Dr. James Hansen, NASA scientist, advocate, and protestor with a rap sheet released a new paper (non peer reviewed) on his website recently. A video report follows. The paper is titled:
Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications (click for PDF)
Here’s a portion of the abstract:
Improving observations of ocean temperature confirm that Earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar minimum. This energy imbalance provides fundamental verification of the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change. Observed surface temperature change and ocean heat gain constrain the net climate forcing and ocean mixing rates. We conclude that most climate models mix heat too efficiently into the deep ocean and as a result underestimate the negative forcing by human-made aerosols. Aerosol climate forcing today is inferred to be ‒1.6 ± 0.3 W/m2, implying substantial aerosol indirect climate forcing via cloud changes. Continued failure to quantify the specific origins of this large forcing is untenable, as knowledge of changing aerosol effects is needed to understand future climate change. A recent decrease in ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols and a deep prolonged solar minimum. Observed sea level rise during the Argo float era can readily be accounted for by thermal expansion of the ocean and ice melt, but the ascendency of ice melt leads us to anticipate a near-term acceleration in the rate of sea level rise.
This line is rather odd:
A recent decrease in ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols…
Well I don’t know what he’s talking about, but the Pinatubo eruption happened in June 1991, and I doubt much aerosol remained after about 3 years. Maybe in his mind 15-20 years ago was “recent”? In 1999 the USGS report on Pinatubo said:
The aerosol cloud spread rapidly around the globe in about 3 weeks and attained global coverage 1 year after the eruption. The SO2 release was sufficient to generate over 25 Mt of sulfate aerosol, and peak local and regional midvisible optical depths of up to 0.4 were recorded. Global values after widespread dispersal and sedimentation of aerosol were about 0.1 to 0.15, with a residence time of over 2 years. This large aerosol cloud caused dramatic decreases in the amount of net radiation reaching the Earth’s surface.
So what’s Hansen thinking when he says “A recent decrease in ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols…” ?
But I digress. The good doctor is also talking again about sea level rise, saying that:
…we conclude that the rate of sea level rise is likely to accelerate during the next several years.
And then goes on to talk about Pinatubo aerosols again:
Reasons for that conclusion are as follows.
First, the contribution of thermal expansion to sea level is likely to increase above recent rates. The nearly constant rate of sea level rise since 1993 masks the fact that thermal expansion must have been less in the Argo era than in the prior decade, when ice melt was less but sea level rose 3 mm/year. Solar minimum and a diminishing Pinatubo rebound effect both contributed to a declining rate of thermal expansion during the past several years. But the Pinatubo effect is now essentially spent and solar irradiance change should now work in the opposite sense.
Well…not so sure about that. A recent analysis of tide gauge data published in the Journal of Coastal Research suggests that there’s been no hint of acceleration at all in the past 100 years:
The paper is currently in press at the Journal of Coastal Research and is provided with open access to the full publication. The results are stunning for their contradiction to AGW theories which suggest global warming would accelerate sea level rise during the last century. In fact, the data distribution seems to be slightly towards the deceleration side:
This seem like a perfect time to revisit this story that I did over a year ago that talked about a prediction posted in a salon.com interview where Dr. Hansen said that the “West Side Highway would be underwater in 20 years”. Well Hansen got upset with that report and called up the reporter and told him his memory was wrong, saying that it was actually 40 years.
Willis Eschenbach told me about the disagreement, and I updated the original story about three weeks ago to deal with the shift from 20 years to 40 years. See the corrected title:
The surprise? Even adding 20 years, Hansen’s prediction still doesn’t look promising. Here’s the new additions to that story from October 2009:
=============================================================
UPDATE: Thanks to a tip from Willis Eschenbach, there’s some developing news in that story from Dr. James Hansen. The Salon interviewee and book author, Rob Reiss that I quoted, now admits he somehow conflated 40 years with 20 years, and concedes that Dr. Hansen actually said 40 years for his prediction. However, as the newest analysis shows, it doesn’t make any difference, and we still aren’t seeing the magnitude of sea level rise predicted, now 23 years into it.
See the relevant excerpt below:
Michaels also has the facts wrong about a 1988 interview of me by Bob Reiss, in which Reiss asked me to speculate on changes that might happen in New York City in 40 years assuming CO2 doubled in amount. Michaels has it as 20 years, not 40 years, with no mention of doubled CO2. Reiss verified this fact to me, but he later sent the message:
“I went back to my book and re-read the interview I had with you. I am embarrassed to say that although the book text is correct, in remembering our original conversation, during a casual phone interview with a Salon magazine reporter in 2001 I was off in years. What I asked you originally at your office window was for a prediction of what Broadway would look like in 40 years, not 20. But when I spoke to the Salon reporter 10 years later probably because I’d been watching the predictions come true, I remembered it as a 20 year question.“
Source: this update on Dr. Hansen’s personal web page at Columbia University.
In my [original] story, below, I quoted from Reiss here in the Salon interview.
So I’m happy to make the correction for Dr. Hansen in my original article, since Mr. Reiss reports on his original error in conflating 40 years with 20 years. But let’s look at how this changes the situation with forty years versus twenty.
Per Dr. Hansen’s prediction in 1988, now in 2011, 23 years later, we’re a bit over halfway there … so the sea level rise should be about halfway up the side of Manhattan Island by now.
How’s that going? Are the predictions coming true? Let’s find out. Let’s look at the tide gauge in New York and see what it says.
Here’s the PSMSL page http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/stations/12.php
You can see the terrifying surge of acceleration in the sea level due to increasing GHGs in the 20th century. Willis downloaded and plotted the data to see what the slope looked like, and then plotted a linear average line.
Here it is overlaid with the Colorado satellite data. Note the rate of rise is unchanged:
And add to that, the recent peer reviewed paper from the Journal of Coastal Research that said: “worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years”
As of this update in March 2011, we’re 23 years into his prediction of the West Side Highway being underwater. From what I can measure in Google Earth, Dr. Hansen would need at least a ten foot rise in forty years to make his prediction work. See this image below from Google Earth where I placed the pointer over the West Side Highway, near the famous landmark and museum, the USS Intrepid:
According to Google Earth, the West Side Highway is 10 feet above sea level here – click to enlarge
The lat/lon should you wish to check yourself is: 40.764572° -73.998498°
Here’s a ground level view (via a tourist photo) so you can see the vertical distance from the roadway to the sea level on that day and tide condition. Sure looks like at least 10 feet to me.
Image from Panoramio
According to the actual data, after 23 years, we’ve seen about a 2.5 inch rise. There’ s still a very long way to go to ten feet to cover the West Side Highway there.
To reach the goal he predicted in 1988, Dr. Hansen needs to motivate the sea to do his bidding, he’s gonna have to kick it in gear and use a higher octane driver if he’s going to get there.
Thanks to Willis for the two graphs above.
Read the full story here: A little known 20 40 year old climate change prediction by Dr. James Hansen – that failed will likely fail badly
=============================================================
This story I did is also instructive:
Freaking out about NYC sea level rise is easy to do when you don’t pay attention to history
But while Dr. Hansen is looking for acceleration, the ensemble current plot of satellite measured sea level data seems to have a small hiccup in the last year:
click to enlarge – graph by Roman M – more hereAnd finally, to be fair, I want to show this video. Dr. Hansen produced a video where he briefed colleagues on his new paper, I present it here in full:
To put things into perspective, it looks like all you need to do to save the West Side Highway from drowning is to not chip off the old tarmac whenever you repair the road.
No acceleration of sea level rise rate, sea level down 2 meters from 4,000BC, no need to read Jimmy’s blathering. Thanks for letting me know he is still wasting air.
Can anyone tell me how Hansen manages to remain employed, given his propensity for hubris and wrong predictions? It seems that all he DOES is tell fairy tales.
[snip over the top – Anthony]
But hey! Keep up the good work. I love taking your posts and smackin’ leftards in their thick heads with them. That hollow sound it makes is so cool.
From the paper, “GHGs are also an amplifying feedback on millennial time scales, as warming ocean and soils drive more CO2, CH4 and N2O into the air.”
Question: What stops some GHG from complete depletion from the soil, after millennia of heating? Is it not the case that these GHG are taken from the air into the soil and back again, by vegetative mechanisms? (There are other mechanisms, like methane leaks from coal seams, but they ought not be temperature sensitive, though they would be land use sensitive). Seems this author Hansen has a confusion of statics and dynamics that we see so often in climate work, and a disinclination to model processes from cradle to grave.
Oh, and as for sea level rise, I pointed out to a Parks Ranger and my rather enviro-indoctrinated nieces a few years ago, while standing on a stone pier on Cape Cod, that said pier, which the Ranger had just told us had been in continuous use since the early 1700s, would be under 6 feet of water at low tide if sea level was actually rising as much as they claimed. I then compounded my blasphemy by pointing out that Cape Cod does not a have a rising sea level problem, it has a tidal erosion problem. You would have thought I had just urinated on their burning Qur’an. I thought for a few moments I would have to do CPR on the Ranger.
Leftards will believe anything, as long as that anything is humans are evil and destroying Mother Gaia.
“We’re all going to die!”
“Protect the queen!”
“Who’s the queen?”
“I’m the queen.”
“No you’re not. I’m the queen!”
Some of us would not be displeased at all should NYC get a 10 ft sea level rise, especially down by the Intrepid museum. The sooner the better.
Mike in Houston
I gather that Hansen is egotistical and self centred enough to keep track of all his own predictions and and the outcome of his personal interviews.
So why the correction from a 20 year prediction to a 40 years prediction only after some 20 years have lapsed from that original widely reported interview and prediction, that in 20 years, New York’s West Side highway would be under water from sea level rise due to global warming.
Why didn’t he correct that statement implying a 20 year time span to a 40 year time span immediately when the interview was first published.
And a correction that finally appears at a time when everybody can finally see that his original reported predictions of 20 years ago are increasingly seen as an overwrought imagination of someone full of his own self important BS and with a near fanatical AGW ideology that he intends to try and impose on the world’s peoples.
Everywhere the AGW/ACCo’s are all showing the same sickening symptoms of trying to rewrite history when they suddenly realise just how stupid their predictions of just a few years ago of an immediate climate armageddon are starting to look.
Because his fairy tales are what the people who give out the money want to hear. And when someone threatens his income, such as George Bush, he plays the victim and says that person is trying to silence him.
