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:
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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
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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:
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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?