According to the KUSI special report page, Dr. Hansen has issued the following statement.
NASA has issued the following statement in response to the KUSI Special Report. This statement is from Dr. James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City:
“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis. The analysis utilizes three independent data sources provided by other agencies. Quality control checks are regularly performed on that data. The analysis methodology as well as updates to the analysis are publicly available on our website. The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically based conclusions regarding global temperatures.” (GISS temperature analysis website: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/)
For more on Dr. Hansen, here is a Youtube clip of his recent appearance on the David Letterman show. Apparently Dr. Hansen does “joust with jesters” after all.
Dr. Hansen writes on his website:
…if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water. Their role and consequence is only as a diversion from what is important.
Yet here he is, jousting with the biggest jester of them all.
As an aside… it suuuure has gotten quiet over at RealClimate.
u.k.(us) (16:31:37) :
cheap shot?
A very expensive shot, that cost lives and set back our space program.
I remember seeing a bit of a press conference afterwards, as they were investigating. At one point, the one guy took a piece of the O-ring material out of a glass of ice water, and snapped it. Forget the exact words he said, something like “You can’t fool nature.”
The multi-part booster design to start. Supercooled liquefied gases around them, could have been spillage or venting against them. And in the end, just because it was cold.
In several ways, NASA was better when it was seat-of-the-pants, staffed with people who knew every last detail, with crews and management who understood that everything had to work, no excuses, no failure. Their landers and such are successful, because they are one-shots designed to be simple and effective without errors, they absolutely must work.
Our grand shuttle program, enormously complicated, was shut down and many important programs were set back, because someone didn’t get the specs right on an O-ring.
NASA deserves scrutiny, there is a lot riding on their work. If we allow Hansen and cronies to get away with their tricks while promoting something that is benefiting them professionally and financially, what happens if, perhaps, someone recommends a certain O-ring material, maybe even “adjusts” the specs a bit, because they’ve done consulting work for or maybe even own stock in the manufacturer? Coworkers notice what others are quietly allowed to do. If they try it themselves, ah, who’s it going to hurt?
…msato\msato\2009_04+05+06\IceSHeetMelt.doc created by Makiko Sato of NASA GISS on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 10:14:00 AM, printed on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 2:24:00 PM, revised 5 times and with a total editing time of 227 minutes. This document is part of the Makiko Sato protected files found on the GISS server and linked in a comment here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/15/hansen-responds-to-john-colemans-kusi-special-report/#more-15286
Here is the document in question:
(The bolded “James” is in the original and appears to be a paragraph from Dr. James Hansen. I have italicized what is presumably Hansen’s proposed text, but I am only guessing. The stuff that is not italicized presumably is Sato’s calculation of the “numbers.” The other emphasis that I have added is a very interesting quote, if true. The idea that sea levels would fall as the earth gets warmer would seem to take out most of the “catastrophe” out of CAGW).
In trying to decipher the calculations, I have assumed the following, but I might be wrong:
4.9 cal/g is to heat ice from -10oC to 0oC.
1 Watt is defined as 1 joule per second.
80+15 appears to be in calories, where 80 cal/g is the latent heat of fusion for water and 15 is the number of calories needed to heat 1 g of water to 15oC, but the latter is a guess. 4.18 is the number of joules per calorie. Actually, it is 4.186, which is not significant in this calculation.
Also, since only about 70% of the earth’s surface is ocean, one could multiply 5.1 by 0.7 to obtain 3.57 x 10^18 cm^2 as the area of the oceans. That would imply a rise in sea levels of 5.6 cm/century per watt/m^2 of forcing on Greenland ice.
Following is an extract from the Hansen interview on ABC Lateline, an Oz current affairs programme.
TONY JONES: Okay, can you tell us how the Goddard Institute takes and adjusts these global temperatures because sceptics claim that urban heat centres make a huge difference; that they distort global temperatures and they make it appear hotter that it really is.
So do you adjust, in your figures, for the urban heat zone effects?
JAMES HANSEN: We get data from three different sources and we now, in order to avoid criticisms from contrarians, we no longer make an adjustment. Even if we see there are eight stations in Alaska and seven of them have temperatures in the minus 30s and one of them says plus 35, which pretty obvious what happens, someone didn’t put the minus sign there, we just, we don’t correct that.
Instead we send an email or letter or a letter to the organisation that produces the data and say, you’d better check the Alaska temperatures, because we don’t want to be blamed for changing anything. But as far as adjusting for urban effects, we have a very simple procedure.