Slightly off topic, but there’s an article in The New Republic today focusing on the mysterious reasons why the United States hasn’t completely embraced the environmentalist agenda (http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/87140/environmental-green-movement-al-gore-nesbit).
Did some people just not get the message? Did the diabolical oil companies do a bang-up job of controlling information? Did the midterm elections weaken the power of the environmentalists? Why aren’t people rioting in the streets to stop global warming??
Well, despite all of the dire warnings of the catastrophes caused by runaway global warming, it appears that things simply aren’t turning out to be as bad as advertised. Apparently the models were wrong. Can it be any more simple than that?
Regarding the Mt Pinatubo references, perhaps Jimbo just recycled an old paper making adjustments to make it appear current but obviously missing that part.
I’m telling you the “Heat in the Ocean” has a thing for the “Hot spot” They ran off together and can’t be found.
Anything to do with this man should not be on this site. He is being given far too much attention.
Anthony, not to quibble, it is after all, Hansen’s statement, and we know how he believes historical information can be dynamic and ehem fluid , but I believe the story now adds the caveat of a doubling of CO2 also. I just wanted to give you a heads up so you can prepare for the backlash of criticizing one of the high priests of CAGW.
REPLY: Thanks. I saw that and there’s lots more, I just needed to limit this one blog post as it was getting large. I’ll have more later. – Anthony
Given that “it’s worse than we thought”, I see no reason to cut The Messiah and his acolyte 20 years of slack.
Watched the video and some interesting points emerged.
First, SHOCK HORROR! Dr Hansen states that that, “total greenhouse gas forcing decreased significantly, then declined and levelled out in the last decade.” On video at 41:50.
Interestingly he also points out at 24:57 that Antarctic (Polar) temperatrures are not a good indication of global temperatures. Well horray for basic physics!
Also at 36:50 that the atmosphere has very little heat capacity, which I just found odd as he is deeply, deeply obsessed by CO2. Pity he seems to find negative forcings too complicated to include in his meanderings.
If he was one of my students I’d be sending him back to fill in some of the gaping holes in his theory before I’d let him send that paper forward.
You know if it were warming, all this sophistry would still be concealing the truth. How did we get so lucky as to have nature cool us off?
There is no way on Earth that Mother Gaia would know that this film of humanity would need relief from fevered political rhetoric in order to survive. She couldn’t, could she, Dr. Lovelock?
============
James Hansen ought to be dismissed from his job as someone losing his grasp on reality. I made a prediction sometime ago that he’d retire this year for personal reasons. I mean he is 69 year old after all. It is time to appoint a young, no-nonsense, honest-to-method scientist to head GISS. Otherwise the funding for Hansen’s tribe should be cut all together.
What a monumental mistake it turned out to be appointing a young Venus specialist to study the Earth’s climate 30 years ago. What a ‘Planet B’ that turned out to be for humanity.
ocw, don’t tell anyone, but their ‘love shack’ is in their own Private Idaho. The Emperor of Wyoming is jealous.
=============
“Geoff Sherrington says:
April 21, 2011 at 4:44 am
From the paper, “GHGs are also an amplifying feedback on millennial time scales, as warming ocean and soils drive more CO2, CH4 and N2O into the air.”
Question: What stops some GHG from complete depletion from the soil, after millennia of heating? Is it not the case that these GHG are taken from the air into the soil and back again, by vegetative mechanisms?”
No,
New article from Church & White:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h2575k28311g5146/fulltext.pdf
“There is considerable variability in the rate of rise during the twentieth century but there has been a statistically significant acceleration since 1880 and 1900 of 0.009 ± 0.003 mm year-2 and 0.009 ± 0.004 mm year-2, respectively.”
data:
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_data_cmar.html
figure 1970-2009(dec), with quadratic trend (blue) and 1 sigma (red)
http://img857.imageshack.us/img857/3056/churchs.jpg
“Geoff Sherrington says:
April 21, 2011 at 4:44 am
From the paper, “GHGs are also an amplifying feedback on millennial time scales, as warming ocean and soils drive more CO2, CH4 and N2O into the air.”
Question: What stops some GHG from complete depletion from the soil, after millennia of heating? Is it not the case that these GHG are taken from the air into the soil and back again, by vegetative mechanisms?”
No, the evil man created CO2 is indisgestible by plants and therefore is immediately expelled by gaia’s plants.
I don’t believe for a minute that he actually said 40 years and was misquoted, only to notice after the “misquoted” 20 years had passed. I call BS.
Er. What predictions coming true?
DaveE.
The word which summarizes Hansen’s latest “paper” is hubris…
Hubris, also hybris, means extreme haughtiness, pride or arrogance. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one’s own competence or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power.
However, what this paper is REALLY all about is a cry for help after the $500 million Glory satellite disaster:
“The Glory mission (Mishchenko et al., 2007a), which was expected to begin operations this year, would have measured the aerosol direct forcing, as it carried an instrument capable of measuring polarization to an accuracy about 0.1 percent. However, a launch failure caused destruction of the satellite, which failed to achieve orbit.”
“Results of our present study are relevant to plans for replacing the Glory mission…”
So let’s see…we’ve given the clowns at NASA-GISS and NASA-GSFC well over $500 million for the Glory boondoggle, and now, as we try to cut the federal budget to deal with our looming debt crisis, Hansen is coming to us with his hand outstretched asking for at least $100 million (though he says – from the private sector!):
“Such a mission concept has been well-defined (Hansen et al., 1992) and if carried out by the private sector without a requirement for undue government review panels it could be achieved within a cost of about $100M.”
I frankly think that his idea to fund CAGW research with private sector funds is an excellent one! So please, Dr. Hansen, resign from NASA, taken your most ardent supporters with you, and establish your own privately funded research group. You could get Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth, George Soros, etc. to chip in for that new satellite you want!
Anthony,
We have only the water volume that is available from oceans and Ice. In order to increase atmospheric precipitation, the ocean levels would have to drop. When the planet dries and melts the caps, they rise.
Simple common sense that climate scientists have yet to grasp.
Simple calculation, in order for ocean water to rise 10′, they also would take the empty space on land at an average of 10′ besides all the ocean distance of square miles. Close to every drop of ice has to melt for that to happen.
This paper is a shocker.
Hansen has conceded that the error bars around forcings due to volcanic aerosols (both their magnitude and their persistence), and the error bars around the sequestering of heat into the deep oceans, are at least as large as the forcing due to all anthro CO2 emissions. Yet only a few years ago Gavin S. published a short letter in Physics Today bragging about how well the models were able to replicate the behavior of global temperature during and after the Pinatubo eruption, and that this was settled science. Oops.
Hansen has also invoked reduced solar activity to help explain the last decade of flat temperatures, which implies that short-term solar forcings are similar in magnitude with anthro CO2 forcings. This is being invoked at a time when CO2 forcings are purportedly their largest in millenia. This is completely antithetical to the IPCC reports, which poo-poo solar as a minor player on the forcing bench compared with the CO2 star.
In other words, after nearly a half-century of computer climate models (Manabe assembled one of the first back in the early 1960’s), they are still curve-fitting exercises with no predictive skill on any temporal or spatial scale.
We’ll have to ask Gavin et al about the value of non peer-reviewed literature. Seems that they only respect the peer-reviewed kind although they might make an exception for their boss. (The boss is not always right but he is always the boss!)
Ask someone for a time in the future and they will say 10, 20, 50 or 100 years.
40 is such a strange number….strange ways for strange days I guess.
‘there has been a statistically significant acceleration since 1880 and 1900 of 0.009 ± 0.003 mm year-2 and 0.009 ± 0.004 mm year-2, respectively.”
Really? Wow! 1/100th of a mm per year. Run for the hills everyone, and don’t forget the waterwings in your panic.
Hansen is apparently blind to weather. Is it just me or is he contributing all variability to his notion of climate sensitivity to such things as volcanoes, CO2, solar cycles, butterflies, etc?
Just read his paper and realised at the end where he goes begging for 100 Million dollars that it’s a not a scientific paper after all, just another project proposal. So much for science.
Notice the genuflection on the part of the reporter — and lack of contact with reality re the predictions. Where are the predicted heat-related crime spikes in NYC? Shouldn’t the West Side Highway be halfway toward being submerged by now?
It’s very telling when Hansen at 7:00 into the video says “We were involved with the IPCC and had to DECIDE what aerosol forcing we where using.” Earlier he stated that they (scientists) DO NOT KNOW the amount of aerosol “forcing” in reality. This means that they are making it up as they go along rather than actually doing some measurements and finding out with empirical evidence based and experiment based science observations.
When you do not know and pick a number out of your hat it’s at best a guess and at worst soothsaying towards your doomsday bias.
At least have the guts to be honest and use a FULL RANGE of values for the alleged aerosol “forcing”. That way you are not putting in unsupportable assumptions that have no foundation in the objective reality of Nature.
Jim,
These are the good old days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
How come he get’s anything published with his track record.
REPLY: He didn’t, he simply posted this to his personal website. He’s apparently evolved beyond the need for process. – Anthony
Hansen does science by having his grand kids pick the amount of aerosol forcing out of thin air. Doesn’t bode well for the rest of his science.
Is this the new norm? When you can’t have a paper accepted in a peer-reviewed paper publish it on a blog and it is as good? Yellow science?
Hansen says: “….as knowledge of changing aerosol effects is needed to understand future climate change.”
He can make predictions based on something we don’t, by his admission, have enough knowledge of to understand future climate change?
What happened to Global Warming? What happened to CO2? Last time we were worried about aerosols, weren’t we worried about an ice age?
This gives us until at most until 2015 to see if we can the prediction. Note it in your calendars.
Definition of several: Being of a number more than two or three but not many.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/several
Is Hansen now saying that the IPCC has got it wrong as to where sea levels will be when his 40 years are up? This is indeed what he is saying.
At 18:30 Hansen admits the fact that the graphs show that the temperature changes BEFORE the CO2 and Ice Sheets change! He does some hand waving (literally) and magically the “slow feedbacks” have the effect happening (rise in temperature) before the cause (CO2 going up).
I didn’t know that slow feedbacks where so slow that they went backwards in time.
Now maybe he’s saying that the feedback are so slow that they were left over from the previous time but that’s way too long for “heat” to be “stored” and released over long periods of time. It would offend the Laws of Thermodynamics, would it not?
