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.)
I am interested in the rhetorical techniques used by the AGW. With the appearance of Hansen’s apologia, we then see posts following-up with pre-prepared statements designed to appeal to the ‘middle-ground’ … aka those who wish for the certainities of the status-quo-ante.
And one of the techniques we must expect to see more of , after the spectacular collapse of Copenhagen, is the Hegelian equalisation of AGW zealotry with the those who are engaged on the serious scientific work of critical examinations of the evidence. This paves the way for a new ‘synthesis’ which will have at it’s heart the idea of universal control. In this way, we see the crab-wise progress of the totalitarians.
Nanuuk’s post is an example of the pre-prepared post, and the ‘plague on both your houses’ argument. Triangulation at work?
I predict the use of a fascinating rhetorical technique where AGW apologists ‘called to account’ by the MSM will start by accusing Skeptics of the same failings that they themselves are accused of. A species of ‘turning the cat in the pan’ , it is designed to confuse.
Caleb (01:15:26)
” I originally became skeptical because the MWP vanished.”
Me too. And what gets my goat about that is when they suddenly removed the Roman and Mediaeval Warm Periods and called the recent warming “unprecedented” they denied all the painstaking work of thousands of archaeologists and historians who, between them, gave us a picture of those times. They deny the results of sediment studies, of records of grain yields, wool yields, grape harvests, studies of Andean crop-growing: thousands of pieces of information that lead inescapably to the conclusion that the Roman and Mediaeval periods were at least as warm as today. And then they have the unmitigated gall to call us the “deniers”.
To be scientific, why not change “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”?
A better read would be “We make our data available to all who request it as soon as possible because the past has shown that errors can be detected quickly and usefully by interested parties”.
@GaryPearse
Here is one reference to prosecution of oil executives:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/fossilfuels.climatechange
“James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.”
and “In an interview with the Guardian he said: ‘When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that’s a crime.'”
Merry Christmas to all and have a Happy New Year!!
And, what a difference a year makes. Hansen has long sense joined the political ranks should one forget his support of vandals and vasrious gigs he’s done with a loudspeaker. For the political naive he’s learned it’s best to paint yourself a victim first and then proclaim all that disagree as the source of his victumhood. He’s still a bit of an amateur but I did notice one of the posters used the key racist word “lynch”. So, those of you that take issue with anything Hansen says or does is simply a racist bigoted mob running around in the streets with tar, feathers and a rope. Next he “explains” how the mob wouldn’t recongnize real science if they ran into it while out torching the countryside. He needs to spend more time with the White House since he still, imho, comes across as a bit of an amateur.
He does remind me of a person that started out doing some good but evolved into a form of derangement. Someone mentioned Hitler who would be a reasonable example of someone that started out doing “good” but then grew more and more “evil”. Hitler was awarded two Iron Crosses for bravery in WWI. The last half of his live was an entirely different story. Hansen is much the same. The first half of his life, by all accounts, did result in some good and he would have deserved a footnote in the history of science as so many do.
Like so many scientists his creative period ended somewhere during his Venus atmospheric work. Everything he’s done since then, imho, is simply to force the Earth to be like Venus and thus prove his greenhouse work regarding Venus. For example, Einstein (and a raft of others) did his truly creative work in the first half of his life then set about applying it during the remainder. If one is really generous and kind, one would simply say that Hansen’s theory of the “Venusian greenhouse effect” as applied to the Earth is simply wrong. How he devolved into the Prophet of Doom I leave to others,.
ONe thing I have learned from this exercise is one should have just about zero regard for any of the reconstruction of temperatures including the “instrumented” ones since the invention of the thermometer. The instrumented ones are far too short of duration to bit much more than a blip in geologic time. Most of the charts and graphs could just as easily be produced with an Etch-A-Sketch and are about as reliable. Ask your kids to do one for you and send it to the IPCC. Might get a grant to pay for college.
The only thing the lay person should walk away from the climate debate is “When we start growing tomatoes in Greenland and growing grapes is it time to think about buying some real estate there?”
