has been indelibly imprinted on the public mind.
Dear Dr Hansen
Thank you for submitting your paper for consideration.
We recognise your original contribution to the measurement of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere and we thank you for it. We also recognise your personal distress at this time.
Our observations and recommendations are below, for your future reference:
1. It is unhelpful to use the word “denier” for those people who do not share your absolute conviction that increases in global temperature are solely due to carbon dioxide
2. Regarding those who may disagree with you, or who may have doubts of various kinds, it cannot be assumed that all of them are politically motivated and technically ignorant
3. It cannot be assumed that all possible bias in the published temperature record has been successfully eliminated
4. It cannot be assumed that all declines in temperature are solely due to aerosols
5. It would be helpful provide similar reconstructions of the carbon dioxide record over the same time periods
6. Differences in the published temperature record between GISS and CRU and others may indeed provide valuable insights in the future. At the present time, however, the most obvious insight is the unfortunate lack of coordination and consensus on the best data sets to use and the best methodology
7. Regarding errors found to date in the constructed temperature record, it is recognized that handling errors do occur from time to time in large scale data processing. We recommend that your team begin to consider the views of others on potential errors.
8. The paper does not address any aspect of the “settled science” in regard to the theory of AGW. Please provide observational evidence in the future.
We wish you a merry Christmas and a happier New Year.
Yours sincerely
I have worked in government for and with individuals like Hansen who master the art of power and control. One element of there approach is a near fanatical insistence on controlling the message. I would guess that this paper has been very carefully word-smithed by Hansen and his staff. The paper itself, the title, every example chosen to write about, every sentence and the wording within has been carefully crafted with an intended purpose of controlling the message beyond just information sharing.
One of the hazards of this approach is that it is most affective when people generally want to believe the message and have confidence in the author. However once this confidence is lost, these writings can backfire because oftentimes they serve as a treasure trove of information. They can serve as a guide map into the areas that the Author is concerned about and is trying to cover over through careful articulation.
So reread his piece very carefully and it may yield valuable clues.
What goes around comes around, sorry Jimmy my heart is like stone when it comes to your fate.
many typos – need coffee before I blog. My apologies.
Nanook says…
“In many ways I am disgusted with both of the extreme viewpoints…”
…followed by unvarnished bashing of this site and its denizens. Typical troll tactic, i.e. to start by claiming neutrality but never to evidence it. Nanook, why don’t you establish your credentials here by giving us an example of what you think is an “extreme viewpoint” on the alarmist side that you disagree with?
Jim Steele (23:30:34) :
I like the Hansen trick where 5 or 8 year averages hide the recent decline. Also a nice trick is to show global temperatures over a 120 year period and then compare it to sun spot cycles over just the past 30 years. The 2 different graphs not hide the recent declines in both temps and solar activity. The carefully chosen time scales also hide a previous graph produced by NOAA showing solar and SST are highly correlated.
http://www.oar.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/images/sunclimate_3b.gif
Thank Jim; very revealing.
JH:
“There is a slight downward tick at the end of the record, but even that may disappear if 2010 is a warm year.”
Without actually knowing the final result for December, but seeing reports of blizzards everywhere, 2010 shouldn’t be a warm year and the “slight downward tick” should become less slight. And maybe James Hansen too could finally admit that the world is cooling?
–Ahrvid
This is like the boy who kiled both his parents and then asked for mercy because he is an orphan.
Excuse me but wasn’t this man the one who was calling for imprisonment or the death penalty for ‘deniers’? Anyone got the reference for this?
First of all, I truly appreciate and respect Dr. Hansen’s dedication and commitment to science as I do with scientists who disagree (unlike Al Gore who calls them deniers and flat-earthers).
But I have a question: I’m relatively new to this – and I’m not a scientist – but does any of what he wrote explain why ocean temperatures haven’t increased, why sea ice has been relatively steady for the past 100 years, why there hasn’t been an increase in hurricanes that we were warned about (by Hansen himself, if I’m not mistaken), and why neighboring planets have shown warming?
Or am I deluded?
Notice in the above report/graphs on ‘global warming’ temperatures. http://bit.ly/4OrrwW It is talking about 0.5 tenths of a degree C increase from the mid-70’s to the present but does NOT link that to CO2 as opposed to solar or galactic gravitational shifts as the controlling variables for the slight temperature increase.
I’ll say it right now, it is my belief that it is gravitational influences that the Sun is going through as it orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and approaches the stronger gravity on the Milky Way’s elliptical plane that is affecting the Sun and primarily causing the climate changes being seen on Earth and on other planets in our solar system. These influences will continue to increase beyond Man’s control to greatest intensity in 2012 and weaken back to the norm by 2026. CO2, taxing carbon, and the UN will make ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE in this.
savethesharks (23:55:19) :
“Wow…nothing like an essay from a manic, narcissistic, yet publicly-funded scientist-turned-activist…fresh from the press!”
You missed out paranoid!
So jim makes the appeal to authority argument – the authority being himself?
And either the paper is cut off to soon or he forgot to add “and I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids!”
Conspiracy theory time. There was something strange about how the climate gate e-mails were first sent to Real Climate about a month before they were released? If this is true, it needs to be vigorously pursued. Did RC get the same files as that were ultimately released? Were certain documents, e-mails purged prior to the release? Why and how did RC get an advance copy and what did they do with it subsequently ? Who did they share it with? There is fire in this smoke I bet.