Now if someone could explain to me how slow feedbacks can travel backwards in time I’d love to know that so that I can send a few messages back to my younger self about certain things before they happen.
“A recent decrease in ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols and a deep prolonged solar minimum.”
Ah. They’re gearing up to alter the aerosol data and ocean responses to aerosols to get the models back on target.
Unbelievable, he let the prediction stand for years, got a lot of hype, got his name in the papers. Then when someone calls him on it he has a tantrum and changes the prediction after 23 years. The funny part is 200 years instead of twenty would be been a much better number for him to claim. I wish someone would ask him how he expects the seas to rise 10ft in 20 years, or is he hoping for a hurricane or tidal wave to claim victory?
It’s called “grasping at straws” – a normal reaction when the walls of denial start crashing down.
Has anyone found a link to his presentation charts and slides?
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”
“Get that little Dog out of here!”
Humbug.
Pamela G. got snow? been spitting rain and snow in the GR valley all
morning. I have to go face my lefty cohort this Am who will say:”The Coldwarm is
active today! bless be the profit!”…
At the end of the presentation section of the video Hansen just jumps to a conclusion about reducing CO2 to 345 to 360 ppm based upon what he had said, but he didn’t actually say how he gets those numbers aka he didn’t show his work on that.
I dont think he knows what he is saying and I really dont think he cares, he is untouchable and beyond the reach of accountability(for now). Here is a man who believes and his beliefs are set in concrete, no reason or rational dialogue will help in case like this.
He believes himself to be right regardless of reality or facts or reason or sense, here we have what you may call a cultist but he is a connected cultist, he is untouchable or so he thinks and perhaps he is for the present.
Mike Bromley says:
April 21, 2011 at 4:38 am
Can anyone tell me how Hansen manages to remain employed, given his propensity for hubris and wrong predictions?
===================================================
Mike, because no one really believes weathermen can get it right….
…and there’s no penalty for being wrong
Rather than address Hansen’s manifest “No Pressure” theses at unwonted length and detail, why not simply note that GISS/NASA’s pumps are failing as the S.S. Seascape lists ever more heavily to port?
From Ehrlich and Holdren to Hansen and latterly Keith Farnish, the AGW mindset is manifestly Thanatist, a Luddite sociopathology that “loves death more than life” as certain fixated canons have it. What better prescription for Hansen’s hated industrial-technological civilization’s Decline and Fall?
Always worth another viewing (“Will this wind be so mighty …”)
Dr. Hansen must be right, because less than 2 hours ago I heard on the Weather Channel that “as the world continues to warm, sea level rise is accelerating.”
So there’s some peer review of his analysis!
To claim that a rebound of sea level rise from the Pinatubo erruption just ended, “20 years later”, should be supported by a noticeable decrease of sea level rise shortly after the Pinatubo erruption. Since there is not it would appear that Hansen is making some outlandish comments that are not based on what the data supports. Oh well, whats new?
Poor science. Poor guy. But good pay. Hope this “kind of science” will bring him the golden hand-shake and a promotion into retirement.
Hansens not the only one who’s predictions have a habit of not coming true but still has a non questioning following of Believers.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-preacher-warns-end-of-the-world-is-nigh-21-may-around-6pm-to-be-precise-2254139.html
Douglas DC @
April 21, 2011 at 8:08 am
Asks,
Pamela G. got snow?
I don’t think she has had time to respond. However, if you want snow, you don’t have far to go.
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Traffic/passes/snoqualmie/default.aspx
A live update: Snoqualmie Pass on I-90 — Snowing, 8:51 AM
Holbrook says:
April 21, 2011 at 7:26 am
How come he get’s anything published with his track record.
REPLY: He didn’t, he simply posted this to his personal website. He’s apparently evolved beyond the need for process. – Anthony
=================================
Not that the process would be any more than an elbow and hand exercising a stamping motion.
The Pinatubo dodge is frankly an obvioius toss of poop against the wall.
There is an interesting article in May’s Readers Digest that first appeared in Chronicles of Higher Education about someone who writes term papers for students for a fee. He writes everything from high school to PHD theses in every subject. I wonder if that’s how Hansen got his PHD.
REPLY: He got his PhD the correct way, Ph.D. (Physics), University of Iowa, 1967, and shame on you for suggesting otherwise. While I disagree with Dr. Hansen’s views on climate, disparaging his education is just a cheap shot. – Anthony
Never forget that our dear James is but “a hectic legman” for climate change! He knows how to play the “technical game” with CO2, the “agent chemical”, and he sticks to the gameplan like a “magnetic leach”
“A recent decrease in ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols…”
Grasping. At. Straws.
They are absolutely getting desperate. That is horrendously lame and does not pass the sniff test…
If one remembers Darwin’s Dilemma, the person will note that Darwin said that if scientists did not find thousands of intermediate transition forms in the next years, then his theory would be summarily falsified (ref: “Origin of Species”).
Although he primarily preached gradualism by interspecific mortal combat, the rapid appearance of species seemed to counter his claims, and statistical analysis showed that there was not enough time to account for speciation.
Then Gould and others proposed “Punctuated Equilibria”, whereby species lay dormant for unknown reasons, for millennia, and the consensus (consensi?) immediately jumped on this as the solution to Darwin’s Dilemma.
Therefore, I propose that Hansen will be bailed out by the warm-earthers in a similar wise. I propose the following name for his inevitable resolution of the dichotomy: “Punctuated Tsunamism”. PT occurs as the missing “Trenberth Heat” bursts forth from the seas, instantaneously melting all polar ice, producing a wall of water that will inundate all continents within a period of weeks, even days. (Brits will propose the name “Trenberth Effect”, a more puffy and supercilious attribution, but the Yanks will win Big Media’s endorsement by dint of the more alarming moniker).
Michael Mann will possibly be the first to corroborate, to the envy of Phil Jones, who has a more antiquated computer and would have been asleep when the news happened in the States.
I propose that this will occur at the eleventh hour, perhaps in December 2028 (The Gai-Mayans may propose the earlier date of Dec. 22, 2012, so be prepared! But when the date comes and goes, Hansen the Hack will be back on track), thus vindicating him.
In 2028, when all the grain has become converted to ethanol, hunting and gathering of food will upstage PT, I predict, so Jimmy and PT will have been forgotten, like Y2K.
This Pinatubo thing is just silly.
And how come the decrease in solar activity is a cooling factor, but the abnormal activity from 1990-1998 is not a warming factor?
In addition to sticking poo, his brain is sticking too.
COMPARISON OF HANSEN ET AL, 20-AUG-1988, WITH OBSERVED DATA
http://bit.ly/hDGUJJ
The 5-year running global mean temperature anomaly of Hansen et al, given in Figure 3 of the paper, are listed below.
5-Year Running Mean of Hansen et al, 1988,
for various emission scenarios A, B & C
Year=>A=>B=>C
1990=>0.5=>0.4=>0.3
1995=>0.7=>0.4=>0.4
2000=>0.9=>0.5=>0.5
2005=>1.0=>0.7=>0.6
2010=>1.1=>0.9=>0.6
The scenarios were defined in the paper as follows:
We define three trace gas scenarios to provide an indication of how the predicted climate trend depends upon trace gas growth rates. Scenario A assumes that growth rates of trace gas emissions typical of the 1970s and 1980s will continue indefinitely; the assumed annual growth averages about 1.5% of current emissions, so the net greenhouse forcing increases exponentially. Scenario B has decreasing trace gas growth rates, such that the annual increase of the greenhouse climate forcing remains approximately constant at the present level. Scenario C drastically reduces trace gas growth between 1990 and 2000 such that the greenhouse climate forcing ceases to increase after 2000.
Here is the comparison of the predictions with observations (gistemp)
http://bit.ly/hp590C
Year=>A=>B=>C=>observed
1990=>0.5=>0.4=>0.3=>0.24
1995=>0.7=>0.4=>0.4=>0.39
2000=>0.9=>0.5=>0.5=>0.48
2005=>1.0=>0.7=>0.6=>0.55
2010=>1.1=>0.9=>0.6=>
Scenario B has decreasing trace gas growth and Scenario C has drastically reduced trace gas growth. As a result, the actual trace gas growth is Scenario C with continuous yearly average growth.
The above comparison shows that the observed temperatures match scenario C where there is drastic reduction in trace gas growth. Since there was no actual reduction in trace gas growth rate, the above comparison shows the predictions of Hansen et. Al, 1998 is completely wrong.
(Hat tip to Goddard Institute for Space Studies for making the data still available in its web site. When predictions and observations mismatch, the relevant data usually disappear into the black hole)
An 1850 tide gauge for New York? Are you sure it isn’t a reconstruction? This is the norm in Chapter 5 of Ar4 of the IPCC
Very few tide gauges even in Europe are from continous and unchanged locations and can claim to have a reliable output.
tonyb.
I love anecdotal stories like this. It proves that there is hope for man – not a lot as the result is usually denial and fingers in ears all the while yelling “lalalalala”. But they are fun to read.
“A recent decrease in ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols…”
An interesting phrase. It seems to me that a decrease in ocean heat uptake is not a ‘rebound’ effect since the aerosols caused a decrease in radiation reaching the earth’s surface. Wouldn’t a decrease in ocean heat uptake be an effect of the aerosols, and an increase in heat uptake when radiation increased be a ‘rebound’ effect. That and he offer no explanation as to why the ‘rebound’ effect was delayed for almost 15 years, unless he’s implying it is part of a feedback cycle seeking equilibrium (of course, if that’s the case the ‘rebound’ wasn’t ‘delayed’, it’s just part of the feedback cycle).
Back to aerosols and RC, I went there to discuss aerosols 3 years ago and was pretty much shutdown by the moderators (I have a PhD in Chem Eng and my thesis was on SO2/NOx reduction from coal-fired power plants, so I knew a little about aerosol emissions in Europe and NA since the 1960’s). It was clear to me back then that they were making it up as they went along. The fact that they wouldn’t allow any dissent shows how shallow and egotistical these guys are. Seriously, if these guys were unknowingly standing on railroad tracks and you pointed out that a train was coming, they would insist you were incorrect until the final second of their lives! People like that deserve to go down, and hard (which usually happens anyway, so I wouldn’t worry about it).
dccowboy says:
April 21, 2011 at 10:16 am
The simplest way to show this is rubbish, is the fact that heat flows from hot to cold, not the opposite. Physics. Cold cannot “rebound”. Heat aggressively seeks lower enthalpy value, and does not stay in reserve for 15 years! That is absurd, Alice in Wonderland physics, perpetrators being charlatans or idiots (or a combination of the two).