We exclude urban locations, use rural locations to establish a trend, and that does eliminate – though urban stations do have more warming than the rural stations, and so we eliminate that effect simply by eliminating those stations, but it’s very clear that the warming that we see is not urban, it’s largest in Siberia, and in the Arctic and the Antarctic, and there aren’t any cities there, and there’s warming over the oceans, there are no cities there. So it’s not urban warming that’s just nonsense.
So if I understand the above statement correctly, GISS uses only rural (whatever is rural, airport is rural?) data to establish a trend, then adjust the urban data to that trend.
Or does he mean GISS doesn’t use urban data at all? Can’t be.
IN any case, the late John L Daly’s website has an excellent article on surface temp records. It’s about 9yrs old now but nothing has changed, same old fudging of data.
Letterman likes assistants Hansen likes adulation. Dumb guy a and b one guy likes to be civilly disobedient the other wants to go upstairs, what a moral pair. Science ??
Carbon Dioxide (14:49:34) :
Now you got my attention, Carbon Dioxide.
I remember watching the landing, but I don’t recall any two minutes of silence. I’m not saying it did not happen, it very well could have. I was so caught up in the moment, I just didn’t notice.
I just didn’t know it was inexplicable, if there was a couple of minutes of silence. Even if someone had pointed it out at the time, I would have just thought, “Hmmm… just some sort of snafu in that long chain of links from Earth to Moon. Oh my. Will you look at that, they are walking on the moon.”
Is there something more I am missing?
Gerard (15:02:50) :
Gerard,
My sincerest apologizes. I thought you were making fun of the issue, as if there were no proof of the anti-AGW position in the last few weeks.
You are entirely correct. The MSM and other self fancied members of the elite have not bothered to acknowledge the deep penetrations in the flanks of the AGW constructs Climategate has provided.
There is probably a lot of secret thoughts along the line of “OMG, I think I stepped into a big pile of doo doo along with the ‘in’ crowd on this matter. How do I gracefully extract myself?”
Remember how Nixon tried to dismiss the whole Watergate thing as a third rate burglary? At each step, there was this escalation of dares, with the ultimate capitulation of his resignation? First there was this assistant. Then this next assistant, all offered as potential goats of Azazel to appease the mob? But the mob was not appeased.
Same thing here. It is all unraveling. Too many people have made too many bold assertions, knowing they had better be right. Right now, there are too many auditor types nailing this thing down, step by step.
At some time in the future, political and media types will be forced into one of two choices:
Admit they were wrong.
Or
Be banned to the infernal regions of irrelevance.
Hard medicine for the proud and vain.
I think we will start seeing people hedging their bets and running for cover.
The easy way out for politicians is to simply say they relied on the word of the climate scientists. Same for the news reporters.
Of course this will be a public admission they were taken in by a bunch of nerds.
But what will the nerds have as their excuse?
Bulldust (18:28:24) :
If that were true then I could just hold off on reporting the seven fold spike in my bad debt expenses and all the new equity I issued to make up for the lost cash. That’s not lying to the new (and old) shareholders, is it?
-Jeff Alberts (18:41:13) :
…if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control,
You mean, the weather and climate anywhere has been under human control in the past? When was this??
He’s playing a religious card here, albeit subtly.
Fine. God gave man dominion over all the Earth.
So, if Mr. Hansen wants to play with religion, he can quit or resign govt. office, file for a new religious belief, and preach the GAIA dogma.
He can be tax exempt, but he can’t use tax dollars to preach.
Otherwise, there is a clear separation of church & state in the Constituion, and in this country, using office to promote dogma is not allowed.
It’s why we came here, to escape State religion.
[snip – we don’t link to crop circle websites and others of that ilk]
The bark beetle kill-off was a result of a drought, not lack of cold in the winter. Pine trees always have a few bark beetles hanging about. They punch a hole in the bark, and it fills up with sap, preventing more beetles from being attracted by the original beetles phemerones. In a drought condition, the trees lack moisture, and not enough sap is produced to plug the hole, and lots of new beetles come to the tree. Enough beetles will eventually girdle the cambium, and the tree is kaput. Cold doesn’t kill beetles, rain does.
Didn’t know Letterman was such a kook! Out of touch with reality I’d say. Sounds like he’s just hears the soundbytes…living in the MSM. Guess that’s what you get!