So, in the final footnote in history for Hansen, he and Michael Mann will be placed right up there with Charles Dawson. And yes, I do think Hansen is “evil” in the sense that he has intentionally tried to steer moral support and action when he should have long ago known that Venus is simply not Earth. The amount of global misery he would have caused is simply beyond belief. He would have effected billions to their detriment, a feat not even the worst of the worst were able to do in the last century.
Carrick (23:45:05) :
Interesting comment. If you have a link to an expanded explanation
I would like to read it. I have absolutely no idea of how an average
global climate temperature is derived, but I am willing to try and learn.
How did society get to the stage where James hansen get threatened he asks.
Could it be something to do with him saying that sceptics in industry should be arrested & tried as the equivalent of war criminals ?
WHAT HANSEN REALLY MEANS:
“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.”
THEN WE REPLACE IT WITH THE SATELLITE DATA AND ADD ON A FEW DEGREES.
“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”
GIVES ME TIME TO TELL THEM TO FIDDLE IT
“The GISS analysis, which extrapolates temperature anomalies as far as 1200 km, has more complete coverage of the polar areas.”
WE GUESS MORE
“The analysis method has been described fully in a series of refereed papers (Hansen et al., 1981, 1987, 1999, 2001, 2006).
BY MY MATES
Successive papers updated the data and in some cases made minor improvements to the analysis, for example, in adjustments to minimize urban effects.”
WE IGNORE IT
“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.”
IT’S WHAT MY DATA SHOWS
“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.”
ONLY JOKING, NEARLY GOT AWAY WITH IT BUT THAT NASTY MR MCINTYRE SPOTTED IT
“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.”
NO WAY ARE THOSE PAPERS GETTING PUBLISHED
Let’s take an example from Finland concerning temp trend 1940-2005. According to GISS unhomogenized station data Helsinki trend is 0.59. The Finnish Meteorologial Organization ensures this and the trend is quite exactly same throughout the entire country.
But after GISTEMP analysis most of the country is ranked to trend between 1…2 degrees:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2009&month_last=11&sat=4&sst=0&type=trends&mean_gen=0112&year1=1940&year2=2005&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
This is because UHI effect from Russian cities is spread also over Finland with homogenization process. Jim Hansen, what is so difficult with these temperatures? Why do you include cities at all, because their measurements are not reliable? This is amazingly stupid. You certainly can not reduce all those disturbing effects away, because there are too many of them. Each city is its own case with its history around the measurement station.
There are enough rural stations to form global data set. Just do it, Hansen! Somebody else will do it sooner or later anyway…
@nanuuq: “Even if CO2 is not the main culprit, could reducing the emiision reduce the overall warming going on?”
You mean: even if those held prisoners at Guantanamo are not the culprits, keeping them in custody sends out a strong signal to help reduce terrorism?
Haven’t we elected our nation leaders to take the most effective actions based on the most accurate facts?
The final agreement they reached at Copenhagen is clearly not about CO2 reduction, it is about recycling our money to fight “against the effects of global warming” in underdeveloped countries. That fact is, even without global warming:
– every 5 seconds, a child dies from malnutrition
– every 15 seconds, a child dies from lack of clean water
– every 30 seconds, a child dies from malaria
Aren’t we already paying millions of dollars every year to the WHO; FAO, WFP, UNICEF just for that? Where does this money go? Look no further than their annual reports – some 40% of the money goes into administration and travel expenses.
Putting the blame on CO2 is just a lame excuse for collecting more money. Not one cent of this money will reduce CO2 emission.
References:
Hansen
Hansen
Hansen
Hansen
Hansen
Article wrote by:
Hansen
In my house I write and song my text and my music, and anyone can’t opponent to me… This method is to science as Father Christmas is to Easter. If I issue a paper in my university only with my references, I come kicking…
Christopher Hanley (above): “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.”