There are, in climate, very brief occasions of inversions, very true, where warm air is overlaid by cold. These brief occurrences resolve themselves quickly, usually violently.
“Delayed rebound effect,” yeah, that’s the ticket.
In his presentation Hansen fails to identity the set of independent observed statistical events that underlie the claims which are made by his theory. If they exist, these events provide the evidentiary basis for the claims. If there are no such events, an evidentiary basis is missing.
An event has a starting time and a stopping time. As the events are statistically independent and Hansen’s study is longitudinal, the starting time of an event must be the stopping time of the preceeding one. What are the starting and stopping times? How are the outcomes defined? Hansen doesn’t tell us.
A prediction is an extrapolation from the condition of a system at the starting time of an event to the outcome of this event at its stopping time. Where is the list of the predicted outcomes from Hansen’s theory? Where is the list of the observed outcomes? Hansen doesn’t provide them. Perhaps an evidentiary basis is missing!
Rather than provide us with the means for determination of whether there is a scientific basis for belief in his theory, Hansen provides us with comparisons of projected to observed temperatures. These comparisons provide us with none of the required information. If we confuse the idea of a “projection” with the idea of a “prediction,” they may seem to provide this information.
C’mon, can’t you see the hockey stick in there? It is edge-on, is all. /snarc
“From what I can measure in Google Earth, Dr. Hansen would need at least a ten foot rise in forty years to make his prediction work.”
Correction: Hansen would now need at least a ten foot rise in seventeen years to make his prediction work (given that we’re already 23 years into his original forty-year timeframe).
Let’s be fair to Hansen. He probably did say 40 years, not 20 years. And dramatic CO2 driven global warming looked like a much better theory 23 years ago than it does today. Still though, 23 years ago, Hansen had nearly a century of tidal gauge data and 30 years of good CO2 data to work with. How in the world he could have projected a doubling of CO2 and 10 foot rise in sea level in the following four decades eludes me. Pretty obviously, barring a dramatic state change in Earth’s climate, Hansen was wrong. Based on current trends, a 10 foot/3meter sea level change might happen in about a thousand years, not 40.
I made it through the perfectly awful video. What I take away from it is that there is a whole lot we don’t know. A frankly I think that much of what Hansen thinks he knows is dubious. Solar radiance changes outside the recent past have been small? How the hell does he know that? CO2 as a primary driver for climate is consistent with ice core records? Based on what little I know, I don’t see how that can stand up to scrutiny. Foraminfera provide a usable deep ocean temperature record? Lots of folks are dubious about that. But Hansen may have learned a bit in the past few decades as he doesn’t seem to predict imminent doom in the video.
BTW, I know a bit about computer modeling. Not a lot, but some. If what Hansen is telling me is what climate models are based on — and I imagine that it is, you don’t need supercomputers and elaborate code to get bad results. With a framework like that, a clever 14 year old could produce equally dubious answers on any personal computer. Might be a good Science Fair project.
So we are hearing that hansen’s prediction has been delayed 20 years. sort of like the UN climate refugees in 2010, oops we meant 2020.
That is the beauty about predictions. If you wait long enough, just about anything will eventually come true. If not in 10 years, make it 20. If not in 20 years, make it 40.
After enough time has passed no one will remember if you said 20 years or 40 years. If you time it right you will have retired anyways on a taxpayer funded government pension and it won’t make the slightest difference. Carbon taxes who cares. It will all come out of the pension, which everyone else is paying for.
At class reunions I am horrified by all the “jerks” and the “know it alls” that landed jobs of authority, power, and control.
Hansen strikes me as one of that lot. It’s no wonder trouble abounds the planet.
“Control freak” is a mental disorder. It’s everywhere.
“hunter says:
April 21, 2011 at 9:15 am
The Pinatubo dodge is frankly an obvioius toss of poop against the wall.”
Naw. What Hansen says, if you suffer through the video far enough is that you’d expect the results of Mt Pinatubo aerosols to fade away after 2 or 3 years, but that there is actually a small tail in atmospheric temps stretching out for a few more years while sea surface temperatures recover from the dip in radiation. May not be accurate, but it isn’t irrational.
Anthony Watts asked,
So what’s Hansen thinking when he says “A recent decrease in ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols…” ?
The answer is in the paper on pages 39 and 40, if you bothered to read it.
Fig. 22e shows the effect of volcanic aerosols. Volcanoes cause a negative planetary energy imbalance during the 1-2 years that the aerosols are present in the stratosphere, followed by a rebound to a positive planetary energy imbalance. This rebound is most clearly defined after the Pinatubo eruption, being noticeable for more than a decade, because of the absence of other volcanoes in that period.
The physical origin of the rebound is simple. Solar heating of Earth returns to its pre-volcano level as aerosols exit the stratosphere. However, thermal emission to space is reduced for a longer period because the ocean was cooled by the volcanic aerosols. In calculations via the response function, using equations (1) and (2), the volcanic aerosols introduce a dF/dt of one sign and within a few years a dF/dt of opposite sign. The integrated (cumulative) dF/dt due to the volcano is zero but the negative dF/dt occurred earlier, so its effect on temperature, defined by the climate response function, is greater. The effect of the temporal spacing between the negative and positive changes of F decreases as time advances subsequent to the eruption.
Looking at figure 22e and f, it is pretty clear that even after the aerosols from Pinatubo have stopped blocking the sun, the decrease in ocean temperature lasts until about 2002. This temperature drop causes an increase in heat uptake by the oceans. The disappearance of this rebound effect, reduces the subsequent rate of heat uptake by the oceans.
REPLY: Oh I read it, but don’t believe that Pinatubo aerosols lasted that long. It also doesn’t explain the UAH LT data in the last 10 years. Hansen appears to be relying on his GISS data, which acts as a form of confirmation bias for him. – Anthony
Here is how to become a Climate Scientist:
I predict a meteor is going to hit the earth, and wipe out all life, unless I skip breakfast today. The IPCC (meteors) has studied the question and find that it is quite likely a meteor will hit the earth and wipe all life.
I didn’t eat breakfast, a meteor did not hit the earth and destroy all life, and therefore I saved the planet. Prove I didn’t (reverse hull hypothesis). You can’t, therefore it is true. My sacrifice saved the planet from certain destruction.
This is at the heart of the delusion. The need to “save the planet” through personal sacrifice (carbon tax). You can’t do this without a prediction that destruction of the planet is at hand (climate change). Once you have this prediction, then you need to arrange the sacrifice (epa – cap and trade).
The beauty of the system is that the sacrifice works. After you perform the sacrifice, the world is not destroyed, which is grounds for even more sacrifice. This system has been used over and over again.
The folks calling for the sacrifice are always shown to be right in the end, because in the end the world wasn’t destroyed. This proves the sacrifice saves the world, which gains them wealth and power. What is really great is that the folks calling for sacrifice; they are always last in line. Everyone else gets to go first.
This is how you can tell it is a fraud. If the high priest was really interested in saving the world, they would be the first to sacrifice themselves for the common good. Give up all forms of energy use that produce CO2. But of course they never will. They are too important. It is the rest of us that need to sacrifice, so the important people can continue to do as they please. Do as we say little people, not as we do.
“Dr.” Hansen has ZERO credentials as a Climatologist, Meteorologist or a Librarian of historical weather data.
He has his doctorate in AstroPhysics, i.e. he is a an Astronomer. Why is his un-educated view of Global Warming any thing more than a Man on the Street uneducated opinion? The gentleman is a huckster, who has discovered the technique of the Big Accusation, and the Big Lie, to make lots of money grifted from the taxpayer.
He is a big bag of hot air.
“Mike, because no one really believes weathermen can get it right….
…and there’s no penalty for being wrong”
Even better than that – if we get the prediction wrong, it is because we don’t have enough funding for research and computers. It is the fault of the taxpayer for not giving us enough money to do our jobs correctly.
I am obviously not much of a scientist as I lost the will the live a few minutes into that presentation.
Doubtless others strongly disagree but it seems to me that the assumptions are so wild and the uncertaincies so great that the whole presentation looked like pseudo-science. Mumbo-Jumbo. A sort of litany. A climate mass in Latin. No one really understands what he is going on about but it sounds impressive and the converts will applaud.
Drone drone drone…graph graph graph…. drone drone drone…forcing forcing forcing…..watts per square meter…drone drone drone….. and so, to conclude , you will see that I have right all along.
I apologise for being such a shallow person.
Homer Simpson incarnate.
“So what’s Hansen thinking when he says “A recent decrease in ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols…” ?”
What he seems to be saying is this. The Pinatubo effect is a transient negative forcing. That drives the temp down. That transient forcing lasts only as long as the residence time. The system then has to ‘rebound’ from this forcing. he seems to be arguing that the time to rebound from this transient is longer than expected, or perhaps the forcing causes the system to over shoot in the negative direction.
Nice speculation.
“rebound” involves storing energy somewhere temporarily, then releasing it. “rebound” implies that the heat that didn’t reach earth because of Pinatubo was stored temporarity somewhere else and will now start heating the earth. Where? Wasn’t that enerrgy lost to space?
Isn’t Hansen really talking about “recovery” when he says rebound. That the temperatures will start to recover, not that they will rebound, because there was no net energy stored as a result of Pinatubo, it was energy lost. Thus there can be no rebound. It is like dropping a ball of wet clay and expecting it to bounce like a rubber ball.
Why doesn’t the GOV give NASA some money so they can go to the moon again and get NASA out of global warming? They are making gooses of themselves.
Well one of the guys over at NCARS whom I have a line of communication with says
“The lag of CO2 vs temperature is not simple. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/”
Then a professor of physics chimed in with “+T -> + [CO2] via thermal equilibrium of oceans, time scale is ocean turnover time, hundreds of years. AND +[CO2]-> +T via greenhouse effect, time scale is years to decades. So the causation goes BOTH WAYS, via extremely well established basic physics. The different time scales allow some sorting out of cause and effect in individual instances.”
