Guest Post By John R. Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville
via Dr. Roger Pielke Sr’s blog: Climate Science
The three warm-color time series are taken from Hansen’s published testimony in June 1988 in which global surface air temperatures were projected under three scenarios by his global climate model.
The red curve follows a scenario (A) of continued emissions growth based on the previous 20 years before 1988 (which turned out to be an underestimate of actual emissions growth.) The orange represents a scenario (B) of fixed emissions at the rate achieved in the 1980s. The yellow curve portrays a scenario (C) in which “a drastic reduction” in GHG emissions is assumed for 1990-2000. The observations are global tropospheric temperatures adjusted to mimic the magnitude of surface temperature variability and trends according to published climate model simulations (i.e. a reduction in satellite anomalies by 0.83.)
After tying all time series to a 1979-83 reference mean, one can see the significant divergence in the results. (Notes: 1. observed 2010 is Jan-Jul only; 2.) tropospheric temperatures are used as the comparison metric due to many uncertainties and biases in the surface temperature record, i.e. Klotzbach et al. 2009, 2010 ; 3.) both models and observations included the 1982 eruption of El Chichon while B and C scenarios included a volcano in the mid 1990s – not too different from Mt. Pinatubo.)
The result suggests the old NASA GCM was considerably more sensitive to GHGs than is the real atmosphere since (a) the model was forced with lower GHG concentrations than actually occurred and (b) still gave a result that was significantly warmer than observations.
Nick Stokes says:
August 13, 2010 at 11:07 pm
“And the prediction of GMST was pretty good.”
Why does your graph stop in 2005?
Wouldn’t this be more appropriate?
http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/252/hansen2009all.jpg
And even with 2010 in record territory (barely), Scenario B is toast.
I notice that Village Idiot weighed in with “who cares about 22 years ago” and Hansen defenders come out of the woodwork arguing “if ands or buts” to try to show that he was right.
“Today, I will testify to Congress about global warming, 20 years after my June 23, 1988 testimony, which alerted the public that global warming was under way. There are striking similarities between then and now, but one big difference.
“Again a wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by policymakers and the public. Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic. Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent. ” [my emphasis]
–James Hansen, 23 June 2008. Opinion piece for Worldwatch Institute
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5798
What Hansen in effect said was that *each* of the three scenarios he outlined in 1988 were almost guaranteed to occur. Talk about hedging your bets. From the same editorial:
“I noted that global warming enhanced both extremes of the water cycle, meaning stronger droughts and forest fires, on the one hand, but also heavier rains and floods. ”
Hansen’s a con artist. No matter what happens, he’ll insist he predicted it.
Has anyone reminded him lately that he predicted the West Side Highway would be under water due to rising sea levels by last year?
I have never understood how Hansen got away with the “adjustment” of the GISS records back in 2000, where the 1930’s were demerited and shrank to temperatures colder than the present. That, (and also Mann’s demeriting of the MWP,) have always struck me as “cheating.” They seem such a flagrant disregard of scientific objectivity that I feel there needs to be some sort of punishment for it. Instead people are, it seems to me, far more patient with Hansen than he deserves.
I cringe when I think of all the tax dollars he has blown. I would like to interview all the people who have worked with him at NASA over the past two decades, “adjusting” temperatures. Surely one could be found who would tell the truth about what went on.
We need a good whistle-blower, or someone in the mood to write a book, “The corruption of NASA.”
People are far too kind to Hansen. He ought have the book thrown at him.
John F. Hultquist says:
August 13, 2010 at 5:34 pm
To paraphrase Richard Feynman:
When the theory makes a prediction that does not agree with observations then the theory is wrong.
DirkH says:
August 14, 2010 at 10:16 am
carrot eater says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:24 pm
“[…]So basically, Christy assumes the models are correct, (and also that UAH/RSS are correct), and ends up deciding the models are incorrect. ”
Would that not constitute a 100% proof by contradiction?
No – not in this particular case. Hansen’s model predicts (or predicted) the surface temperature trend. John Christy has used the UAH LT record to “mimic the surface temperature variability and trends according to published climate model simulations” . He needs to explain how this is relevant to Hansen’s model.
Nick Stokes says:
August 14, 2010 at 6:42 am
If global absolute temps are a virtual impossibility, then why not invent an anomalymometer, and do away with useless thermometers? I don’t need a tarmac thermometer to tell me that it is unbearably hot on my rooftop in summer.
Nick Stokes says:
August 14, 2010 at 6:42 am
“Hansen doesn’t do that. He has a standing post at GISS on why it’s virtually impossible to even define a global surface absolute temperature, and why anomalies are essential.”