In fact Hansen is being much more cautious? “The different hemispheric records in the mid-twentieth century have never been convincingly explained. The most likely explanation is atmospheric aerosols…However, there are no aerosol measurements to confirm that interpretation. If there were adequate understanding of the relation between fossil fuel burning and aerosol properties it would be possible to infer the aerosol properties in the past century. But such understanding requires global measurements of aerosols with sufficient detail to define their properties and their effect on clouds, a task that remains elusive” (The last part seems to have been run into a graph caption when the PDF was converted to a blog post!).
Contrast this with Ben Goldacre’s faux certainty about what he calls “zombie arguments” (He’s the author of the Bad Science column in the UK Guardian):
“…what about the cooling in the 1940s?” says your party bore. “Well,” you reply, “since the last time you raised this, I checked, and there were loads of sulphites in the air in the 1940s to block out the sun, made from the slightly different kind of industrial pollution we had then, and the odd volcano, so that’s been answered already, ages ago.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/12/bad-science-goldacre-climate-change
I do hope someone sends all the comments in this thread to the politicians that are responsible for his employment, and to the universities councils that support his programmes, better still buy a full page in the NYT and publish the lot.
Some of the posts are really telling !!
Playing politics can be a very dirty game & if you play expect to collect a lot of dirt yourself , and when you screw up bigtime look for a large hole to jump into.
This man really has no shame. He states that “in the 70’s ……..I made my own analysis” and hits the fast forward button to December ’09 without mentioning that he first concluded that we were heading for an ice age. I have to get one those fast forward buttons for my life, too. How convenient.
In an incredible display of hubris the man who defended people trying to destroy a power plant in the name of “green” then decries the politics surrounding his work. Hansen’s intellectual dishonesty is very disturbing.
Hansen references himself in his long paper.
nanuuq (23:38:36) is right. A sobering is required. Discuss science, with scientific arguments.
Emissions of nonsens from both sides just contributes to the madhouse effect.
RIGHT? A criminal should be discussed in criminal terms, not scientific terms. When Hansen obeys Freedom of Information requests, then we can finally get to the science.
Until then, he’s just a criminal (defined as someone who rebuffs FOI requests, which by law he is obliged to obey).
And I’ll give you an idea how far the perversion has gone: “nanuuq” in a prior post requested that we sit back and think. Well, I have done considerable thinking and this is my current opinion:
1) That global warming is good, not bad.
2) That increases in CO2 are beneficial; I have yet to see substantive evidence of any threat. (Models based on cooked data and assumptions give you cooked projections.)
3) That the earth is becoming more productive in terms of food supply and ecosystems.
These ideas are a huge departure from the AGWers and even many who are contrarians. I say let the earth warm up; let the deserts bloom as the rose and the jungles re-establish themselves. It simply makes for a more hospitable earth and a far better future than Al Gore would ever admit.
But these are my conclusions.
I get the impression that no one loves James Hansen as much as James Hansen.
Any personal threat to Hansen is to be condemned out of hand, we are sceptics of the AGW science pure and simple and must never condone such disgraceful behaviour. Nevertheless, Hansen has shown himself to be somewhat inconsistent regarding this threat. As others have said, who was it that talked about the death trains and called for CEOs of major energy companies to be tried for crimes against humanity? Who was it who called for civil disobedience and who supported the GreenPeace activists when they damaged our Kingsnorth power station? Dr James Hansen, and he did most of this with US taxpayer’s money. As a UK citizen and retired civil service scientist I can assure you that he would not get away with his political behaviour in my country. Dr Hansen, I fully support those US citizens who are demanding your dismissal or at least asking for your extramural activities to be curtailed.
But as to the science. I put my trust in Willis Eschenbach’s comments. I have looked at his work and admire him for it. Though I have to admit such painstaing data analysis is well outside any of my specialities. It seems clear that only the release of raw data from every surface station taken in conjunction with satellite data is acceptble. Then there must be a completely independent analysis carried out with scientifically robust methods that will satisfy the climate neutral or sceptical scientific community.