In reply I wrote them:
What? Causation goes both ways? Time travel? [:)]
Ok, so you have it both ways with an increase in temp driving up CO2 after an 800 year time lag (see shivers, Real Climate link he provided) and then an increase in CO2 allegedly driving up temp.
What about the declines in temperatures later? Somehow the planet didn’t explode heating up forever and melting like Venus.
Still you’ve not PROVEN with an experiment that GHG gases behave the way that you claim they do dooming us to a melting planet (personally it’s not warm enough up here in Canada). In science those that make the claims need to be able to experimentally prove their claims in a way that can be openly verified and replicated independently (preferably by anyone with minimal equipment).
What do you guys here on WUWT say to that? What should I ask two die hard co2 climate doomsday scientists, one a working professor of physics and the other working at NCARS?
“It’s dead, Jim”. The sea level rise acceleration, that is.
The greenhouse gases can’t soar the sea level the 10 feet needed to cover the highway, so the down goes the whole kit & caboodle, GISS included.
If it’s not going to be underwater soon, then why have they parked a submarine there? Eh? Answer me THAT!
Robert M says:
April 21, 2011 at 7:53 am
“Unbelievable, he let the prediction stand for years, got a lot of hype, got his name in the papers. Then when someone calls him on it he has a tantrum and changes the prediction after 23 years. The funny part is 200 years instead of twenty would be been a much better number for him to claim. I wish someone would ask him how he expects the seas to rise 10ft in 20 years, or is he hoping for a hurricane or tidal wave to claim victory?”
Very well said. His 40 year prediction is no less foolish than his 20 year prediction and that is evident to anyone who can read at a sixth grade level. Seems to me that we are now talking early onset of Alzheimer’s.
Well, Anthony, all those stinkin facts and logic are nice and all but surely you must accept the consensus of Hansen’s peers:
‘Dr. James Hansen is Paul Revere to the foreboding tyranny of climate chaos—a modern-day hero who has braved criticism and censure and put his career and fortune at stake to issue the call to arms against the apocalyptic forces of ignorance and greed.”
— Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“Jim Hansen is the planet’s great hero. He offered us the warning we needed twenty years ago, and has worked with enormous courage ever since to try and make sure we heeded it. We’ll know before long if that effort bears fruit—if it does, literally no one deserves more credit than Dr. Hansen.”
— Bill McKibben, coordinator 350.org and author of The End of Nature
“If you want to know the scientific consensus on global warming, read the reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But if you want to know what the consensus will be ten years from now, read Jim Hansen’s work.”
— Dr. Chuck Kutscher, National Renewable Energy Laboratory and American Solar Energy Society (ASES), editor of ASES report “Tackling Climate Change in the U.S.
See. If you would just heed Chuck’s words you could save yourself a lot of time. I mean Hansen already knew last year would be the hottest year before it happened.
He’s got charts and everything!
Chris y, pwl, DJ, and others, thanks for your fine posts. What Hansen presents is simply indefensible. No, it is not implausible. But it is indefensible on grounds of evidence. The big question is why he posted this. If he is trying to test his remaining influence, he is going to be a very sad man. Maybe Lisa Jackson asked for some support from American climate scientists. She has said publicly that her findings are based on the work of American scientists and not the work of Climategaters.
Well Mr. Watts.
If you are so sure of yourself, why not get your stuff published in some journal so that people which knowledge in the field can review your findings. If you are really correct, then we will know.
yours
harvey
REPLY: Heh, I could say the same thing to Dr. Hansen, publishing this on his personal website, rather than submitting it to peer review. If he’s so sure of himself, let him publish it the way traditional science demands, and then we can have the debate as science intends. Since he didn’t, I and anyone else are free to criticize his essay using the very same medium he chose to release it. Sorry, complaint denied. – Anthony
That video of Hansen is priceless. To think he actually wants anyone to see his disjointed rambling is amazing. I’ve never seen him speak before but it seriously looks like he’s on medication.
If anyone wants to show what a crock climate science is I thoroughly recommend this video.
Never the less, it interesting to listen to. He starts by claiming we can calculate the CO2 forcing “very accurately” from basic physics, then states it to be 3W/m2 which of course is not the value you get from the physics. It what you get when you multiply by a totally unscientific and unfounded cloud feedback. Far from being “very accurately”, it is pure speculation.
Then he goes on to claim that as far back as the dinosaurs the main reason for climate change was atmospheric composition “because” CO2 was about 1000 ppm. No more than that , just “because”.
He seems to have developed his own person logic for dealing with inconvenient data. Pinatubo rebound is a classic of self-delusion. It seems from his talk that Mt P emissions actually cooled the ocean in the two years they were around enough for it to still be in “rebound” ten or more years later.
He similarly explains away the 800 year lag in CO2 after temperature by saying it is a “very slow feedback”. He does not detail the mental gymnastics necessary to get the effect of a very slow feedback to happen 800 years before the driving force supposedly causing it.
La piece de resistance is how he can look at decelerating sea rise and predict it will start accelerating.
It looks to me like he is near a crisis. He knows it all falling apart and his arguments don’t make sense but he’s dug himself a hole so deep there’s no way out now. He just has to keep on pretending.
[snip -hidden vulgarities]
“pwl says:
April 21, 2011 at 1:33 pm
…
What do you guys here on WUWT say to that? What should I ask two die hard co2 climate doomsday scientists, one a working professor of physics and the other working at NCARS?”
Why not ask your doomsters to come up with a cocktail napkin numeric model that includes IPCC style high sensitivities to CO2, rather dramatic CO2 releases lagging 800 years behind temperature increases, doesn’t depend on magic, and roughly matches ice core data. My guess is that their first attempts will exhibit run away greenhousing. If they can eventually come up with a reasonable model that works, maybe we’ll all learn something.
BTW, the RC article you linked to looks to me like blowing smoke, not science.
P. Solar
Thanks for your review of the video.
Perhaps we will soon be seeing a Jones-like nervous breakdown from Hansen, followed by an orchestrated – look how mean those ‘deniers’ are, they made poor Jim mental – campaign to generate pity and distract from the substance. That seemed to work for Jones.
Hansen is dead wrong about Pinatubo. Its volcanic influence stayed in the stratosphere, at first warmed it, then cooled it, and had no influence on tropospheric temperature. The global temperature drop they say was caused by Pinatubo is a case of mistaken identity. It represents cooling by a La Nina that just happened to follow the eruption by pure chance.
According to his Wikipedia entry, Hansen has a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics, a Master of Science in Astronomy and a Ph.D. in Physics.
He has devoted almost his entire professional life (from the early 70s) to understanding “the climate change on earth that will result from anthropogenic changes of the atmospheric composition”.
There he admits it himself.
At 70, what’s a man to do?
What kind of paper is this? It is not reporting on observational data. It is not exactly a literature review. It could be a chapter in a textbook… maybe. On one hand, Hansen’s paper reads like “This is everything we know about climate change” but it also has a kind of “This is my response to ‘Climate Change Reconsidered’ by Idso and Singer.”
It is interesting to review the references. No references to Christy, Spencer or Douglass. No references to Lindzen or Pielke. No references to Scafetta. One reference to Svensmark and one to Chylek. But he refers to four different Levitus papers, four different Lyman papers, two Trenberth papers and 17… count ’em, 17! different Hansen papers. Wow.
harvey says:
April 21, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Well Mr. Watts.
“If you are so sure of yourself, why not get your stuff published in some journal so that people which knowledge in the field can review your findings. If you are really correct, then we will know.”
How interesting! You trust a journal over your own critical ability. You would do better to acquire the knowledge necessary to evaluate Hansen’s claims on your own. You can do that right here on WUWT and it is free. For a year or two, just do some serious reading on this website and ask a few questions.
I am amazed that any of the bloggers here made it past the 2:30 point of JH’s video. I could not last any longer as I was falling asleep listening to his ramblings.
He was obviously ‘preaching to the choir’ as no audience member questioned anything he said.
Salon? Hansen? Same on my credibility scale – nil.
@Ian H
I think that’s taking it a bit too far. If you don’t chip off the old asphalt before re-paving, at least every third or fourth time, it’ll get so think your car can fall off and damage itself getting to the shoulder. Once there, you won’t be significantly closer to sea level, but you’ll have damages to pay.
pwl says:
April 21, 2011 at 1:33 pm
“What do you guys here on WUWT say to that? What should I ask two die hard co2 climate doomsday scientists, one a working professor of physics and the other working at NCARS?”
If “the causation goes both ways” you have a dynamic system with a positive feedback, that’s all. So ask them to explain how, under the influence of this positive feedback (temps driving CO2 up; CO2 driving temps up) it can be that the planet is cooling.
If that doesn’t suffice to watch them implode, ask them how it can be that a cloudless night still (even under increased CO2 levels) cools down strongly. (Just like it used to do for eons.)
If that doesn’t suffice, ask them to explain the lapse rate (the dry lapse rate and the adiabatic lapse rate; and why the adiabatic lapse rate is smaller). Ask them whether the dry lapse rate changed in recent times.
I pity the fools.
Apparently, he’s getting deleted at the opportune moment.
So what’s Hansen thinking when he says “A recent decrease in ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols…” ?
=====
I can’t help thinking, he’s telling porkie pies.
Whether he knows it or not.
Oh, make sure you save off a copy of the Hansen video for insurance. I’ve downloaded a copy. The “Download Helper” extension for Firefox is wonderful. Best to download it when watching from youtube directly though. Pick the “medium mp4” as it’s the best quality and plays well in many desktop video players (flv is ok but mp4 is better).
Poor Hansen, before blurting out what I really thing and saying something I’d regret can someone tell me whether he has developed some kind of illness or disability?
if I were Anthony Watts , I’d keep an escape submarine handy too.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t that area under water at one time (it looks like the filled in stuff that coastline cities do to gain more space)? You can’t say what was once shoreline is now at risk of being overrun by…shoreline.
Re:harvey says:
April 21, 2011 at 2:33 pm
“Well Mr. Watts.
If you are so sure of yourself….”
Let me once again distance myself from the lunatic line of “Harvey”s.