So…even though all of thermodynamics associated with atmospheric heat transfer depends on absolute temperatures, they don’t want to deal with that at GISS. For example, would the radiation heat transfer be different if the average surface temperature is 55 F vs 60 F? So why, again, are anomalies essential? And, again, how do they calculate the surface integral of the anomalies in the GCMs? Where are the node points in the computational mesh located? Do they even care? Hmmmm…let me check their documentation…ooops….
It looks unusually warm in the Arctic in James Hansen’s temperature set this year. Yet it may have been the coolest summer on record there this year.
In 1988 they opened the hearing room windows so the air conditioning would be overcome. Now they are dropping Arctic temperature stations so cooling in the earth is overcome.
Dirck Noorman says:
August 14, 2010 at 6:43 am
Very similar analysis here with Hansen’s original graphs:
http://tinyurl.com/6cms9f
I suggest you reread Hansen’s paper and testimony again more carefully since you are mistaken. In particular look at Fig 2 and reconsider your statement that the GHGs continued to increase at the same rate.
To Joel Shore:
“(and I believe that there are in fact two groups besides RSS and UAH who have done the analysis and reported higher trends than either RSS or UAH).”
What do you mean by this. Either there are one or more groups other than RSS and UAH or there isn’t. You say there are, so supply ID and preferably links.
Caleb: August 14, 2010 at 11:01 am
I have never understood how Hansen got away with the “adjustment” of the GISS records back in 2000, where the 1930′s were demerited and shrank to temperatures colder than the present. That, (and also Mann’s demeriting of the MWP,) have always struck me as “cheating.”
It’s making the data fit the agenda — in other words, fraud.
If anyone here tried “demeriting” his or her income for tax purposes, we’d be in jail — unless, of course, we were cabinet-level nominees in the current administration…
If Hansen’s own boss admitted Hansen was way off in more than one way, why is he still getting an audience?
Nick Stokes says:
August 14, 2010 at 6:03 am
BarryW says: August 14, 2010 at 4:13 am
No, scenario B is the closest, roughly linear increase in CO2, with a El Chichon type volcano (we got Pinatubo). Hansen said in 1988 that B was the most plausible.
Hansen said the B scenario was the most plausible but we didn’t get B for the CO2 values, they were at or above A as has already been pointed out. So he was wrong on the most plausible scenario and we got between C and B temperatures from A+ CO2 input, so he was wrong about the sensitivity of the climate to CO2.
Nick Stokes says:
August 14, 2010 at 6:03 am
“No, scenario B is the closest, roughly linear increase in CO2, with a El Chichon type volcano (we got Pinatubo). Hansen said in 1988 that B was the most plausible.”
So you agree with Monckton about a linear increase in CO2 then. But w r t Hansen you are confusing concentrations with emissions. Emissions have not been linear.
Nick Stokes says:
August 13, 2010 at 11:07 pm
“What a contrived post? Hansen wasn’t predicting LT, or LT (SfcAdj) or whatever. He was predicting measured surface air temperature. His plot showed the prediction against GIStemp.”
“And the prediction of GMST was pretty good.”
It was only good if you omit the last five years, deprecate scenario A and use modelled GIStemps rather than the measured satellite temperatures. At least Christy’s multiplier is based on solid physics, whereas Hansen’s 1200 km extrapolations and arbitrary adjustments are just based on hand waving and a mis-use of statistical formalism.
Richard M says: August 14, 2010 at 7:48 am
“Wrong. Emissions have been exponential.”
Nope. Here’s the AR4 graph. Ups and downs, but basically linear.
Frank K. says: August 14, 2010 at 11:55 am
“So…even though all of thermodynamics associated with atmospheric heat transfer depends on absolute temperatures, they don’t want to deal with that at GISS.”
Nonsense. Of course regular temp is used in modelling and analysis. But you need anomalies to calculate a meaningful global surface temp average, and hence global trend.
rbateman says:
Absolute temperatures are useful locally. However, on a global scale, absolute temperatures are not a good thing to use because they do not have very good properties in that they can vary dramatically over large distances, which means you need a very large distribution of closely-spaced stations to get an accurate result. Consider the weather station located at the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire and imagine a station located in a nearby valley. The two would record very different temperatures. The advantage of anomalies are that they are correlated over large distances. Thus, a much sparser set of readings suffices to determine the trends in the global temperature anomaly.
Richard M says:
Actually, emissions of CFCs were cut even more drastically than Hansen could have possibly imagined. You have to include all parts of the equation. Also, in terms of CO2, the question is not just linear or exponential but how fast an exponential. I.e., if emissions increase 1% year-upon-year or 3% year-upon-year, both yield exponential growth but with different factors.
There are separate issues to consider in terms of how well he did predicting CO2 levels on the basis of emissions vs how well he did predicting climate on the basis of CO2 levels. You seem to be claiming that there was some major error in the first part. Do you have evidence to back this up or are you just talking off of the top of your head?
