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:
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
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.