Claude Harvey
It appears that the Hansen’s climate models use unmeasured direct and indirect aerosol forcings together with unmeasured energy sinks of the deep oceans together with calculated CO2 forcing amplified by unmeasured water vapor feedback and unmeasured cloud feedback to arrive at a 100 year climate prediction which we are told is settled science. I count five adjustable parameters and see a wiggling elephant trunk…
Another little gem in this Hansen legacy document- page 44-
“It is thus imperative to measure Earth’s energy imbalance and the factors that are changing it.”
Sounds fine. Didn’t we already do this? Don’t you need measurements of energy imbalance in order to verify the models?
It turns out the answer so far has been hell no.
“The required measurement accuracy is ~0.1 W/m2, in view of the fact that estimated current (2005-2010) energy imbalance is 0.59 W/m2.”
This 0.59 W/m^2 reads like settled science, when in reality it is a guess. Note the delusional accuracy of a hundredth of a W/m^2. It certainly can’t be based on ARGO data, which shows no significant energy imbalance over the past 5 years. Perhaps this is based on the CERES satellite? Why no…
“…ongoing CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) instrument (Loeb et al., 2009), which finds a measured 5-year-mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009). Because this result is implausible, instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009).”
Our best satellite instrument measures an imbalance of 6.5 W/m^2 over a 5 year period. Since this isn’t ‘plausible’ (really?), it is ‘adjusted’ to 0.85 W/m^2 TO AGREE WITH CLIMATE MODELS!!!!!!!!!
In other words, we have no observational evidence of what the energy imbalance is, yet we have the head of NASA GISS claiming it is 0.59 W/m^2.
From this putrid pumpernickel emerges a plea for privately patronizing a $100M satellite to measure aerosol forcings, which, as has already been mentioned, is currently also a WAG.
I am sure there are many other gems in this paper. I note in particular a complete absence of references to articles by Roger Pielke Sr., who has been pounding the table for years to start looking at ocean heat content as a measure of global energy imbalance.
If this represents the best-of-the-best in climate science modeling, then I have to conclude that Hansen has been promoting a rancid pile of CACC*.
*CACC=Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change
What does this mean?
“Earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat”
Earth is ‘absorbing energy’ from the sun and ‘Earth is radiating energy’ from the sun FACT, but with a twist. apparently!!
“This energy imbalance provides fundamental verification of the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change”
What the Frock does this mean??
If our Earth is absorbing energy from the sun and the Earth is radiating energy from the sun into space, then it’s not a green house is it?? a green house is a confined space like a small (or even a large) enclosed area that has a controlled inlet or outlet for a controlled atmosphere, we build “green houses” on earth to trap heat so that it benefits the growth of our botanical interests, “green houses” are an artificial construct, the fact that we build them must defy reality!!
A description of an energy imbalance that does not include reality?? oh the Entropy!!
He should have stuck to GISS doing lunch. The missing heat is not found, and so the lag time is for naught. The Oceans are absorbing heat now because they already tossed out more than they received and they need to recharge.
Interview: Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner
Claim That Sea Level Is Rising Is a Total Fraud
Tide gauging is very complicated, because it gives different answers for wherever you are in the world. We have to rely on geology when we interpret it. So, for example, those people in the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], choose Hong Kong, which has six tide gauges, and they choose the record of one, which gives 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.
Every geologist knows that that is a subsiding area. It’s the compaction of sediment; it is the only record which you shouldn’t use.
Now, back to satellite altimetry, which shows the water, not just the coasts, but in the whole of the ocean and you measure it by satellite. From 1992 to 2002, [the graph of the sea level] was a straight line, variability along a straight line, but absolutely no trend whatsoever.
Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC’s] publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge.
It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the [Hong Kong] tide gauge.
It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don’t say what really happened and they answered, that we had to do it because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!
==================
What a tangled web they weave!
“REPLY: He got his PhD the correct way, Ph.D. (Physics), University of Iowa, 1967, and shame on you for suggesting otherwise. While I disagree with Dr. Hansen’s views on climate, disparaging his education is just a cheap shot. – Anthony”
Well, he should ask for his money back, the education obviously didn’t stick.
“Pamela Gray says:
April 21, 2011 at 7:21 pm
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t that area under water at one time (it looks like the filled in stuff that coastline cities do to gain more space)? You can’t say what was once shoreline is now at risk of being overrun by…shoreline.”
I don’t know that you’re wrong Pamela, but I do know that the East/West streets in that area (the 40s and 50s) slope down to the Westside Highway (12th Avenue) with a modest slope. Cross the street from the docks (Yes, your chance of surviving that move is less than 100%) and you will find yourself walking uphill immediately. There isn’t likely a lot of fill there
”
TheTempestSpark says:
April 21, 2011 at 8:25 pm
…
Sounds fine. Didn’t we already do this? Don’t you need measurements of energy imbalance in order to verify the models?”
It appears to me that model verification is not needed in climate science because climate scientists are very smart people with advanced degrees who write peer reviewed papers. They do not make mistakes.
No, I don’t see how their models can possibly be validated if they implement the framework Hansen describes. I suppose that means no research grants for the likes of you and I senor Spark.
NASA’s Topex and Jason satellites cleanly measure sea-levels with methodical accuracy, all within a 20mm band. This hard data has essentially leveled out over the past 6 years and as more snow is accreted upon Antarctic land, the levels can only fall. The “Toucan Equations” have it happening in the mid 2030s. You’ll still be driving on the West Side Highway then and thereafter.
Let us see what the data says.
They never show us results when the data contradicts AGW. As a result, I have drawn the graph for the mean sea level change for the data from University of Colorado at Boulder for the last 15 years:
http://bit.ly/fMb7bw
This result shows the rate of sea level increase has decreased by about 40% from 3.8mm per year to 2.26mm per year. If the current trend continues, the see level will increase by about 200mm, about 8 inches, less than one feet by 2100.
SSam says: April 21, 2011 at 10:32 pm
“REPLY: He got his PhD the correct way, Ph.D. (Physics), University of Iowa, 1967, … disparaging his education is just a cheap shot. – Anthony”
Well, he should ask for his money back, the education obviously didn’t stick.”
I don’t think it is as simple as yes/no he got a good education. He may have got a good “sausage machine” education which is good for churning out stuff, but he certainly did not get the kind of education you need when developing a new area of science where you’ve got to have a good understanding of the philosophical foundation of science.
I remember when I did physics at University that I was struck by the complete absence of any kind of education about the philosophy and indeed ethics of science. Yes we went into depth about correlation and statistics and recited this and that law. But as far as I can remember there was no significant discussion of why some things were considered laws, what was meant by “truth” or even logical inference. This was particularly noticeable because I went to that university because I could do philosophy as part of the course.
Having read up on the history of science in the 19th-20th century I think Hansen et al are the second generation of the “sausage machine” science introduced post WWII. Basically science was no longer “Natural philosophy” which provided a full rounded education including the philosophical basis, but now it was a cut-down application of formulistic procedures and methods with no real understanding of what they mean nor any concept of their limitations. This was great for churning out “worker-drone” scientists to fill all the scientific companies that developed post WWII, but it was a complete disaster for climate “science”.
Obviously, I’m not suggesting every university produced people like Hansen, because whilst not a formal part of many science degrees, many scientists pick up these concepts from the better Universities (presumably by osmosis unless their is a formal component on the philosophy of science) but apparently not where Hansen picked up his “science”.
So, Hansen may have got a “good” education for a run of the mill bit of established science, but his type are a complete disaster when developing new areas and climate science will become one of those oft cited examples in future courses on the subject. Where Hansen went wrong is that he hasn’t a clue about the philosophical nature of truth (to put it mildly), so he has no concept that just getting all the curves to match is absolutely meaningless when we are dealing with such a complex and unknown entity as the earth.
His whole argument really boils down to this: “because I personally can’t think of a better way to match this curve … even though I can’t explain why the curves match, because I can’t justify all the random constants that I litter my equations with … this must be the truth because as the world “expert” there is a consensus (amongst other world experts) that I really know what I’m talking about.”
He even explicitly acknowledges that he asked his small child what number to put on particulate forcing. And he explicitly uses the argument that “my guess is better than other people’s because I’m a better guesser”. I.e. the truth is the best guess, the truth is the opinion of the expert. Compare that to real science which “takes no one’s word for it”, but instead relies of physical experimentation to determine truth.
“Oh .. but how do you experiment on the earth? You can’t so science has got to use our approach” Hansen will say. To which the answer is simple, if you can’t provide experimental verification, then it is not science. There are many areas that can’t be scientifically experimented on: Shakespeare, fashion, the world economy, these are not subject to scientific experimentation and that is why they are not sciences. So, Hansen, please don’t pretend to be a scientist and then reject the basis of scientific truth because it just happens to be inconvenient to have to prove things by experiment. And please don’t think it is clever to suggest you came up with an answer by ask your daughter because that it far far far too close to the real truth.
Improving observations of ocean temperature confirm that Earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar minimum. This energy imbalance provides fundamental verification of the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change.
I still have a problem with this statement. When asked about this on another blog, the response was: “Not relevant”. So I’ll try here. My basic observation is: Has it ever been other than that the earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it radiates back into space? At what point in the last 6 billion or so years was it otherwise? Seems to me that the earth always absorbs more energy from the sun than it radiates. If the foregoing statement is true then I fail to see the logic of Dr.Hansen’s next sentence. Can anyone here help me to point out the error of my ways?
Scottish Sceptic says:
April 21, 2011 at 5:23 pm
I’ve just seen in another post that he’s now 70 (does not look it in the vid). That may explain his rather absent minded and rambling presentation.
It also probably indicates that there is no way he’s going to change his mind at that age despite whatever data may come to light to show that he has been mistaken for his entire professional career.
That would be too much for most people to come to terms with.
We all have to get old one day but some need to recognise their diminishing potential to contribute and take a well earned rest rather than thinking they have the intellectual authority to change the world economy.
Don K says:
April 21, 2011 at 11:11 pm
First of all Don K, It is my swamp! and if the evil climate fairy wants my swamp! she will first have to pry it from my cold dead bare hands…
🙂
Can anyone tell me how much of the “energy imbalance” between incoming solar radiation and outgoing radiation is a result of the fact that almost every dynamic system on earth, tectonics being the most obvious exception, is powered by this incoming solar radiation? How much of this energy is required to move countless billions of tons of water in ocean currents? How much is used to power almost the entire biosphere, excepting the communities around black smokers and bacteria in the crust etc.? To evaporate all the water to make all the rain? To form all the hurricanes , tornados not to mention mild zephyrs? I’ve often heard it said by CAGW proponents that this energy imbalance is exactly what the climate models suggest they should be to produced the expected warming (although quite a lot of this heat is apparently hiding somewhere in the oceans) but I’ve never been able to get an answer about how many W/m2 does the earth use up in the many various kinds of “work” it takes to make this a living planet.