James Sexton says:
I do not understand the distinction. On the basis of Dr. Christy’s and Dr. Spencer’s flawed analysis of the satellite temperature record, there was a considerable period of time when it was erroneously claimed that the troposphere was cooling…and this likely played a significant part in delaying the sort of laws of which you speak.
Now, if you don’t like such laws, you might think that delaying laws is not a bad thing. However, for those of us who don’t like people freeloading off of us by using fossil fuel energy irresponsibly (e.g., driving Hummers on their city commute to work) because they can offload the consequences onto the rest of us, that is not a good thing. I would prefer to have these people pay for the full costs for their decisions, so that they will hopefully make more responsible decisions (or, so even, if they don’t, they at least bear the full cost of their irresponsible decisions themselves rather than having everyone else share the cost). That is what market economics is supposed to be about, but alas things have been co-opted by what I call “free market fundamentalists” who believe in “free markets” as a religious tenet rather than believing in the (social) science of market economics as understood by economists.
Can anyone tell me what “skillful” means. Mann talked about skillful in his “reconstruction” of temperatures to the medieval period. Then he could produce a skillful reconstruction.
What does “skillful mean”?
Jim says:
Good question. I just tried to research this by looking at the U.S. Climate Change Science Program’s report on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere ( http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/saps/291 ). It turns out that, as I vaguely remembered, there are two other groups that have analyzed temperature trends, at U. of Maryland and U. of Washington. However, it seems that both these groups just report trends (or corrections to trends) for the middle troposphere, not the lower troposphere as is being talked about here. I do think that at least one of those groups was arguing that the way that UAH was determining lower troposphere (LT) temperatures still has some contamination from the stratosphere (where the temperature trend has been quite strongly negative, as expected due to decreased stratospheric ozone and increased GHGs), and I believe there is still an ongoing debate about this, but from what I can tell from that report the only two numerical trend values that we have for the LT are from UAH and RSS. So, those are apparently still the only two games in town for actual numerical trends in the LT.
Jimbo says:
Henry Chance says:
It is wrong to claim that Theon was Hansen’s supervisor in any realistic use of the term. Apparently, Theon was a bureaucrat reasonably high up in the bureaucracy at NASA who had some responsibility for funding of various agencies within NASA, including GISS. In my experience in industry (and I assume government is no better), such people often have very little scientific expertise or judgment in the areas in which they may have bureaucratic control. You know the old saying: If you can’t do, teach; if you can’t teach, administrate. (I’ve recently gone from doing to teaching…but I hope to avoid that last transition!)
Nick Stokes says:
August 14, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Probably a distinction without a difference, but there’s a definite bow in that curve.
http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/2050/co2q.jpg
Anyway, it’s the total ghg forcings that should be considered, not just CO2.
Either way, Scenario B (if you consider now and not 2005) looks pretty bad. Hansen adherents have admited that he overestimated ghg sensitivities in 1988. Why keep trying to salvage Scenario B?
Perhaps like the Hockey Stick, too much invested in it?
@roger Knights:
Lost in all this controversy was a mighty fine pun on the psychological state of some researchers: Academia Nuts
(I saw it, Roger…nice one.)
Nick Stokes @ur momisugly August 14, 2010 at 2:49 pm said:
Nonsense. Of course regular temp is used in modelling and analysis. But you need anomalies to calculate a meaningful global surface temp average, and hence global trend.
And when you get to the models, there are parts of the temperature that cannot be explained by anything but CO2, right?
Why can meteorology explain the physical reasons (humidity is this, this much sun, and so on) the temperature is 75F tonight, but the models can’t? Might the process remove information from the data (outliers come to mind as one possibility)? You certainly wouldn’t find out by looking through the data that something was missing if that was the case.
Tangeng says:
August 14, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Can anyone tell me what “skillful” means. Mann talked about skillful in his “reconstruction” of temperatures to the medieval period. Then he could produce a skillful reconstruction.
What does “skillful mean”?
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It’s called magic
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Nick Stokes says:
August 14, 2010 at 6:42 am
Frank K. says: August 14, 2010 at 6:06 am
Does anyone know the absolute global mean temperature predicted by Hansen’s code (not the anomaly) – how does this compare to the “actual” absolute global mean temperature.
Hansen doesn’t do that. He has a standing post at GISS on why it’s virtually impossible to even define a global surface absolute temperature, and why anomalies are essential.
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How do you have a global temperature anomaly with no global temeperature?
Wouldn’t the averaging of global anomolies imply an average global temp using the same method. Being virtualy imposible to calculate a global surf temp, would that not also imply a virtual imposibility to calc a global anomoly?