Apology accepted Jack. I and neighbours have been battling a proposed windfarm in the beautiful Macedon Ranges area of central Victoria for over six years now. Useless turbines that politicians love as symbolic gestures to climate change mitigation. Recently the Victorian Health Department deemed that there is no evidence that noise from turbines in close proximity to households have a impact on health. Giving a green light to developers to impose 135m tall turbines as close as they want to homes. Residents close to existing turbines have effectively been told that it is all in their imaginations that they are ill.
Hansen’s carefully crafted bureaucratese avoids the core scientific critique. See:
Climategate: Leaked Emails Inspired Data Analyses Show Claimed Warming Greatly Exaggerated and NOAA not CRU is Ground Zero
(This is a preliminary introduction – final much more complete report will be posted here and on SPPI, which has supported the study shortly)
By Joseph D’Aleo
See Chiefio on: GHCN – GIStemp Interactions – The Bolivia Effect
Nor does he address the problems Anthony Watts has been exposing: Is the US Surface Record Reliable?
Wow, well that totally refutes the very specific items I saw. Got to hand it to Hansen, he pwned Coleman there. No possible way to cross-refute that bomb from the GISSman.
With responses like this, who needs queries?
rbateman: “Can I believe that someone who says things to incite civil disobedience is not going to sit silent while others discuss how to cook the books to further his own doings? NOT”.
WELL SAID
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Both these people need a serious check-up from the neck-up. Stunning how this rubbish get’s airtime.
The transcript of David Letterman with “yep….yep……yeps” from Hansen.
LETTERMAN: “I just saw the other day another massive iceberg has busted off and is headed toward Australia.”
LYSENKO: [Nods]
LETTERMAN: “And the glaciers of Mt. Kilamanjaro are melting and will flood the valleys….and on and on.”
LYSENKO: “Right.”
LETTERMAN: “And the Maldives will be submerged in 20 to 30 years.”
LYSENKO: “Yep. Right. Yep.”
LETTERMAN: And 50% of the species that we now know will be, in my son’s lifetime, eradicated.
LYSENKO: [Nods]. “Yep. Well you know in my book I talk about what happens as Greenland and Antarctica begin to melt faster…..blah blah blah….greater pressure gradients and stronger storms…..blah blah blah.
In this “WARMEST” decade ever, as you call it, Jim…..then how has the ACE index been so low????
Again….message to Jim Hansen and his henchmen.
Your tale of scare tactics and myths….are soon to be over.
Your reign is over.
Be a man, step down and stop funding your activism from the public dollar!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Baa Humbug (19:55:10) :
Excellent post!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Hansen would be wise to shut up while he has the chance.
There will be plenty of time for his CO2 later in the legal system.
kadaka (20:35:11) :
[snip – we don’t link to crop circle websites and others of that ilk]
Not even for fun? That’s what Google dug right up for “apollo 11 minutes silence,” first two results that had “two minutes of silence” in the results. What other sort of sites have such important and critical information?
😉
An that IS the real beef of the argument, folks…the one that burns me up….even more than the AGW scare. (OK….not more, just equally).
If Hansen elected to stop receiving a paycheck from Uncle Sam, so he could continue his extremism, I would respect that.
But he doesn’t.
And so the American taxpayer should be OUTRAGED.
The “Storms of His Grandchildren”…will be the storms they unfairly have to endure…when history proves that Granddad is a FRAUD!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Here’s a theory: Letterman is baiting Hansen into agreeing with ridiculous claims to show what a loon he (Hansen) is.
Naw, but it was worth a try.
Letterman does ask what he can do to further the cause. Here’s the answer, Dave my son – turn off your electricity, dispose of your vehicles, don’t heat your home or your water, stop eating or wearing anything you didn’t produce yourself, no home repairs you can’t do yourself with raw materials you procure yourself without power tools. And no television show, for crying out loud! Think of the carbon footprint. And it would be even higher if anyone watched the stupid thing!
[Why is it always about getting the government to make other people do something? If you believe the planet is doomed, you have the moral obligation to stop emitting CO2 this instant!]
What are the facts. Are the opponents of AGW just making noise or do they have proof?
Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?
E.M. Smith has adduced the evidence that cooler stations have been removed from the records and that the area has been “homogenized” by warmer stations. Either that is correct or it is not. Dr. Hansen has responded by saying “we have not manipulated anything” while not addressing the actual issue in any way whatever. That is not the typical action of a man who has an adequate defense of his method.
If you aren’t hiding anything James the why the resisting of FOIA?