Hansen said the West Side Highway would be underwater today. If it goes underwater within the next million years or so, will he have been proven right?
Woody, interesting question. It depends on what kind of energy source you are speaking of. Several sources of energy can be taken up by things that radiate a different version of that energy as well as things that use that energy up without anything left over. The part of solar output that is shortwave IR (a very good source of energy that penetrates into the ocean and other surfaces amazingly well) can be deflected without changes (like what happens when it hits snow). So I think your question pertains to just that part of solar output that is taken up by planet Earth. Because once it does, if there is any left over after being used for some purpose, the energy the things of Earth give off is no longer shortwave IR, but longwave IR. This form of energy is a weak sister, with very little ability to penetrate surfaces such that it can be “stored in the pipeline”.
Right now we have freeze warnings in my part of Oregon. Our LW infrawave energy is, right now, leaving for space at such speed I can almost hear the sucking sound. In its place are frosted fields of wheat. And this is happening even without the assistance of snow on the surface of those fields to also deflect shortwave. There is plenty of greenage to use up SW IR, but whatever LW is being given off ain’t sticking around.
Must get ready for work. Now where did I put my long johns and woolly socks.
“Woody says:
April 22, 2011 at 4:15 am
… I’ve never been able to get an answer about how many W/m2 does the earth use up in the many various kinds of “work” it takes to make this a living planet.”
You really need to talk to someone who didn’t detest thermodynamics in college, but I’ll give it a shot. I think you have two things confused. Energy differentials and heat. Energy differences can be used to power things. Processes like winds, evaporation, precipitation, ocean currents, photosynthesis, light bulbs, etc depend on energy differences. But even those that store heat for a while eventually give it up to friction. There are only a few ways that the planet can lose heat. It can radiate it. Or it can be used to launch mass into solar orbit or beyond–which is currently negligible (probably). Conceptually heat could be converted into mass, but no one thinks that is happening in any meaningful way.
If the Earth didn’t dump all the energy that it receives (plus an additional 0.1w/m2 that is created internally by radioactive decay and various frictions), it would just get hotter and hotter and hotter. In the short term, heat can be stored in warmer land and water, stronger currents and winds, etc. In the long and medium term, there has to be balance between incoming radiation plus that 0.1w/m2 and outgoing radiation. If there were not, Earth would have melted about 4 billion years ago and stayed molten ever since.
Its easy for Hansen to ask for $100mil from the “private sector”. They’ll do it the same way they’ve always asked for PS money. Ask the government to take it first. PS for BS…what could go wrong?
In support of the above, New Zealand has some compelling data : http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/2011/04/sea-level-rise-is-normal-my-friends/
“A new analysis finds evidence of a weak deceleration in mean sea level rise in the Australasian region from 1940 to 2000 in four very long-term tide gauge records.”
Ocean Inertia
Heat in the Pipeline
1.67 Watts/Meter squared
Natural Forcing
Sun
Volcanos
Aerosols
Clouds
Climate Sensitivity
Slow Feedbacks
Thermal Inertia of the Ocean
Planetary Energy Imbalance
Ocean Heat Storage
Mt. P. caused a 20 year cooling, suppressing a rebound.
Did I miss anything else, I sort of slept through most of his lecture.
Scottish Sceptic says:
April 22, 2011 at 1:53 am
“Having read up on the history of science in the 19th-20th century I think Hansen et al are the second generation of the “sausage machine” science introduced post WWII. Basically science was no longer “Natural philosophy” which provided a full rounded education including the philosophical basis, but now it was a cut-down application of formulistic procedures and methods with no real understanding of what they mean nor any concept of their limitations. This was great for churning out “worker-drone” scientists to fill all the scientific companies that developed post WWII, but it was a complete disaster for climate “science”.”
Great post! Permit me to add a related point that is rather prosaic. Hansen, along with the rest of the Warmista, does not have the instincts of a scientist. I am willing to weaken that claim a bit and say that Hansen and others do not have the instincts of the scientists who have given us a legacy. Hansen is not interested in scientific explanation. He talks on forever about temperature measurements and such but never delves into explanations of them. His hand-waving about Pinatubo is an excellent example of his lack of interest in explanation. His lack of interest in explanation is coupled with a remarkable lack of modesty. He “knows” that his temperature measurements and forecasts of doom are correct despite the fact that he offers no explanation for either. Finally, the worst of his sins is that he is an antagonist in all matters scientific. He takes the position that in order to criticize him a critic must offer a better set of measurements. As the blogosphere and published articles reveal, this attitude has settled in many students influenced by Hansen. Yet science is criticism. When one puts forth data or a hypothesis, one invites rational criticism on factual, logical, or methodological grounds. Lacking the instincts of a scientist, if Hansen gives us a legacy it will be that of an advocate for his doom laden view of human activity.
Pamela Gray says:
April 22, 2011 at 6:44 am
“So I think your question pertains to just that part of solar output that is taken up by planet Earth. Because once it does, if there is any left over after being used for some purpose, the energy the things of Earth give off is no longer shortwave IR, but longwave IR. This form of energy is a weak sister, with very little ability to penetrate surfaces such that it can be “stored in the pipeline”.”
I think you have answered a question for me. You seem to be saying that LW radiation must return to space because it cannot penetrate surfaces on Earth. If this is true, maybe it explains why buildings in Manhattan’s financial district are not getting warmer indefinitely. I have this question because of the asymmetry between sunlight striking the buildings and radiation leaving the buildings. The asymmetry is that skyscrapers on an east-west street are illuminated all day by direct sunlight but the radiation that they release does not track back to the sun but hits the building next door. So, because the radiation is LW it bounces off the building next door and eventually escapes the canyon and is lost in space?
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8518750
Battery Park sea level. doesn’t seem to be any acceleration at all-just about constant velocity for many years past to present. Good luck with that 10 foot rise.
It appears James Hansen is unaware of the Svensmark, Shirav, and the late Gerald Bond’s work. The progress in resolving what truly causes ice epoches and the glacial/interglacial cycle and what are the implications of solar cycle 24 is stalled due to the AGW fan club efforts to reduce CO2 which is the basis for life on this planet. (We are carbon based life forms. Where does the carbon come from as there is only trace amount of carbon in the mantel? The late thin veneer theory?)
CO2 during the last interglacial was at the lowest levels in the history of the planet. There is evidence of CO2 starvation of plants on the planet. As atmospheric CO2 levels are reduced plants must increase the number of stomata on their leaves which causes them to loss increasing amounts of water. During the last glacial period roughly 2/3 of the Amazon forest was converted to grass land (savana) due to low levels of CO2.
Galactic cosmic rays are the driver of the ice epochs and the restart of the solar magnetic cycle is the driver of the current glacial/interglacial cycle.
The ice epochs coincide with periods when the solar system passes through the center of the galaxy’s plane at which time galactic cosmic rays increase by a factor of 5 to 7. The increase GCR causes an increase in planetary clouds which causes the planet to cool. In addition, the is a secondary effect that cause a reduction in CH4 that is outgassed from the core of the planet.
At each of the ice epoches, the planet’s temperature drops and then millions of years later atmospheric CO2 drops.
Deep ejection of CH4 from the planet’s core is evident in different geological formations that show an immense unexplained increase in C12. (C14 is created by C12 that is struck by GCR.) The deep earth carbon is mostly C12. Perhaps sometime I will write a post on the science of the development of the early atmosphere and the origin of oil/natural gas. That is an interesting subject.
Hansen’s lecture states that the glacial/interglacial cycle is caused by a few tenths of a watt changes in solar insolation that are caused by orbital changes.
In the paleoclimatic record there are immense cyclic rapid climate changes. The “Younger Dryas” is an example. The Younger Dryas was a 4C cooling period that occurred over 10 years. That is climate change. There is a immense reduction in C14 that coincides with the Younger Dryas. There is a geomagnetic excursion that coincides with the Younger Dryas.
Each of the past interglacial lasted for less than 10,000 years and all ended abruptly. What caused the Younger Dryas abrupt cooling caused the past interglacials to end. There has been 22 glacial/interglacial cycles.
Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate?
http://www.juniata.edu/projects/oceans/GL111/celestialdriverofclimate.pdf
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/ClimateDebate/RahmReplyReply.pdf
Detailed Response to “Cosmic Rays, Carbon Dioxide and Climate” by Rahmstorf et al.
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/articles/long-ice.pdf
The following is a link to Bond’s paper “Persistent Solar influence on the North Atlantic Climate during the Holocene”
http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/spring2006/Mar1/Bond%20et%20al%202001.pdf
Excerpt from the above linked paper:
“A solar influence on climate of the magnitude and consistency implied by our evidence could not have been confined to the North Atlantic. Indeed, pervious studies have tied increases in the C14 in tree rings, and hence reduced solar irradiance, to Holocene glacial advances in Scandinavia, expansions of the Holocene Polar Atmosphere circulation in Greenland; and abrupt cooling in the Netherlands about 2700 years ago…Well dated, high resolution measurements of O18 in stalagmite from Oman document five periods of reduced rainfall centered at times of strong solar minima at 6300, 7400, 8300, 9000, and 9500 years ago.”
Attached are additional two papers by Nir Shaviv:
The first provides an explanation for the faint sun paradox (Solar irradiation was roughly 30% less for a young sun. A reduction in irradiation of 30%, would have, all else being the same as current planetary conditions, meant all liquid water on the planet would have been frozen.) Shaviv’s hypothesis is the younger, faster rotating younger sun had a stronger solar wind and that the stronger solar wind shielded the earth from galactic cosmic rays, which other researchers in addition to Shaviv have shown affect the amount of low level clouds. Less clouds, warmer planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_sun_paradox
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0306477
The second paper by Shaviv provides data from examining iron meteoroids to determine the long term changes in GCR as the solar system moved in an out of the galactic arms. Shaviv makes a case that the ice epochs, correlate with GCR changes, and that the ice epochs were caused by changes in GCR.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0209252
Link: Reduced solar activity as a trigger for the start of the Younger Dryas?
http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://dept.kent.edu/geography/GEC/Reduced_solar_activity_as_a_trig.pdf
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
According to the marine records, the Eemian interglacial ended with a rapid cooling event about 110,000 years ago (e.g., Imbrie et al., 1984; Martinson et al., 1987), which also shows up in ice cores and pollen records from across Eurasia. From a relatively high resolution core in the North Atlantic. Adkins et al. (1997) suggested that the final cooling event took less than 400 years, and it might have been much more rapid.