This would certainly take considerable time even if it were to be acceptable to the funding authorities, that would have to be national governments. Consequently any international policy decisions would need to be held up until the truth of a real worrying warming period was confirmed or proved wrong.
Unfortunately we all know that this just will not happen. Thanks to scientists like James Hansen and politicians like Al Gore, the die is cast. We saw this at CO15. As far as the delegates at this ridiculous gathering were concerned ‘Climategate’ just did not figure. There is no doubt, according to the vast majority of political policy makers, that the IPCC doctrine is the only one that matters. Emails, what emails? Just tittle tattle between a group of dirty fingered nailed scientists. The science is settled, okay. Harry? Just meaningless notes of a junior computer programmer.
Here in the UK there is a consensus between Labour, Conservative and LibDem hierarchies that AGW is real and carbon emission reduction and trading is the only way forward. We are actually legally bound to reduce CO2 emissions via an Act agreed between all parties! We have a few dissenters in all major parties but they are looked upon as mavericks. No one really wants to even consider that the sceptics might just have a point. Even the stupidly inaccurate forecasts of out Met Office are not questioned. Only a few years ago our one time Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett said that climate change ‘deniers’ should be treated as terrorists and denied air time. Lovely lady. No doubt she was a fervent admirer of James Hansen.
One thing is absolutely certain, no politician here is considering the possibility of a protracted cooling period, so I hope we do not suffer from one. Looking at the uncommonly early snow and the fact that it took my wife six hours to cover a twenty minute journey only yesterday; I have to admit I am not sanguine about the matter.
Anthony, Willis and all of you who have the skill and dedication to question the data analysis of the AGW authorities, please carry on the good work.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.
“My experience with global temperature data over 30 years provides insight” in how to make it do what I want.
You can make the temperature data say anything you want it to when you’re in charge of it. A little algorithm change here, dropping of stations there, voilà, you’re hypothesis suddenly is right.
I suggest a read of “Without Concience” by Bob Hare.
I find it bizarre that most scientists on the warm and fuzzy side feel the media is stacked up against them, pouncing on every tidbit. You have to have a certain disconnect from reality to believe that.
I’m pretty sure any threats he is getting regarding ‘releasing the emails’ aren’t coming from around here — Mr. Hansen, if you did do it, then thank you.
I have a feeling Hansen will be spending alot of time with the Police in the coming years, do the crime, do the time.
Anthony – the last line of JH’s .pdf:
“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.”
reads to me as an opportunity to respond with your findings from the SurfaceStations project. Do you have any news on this? I saw your mid term census report a little while ago and wonder how things are going on the next phase?
As a layman I found Hansen’s apologia very plausible. But, as at least one of your correspondents has already written, what is he analysing? Raw data or adjusted data? As a trained statistician there are other points which puzzle me:
(i) Why does he show his cumulative means, in figs 1 and 2, at the centre of the period over which he is cumulating rather than, as is more usual, at the end of those periods? In figure 3b he shows his five-year running mean in about 2008 (ie at the end of the period) whereas he shows his 11-year running mean at about 2004 which is neither the end nor the centre. I suspect that the blue line should be shifted about four years to the right which might give a more balanced picture.
(ii) In fig.1a his 95% confidence bar becomes distinctly shorter with age. Is this because there are more sites providing temperature readings or because he is basing his standard deviations on all readings to the point at which he calculates his confidence limits? There are flaws with both approaches.
(iii) “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”. There is something radically wrong with a program that is unable to weed out “occasional flaws” before these get into the system. Just think of what could happen the next time you use a “fly by wire” aircraft if aviation engineers were as casual. In this case it would appear that the NOAA programs are not robust. Perhaps they should invite M. and M. to improve them.
I saw all I needed in that article when I looked at the references, only one reference that does not have his own name on it. Either there is so little written on global warming (but then how can it be settled) or the researchers are so deluded with their own grandeur that they can’t see past the end of their own noses.
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear if he was a self-googler as well.