Hansen's Arrested Development

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

James Hansen has taken time off between being arrested to produce another in the list of his publications. It’s called “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications“. This one is listed as “submitted” …

Normally these days I prefer to only deal with scientific papers, which of course leaves activist pleadings like Hansen’s stuff off the list. But in this case I’ll make an exception. Here’s my sole reason for bringing this up. Hansen’s paper says the following (emphasis mine):

The precision achieved by the most advanced generation of radiation budget satellites is indicated by the planetary energy imbalance measured by the 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).

I bring it up because it is climate science at its finest. Since the observations were not of the expected range, rather than figure out why the results might be wrong, they just twisted the dials to “reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models.” 

And curiously, the “imbalance suggested by climate models”, of some 0.85 W/m2, was actually from Hansen’s previous paper. That earlier paper of his, by coincidence called “Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications“, gave that 0.85 W/m2 figure as a result from Hansen’s own GISS climate model … but all this incestuous back-slapping is probably just another coincidence.

Of course, you know what all this means. Soon, the modelers will be claiming that the CERES satellite results verify that the GISS and other climate models are accurately duplicating observations …

You can see why Hansen’s “science” gets left off my list of things to read.

w.

PS—Upon further research I find that according to Loeb et al., 2009, they didn’t just tweak the dials on the CERES observations to get the answer they wanted, as I had foolishly stated above.

No, they didn’t do that at all. Instead, they used…

an objective constrainment algorithm to adjust SW and LW TOA fluxes within their range of uncertainty to remove the inconsistency between average global net TOA flux and heat storage in the earth–atmosphere system.

I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that it wasn’t just twisting dials, they actually used an objective constrainment algorithm to adjust their Procrustean Bed …

UPDATE:  Some commenters have noted that my article implies that Hansen used those CERES satellite results in the study in question. Hansen did not use them, stating correctly that the uncertainties were too great for his purposes.  —w.