Following the end of the Eemian, a large number of other sudden changes and short-term warm and cold alternations have been recognized; apparently many or all of these occurred on a global or at least a regional scale (Fig.3; Ice core record). The most extreme of these fluctuations are the warm interstadials and the cold Heinrich events. These are most prominent in the ice-core record of Greenland, deep-sea cores from the North Atlantic, and in the pollen records of Europe and North America, suggesting that they were most intense in the North Atlantic region (e.g., Bond et al., 1992; 1993).
Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate?
http://www.juniata.edu/projects/oceans/GL111/celestialdriverofclimate.pdf
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/ClimateDebate/RahmReplyReply.pdf
Detailed Response to “Cosmic Rays, Carbon Dioxide and Climate” by Rahmstorf et al.
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/articles/long-ice.pdf
The following is a link to Bond’s paper “Persistent Solar influence on the North Atlantic Climate during the Holocene”
http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/spring2006/Mar1/Bond%20et%20al%202001.pdf
Excerpt from the above linked paper:
“A solar influence on climate of the magnitude and consistency implied by our evidence could not have been confined to the North Atlantic. Indeed, pervious studies have tied increases in the C14 in tree rings, and hence reduced solar irradiance, to Holocene glacial advances in Scandinavia, expansions of the Holocene Polar Atmosphere circulation in Greenland; and abrupt cooling in the Netherlands about 2700 years ago…Well dated, high resolution measurements of O18 in stalagmite from Oman document five periods of reduced rainfall centered at times of strong solar minima at 6300, 7400, 8300, 9000, and 9500 years ago.”
Attached are additional two papers by Nir Shaviv:
The first provides an explanation for the faint sun paradox (Solar irradiation was roughly 30% less for a young sun. A reduction in irradiation of 30%, would have, all else being the same as current planetary conditions, meant all liquid water on the planet would have been frozen.) Shaviv’s hypothesis is the younger, faster rotating younger sun had a stronger solar wind and that the stronger solar wind shielded the earth from galactic cosmic rays, which other researchers in addition to Shaviv have shown affect the amount of low level clouds. Less clouds, warmer planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_sun_paradox
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0306477
The second paper by Shaviv provides data from examining iron meteoroids to determine the long term changes in GCR as the solar system moved in an out of the galactic arms. Shaviv makes a case that the ice epochs, correlate with GCR changes, and that the ice epochs were caused by changes in GCR.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0209252
Link: Reduced solar activity as a trigger for the start of the Younger Dryas?
http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://dept.kent.edu/geography/GEC/Reduced_solar_activity_as_a_trig.pdf
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
According to the marine records, the Eemian interglacial ended with a rapid cooling event about 110,000 years ago (e.g., Imbrie et al., 1984; Martinson et al., 1987), which also shows up in ice cores and pollen records from across Eurasia. From a relatively high resolution core in the North Atlantic. Adkins et al. (1997) suggested that the final cooling event took less than 400 years, and it might have been much more rapid.
Following the end of the Eemian, a large number of other sudden changes and short-term warm and cold alternations have been recognized; apparently many or all of these occurred on a global or at least a regional scale (Fig.3; Ice core record). The most extreme of these fluctuations are the warm interstadials and the cold Heinrich events. These are most prominent in the ice-core record of Greenland, deep-sea cores from the North Atlantic, and in the pollen records of Europe and North America, suggesting that they were most intense in the North Atlantic region (e.g., Bond et al., 1992; 1993).
It just hit me but the climate communist hippie paranormal science parade is nothing but a bunch of slug taking from that flushed away movie going aaahaaaahaaah one millimeter per minute and panzer pants alarmist whip wielding pansy shrieking master Hansen is at the fore front of the whole bunch. Question is though, is he going for the insane lead or is he just trying to be the first one to leave the sinking ship, alarmist style, again?
For those interested, I just published a post about Hansen et al (2011) that shows that Global Ocean Heat Uptake appears to be responses to Tropical Pacific Ocean Heat Uptake, which would mean that ENSO is a significant component of Global Ocean Heat Uptake:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/notes-on-hansen-et-al-2011-earths-energy-imbalance-and-implications/
James Hansen notes in his lecture that the earth reaches temperature equilibrium in at most a few 100 years when atmospheric CO2 level changes, based on the IPCC computer models. As Hansen notes an energy imbalance is physically sustainable for at most a few 100 years, even with the very extreme theoretical IPCC models. (It is difficult for the IPCC models to explain the lack of warming.)
What Hansen does not explain, is the paleo climatic data does not support atmospheric CO2 as the primary driver of the planet’s climate. There are paper that discuss this fact.
In the geological past there was been periods of millions of years when CO2 levels have been high and the planet has been cold and periods when the planet has been warm when CO2 levels have drop. Multiple periods of millions of years during at which time there is no correlation between climate and atmospheric CO2 levels are explained by the planet’s response to a change in forcing being strongly negative.
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/7/4167.full
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years, Daniel H. Rothman
See figure 4 in Rothman’s paper that shows past ice epochs and the atmospheric CO2 levels. Note CO2 levels for most of the geological past has been between 1000 ppm to 2000 ppm.
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/7/4167/F4.expansion.html
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/eemartin/GLY6075F10/papers/Kump%2702.pdf
Kump wrote this paper to attempt to bolster the extreme AGW theory in face of obvious observational evidence that disproves the theory. He acknowledges that atmospheric CO2 levels do not correlate with planetary temperature, but notes after the planet cools (millions of years after) CO2 levels drop. (There is by the way no explanation as to why a cooling planet cause the atmospheric CO2 levels to drop.)
Reducing uncertainty about carbon dioxide as a climate driver
Mismatches in the CO2–climate relation
Despite these successes in linking variations in greenhouse gas concentrations to climate change in the geologic past, the oxygen isotope palaeotemperature record from 600 Myr ago to the present displays notable intervals for which inferred temperatures and pCO2 levels are not correlated1. One of these occurred during the early to middle Miocene (about 17 Myr ago), a time well established as a warm interval (relative to today), but with proxy evidence for low atmospheric pCO2 (ref. 2). Moreover, whereas climate models predict tropical warming in response to elevated pCO2, geologic data — in particularly the oxygen isotope record — indicate muted warming or even cooling at low latitudes while higher latitudes warm (the ‘cool tropics paradox’10–11).
The ice epochs are cyclic. The hypothesis that CO2 is the main driver of climate can not explain the ice epochs periodicity. (i.e. What could cause CO2 to change cyclically? The CO2 hypothesis has CO2 levels change due to long term increases of decreases in planetary volcanism for some unexplained reason.)
The alternative hypothesis (which is discussed in dozen of published papers) is that planetary climate is modulated by changes in the magnitude and the intensity of galactic cosmic rays which occur as the solar system moves in and out of the center plane of the milky galaxy. Nir Shaviv has been able to show the timing of large GCR changes matches the timing of the occurrence of the ice epochs by analyzing the isotopes in meteorites.
Nir J. Shaviv
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/Ice-ages/GSAToday.pdf
Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate?
We find that at least 66% of the variance in the paleotemperature trend could be attributed to CRF variations
likely due to solar system passages through the spiral arms of the galaxy. Assuming that the entire residual variance in temperature is due solely to the CO2 greenhouse effect, we propose a tentative upper limit to the long-term “equilibrium” warming effect of CO2, one which is potentially lower than that based on general
circulation models.
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/ClimateDebate/RahmReply/RahmReply.html
“RECONSTRUCTING COSMIC RAY FLUXES —The starting point of SV03 is a reconstruction of cosmic ray fluxes over the past 1,000 Myr based on 50 iron meteorites and a simple model estimating cosmic ray flux (CRF) induced by the Earth’s passage through Galactic spiral arms ([Shaviv, 2002; Shaviv, 2003]). About 20 of the meteorites, making four clusters, date from the past 520 Myr, the time span analysed in SV03. The meteorites are dated by analysing isotopic changes in their matter due to cosmic ray exposure (CRE dating [Eugster, 2003]). An apparent age clustering of these meteorites is then interpreted not as a collision-related clustering in their real ages but as an indication of fluctuations in cosmic ray flux (CRF). One difficulty with this interpretation is that variations in CRF intensity would equally affect all types of meteorites. Instead, the ages of different types of iron meteorites cluster at different times [Wieler, 2002]. Hence, most specialists on meteorite CRE ages interpret the clusters as the result of collision processes of parent bodies, as they do for stony meteorites (ages _ 130 Myr) to which more than one dating method can be applied.”
[snip – while I disagree with Hansen’s views, let’s leave the ad hom comments about his appearance out of this discussion – Anthony]
William says: April 23, 2011 at 4:00 pm
(There is by the way no explanation as to why a cooling planet cause the atmospheric CO2 levels to drop.)
Supposedly, colder water holds more CO2 than warm, thus the outgassing and increase in CO2 levels when it warms.
NASA’s Hansen thinks sea level rise will be accelerating – I think not, offering a new paper and updated story on Hansen to show why | Watts Up With That? . LOL, awesome dude.
“As of this update in March 2011, we’re 23 years into his prediction of the West Side Highway being underwater. From what I can measure in Google Earth, Dr. Hansen would need at least a ten foot rise in forty years to make his prediction work.”
No that it matters much, but I think there might be a problem with the difference between Mean Sea Level and Maximum High Water. The latter (plus storm surge perhaps) is the parameter that governs potential flooding of 12th Avenue.
But I don’t think the actual rise of 4 inches in 40 years (plus or minus any local tectonic affects) is going to flood the West Side Highway. And having actually been in that part of NYC in the past year, I think 10 feet is probably an underestimate of the required sea level rise. BTW, many of the world’s most important airports including JFK aren’t much more than 10 feet above msl.