In June 1986, Dr. James Hansen made a prediction to an AP newspaper reporter, which was carried in Oxnard, CA, of a 2 degree temperature rise by 2006. This was two years before, almost to the day before he and Senator Tim Wirth duped a bunch of Washington legislators with stagecraft on a hot June day by turning off the a/c in the hearing room while complaining about global warming and urging the need for “immediate action” (translation: cash).
Like Dr. Hansen’s 20 year sea level prediction, it hasn’t come true. In honor of the 80’s, when a popular TV commercial for a fast food restaurant had inspired a whole nation to say the catch phrase, I ask Dr. James Hansen, regarding your claims of global warming, “Where’s the Beef”?!
Let’s have a look at Exhibit A: Hansens’ GISTEMP graph, distributed worldwide from the GISS headquarters above Jerry Seinfeld’s favorite Monk’s Restaurant in New York City. Annotations in blue mine.
Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
Exhibit B: The GISS Data, available here. Let’s do the math.
Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index (C) (Anomaly with Base: 1951-1980) ---------------------------------- Year Annual_Mean 5-year_Mean ---------------------------------- 1986 0.13 0.18 1987 0.28 0.20 1988 0.33 0.26 1989 0.21 0.31 1990 0.36 0.28 1991 0.35 0.24 1992 0.13 0.24 1993 0.14 0.25 1994 0.24 0.24 1995 0.39 0.30 1996 0.30 0.39 1997 0.41 0.40 1998 0.58 0.40 1999 0.33 0.43 2000 0.35 0.46 2001 0.48 0.46 2002 0.56 0.49 2003 0.55 0.54 2004 0.48 0.55 2005 0.62 0.56 2006 0.55 0.53
Finding the difference: 0.55C – 0.13C = 0.42C
Predicted change 2.0C compared to Actual change 0.42C = Climate Fail
Exhibit C: Where’s the Beef?!
Note: I realize that I could have placed the top prediction at 2.13C, but why pile on? 😉 What’s 0.13C between friends? Besides he said “nearly” and it is near well enough.
Don’t believe me? Read for yourself. The Press-Courier – Google News Archive Search
Big h/t to Steve Goddard at Real-Science for finding this one.
UPDATE: Some commenters suggested Hansen may have given the 2 degree number in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius. Another article on the same day suggests he did.
Read article here: http://news.google.com/newspapers
So at 4F we have 2.2 C If the reporter in the first story took the middle between 2-4F as 3F we have 1.67C or “nearly 2 degrees higher in 20 years” as the reporter from Oxnard states.
The 2010 Annual Mean Temperature anomaly from GISS is 0.63 C
So, no matter how you look at it, Hansen’s 1986 prediction has not come true,
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
James Hansen: Friend of Al Gore; Obama-Supporter; Failure.
That’ll get him some street cred…
Where’s the Beef? ——————Hell where’s any accountability!
When will any of the warmists in power or authority be held accountable for their actions?
If Hansen worked at any major corporation and was in a position of authority and made a public prediction/projection of company profit and was wrong, the company would be sued and he would be fired!
If Hansen held any position of power at any corporation and was arrested multiple times he would be fired.
If Hansen worked at a drug company and did projected/predicted the effects of a drug and he was wrong and it impacted anyone, the company would be sued and he would be fired!
If Michael Mann worked at a drug company and he was caught hiding the decline in the efficacy of a drug, the company would be sued and he would be fired!
Maybe Glieck will be thrown in jail and we will have the 1st instance of accountability for these warmist bast%&*s
I know what’s wrong: The error bars are missing error bars. Just make the error bars bigger and then earth could be warmer, if we believe it!
(And also, 1/10 degree error bar today versus 2/10 in 1890? These people must be kidding us.)
And with larger error bars, we don’t need to project, we don’t need to predict, we simply pretend it is 2 degrees warmer.
Anthony
The final paragraph of the article (which is cut off on your picture) says :-
Hansen said the average US temperature had risen from 1 to 2 degrees since 1958 and is predicted to increase an additional 3 to 4 degrees sometime between 2010 and 2020
Presumably it should be easy to check whether he was talking Fahrenheit or Centigrade from the records then.
Either way he was wrong!! US temperatures for 2011 were 0.21F lower than 1986.
http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/hr-display3.pl
J Bowers says:
March 9, 2012 at 1:39 am
Dang…and just when it was settled science that climate change causes cold and snowy winters.
From Jim Petrie on March 9, 2012 at 2:08 am:
Well if you really want to be pedantic, it’s really 2.7K. So says NASA. Which is a good thing, as space would be far more weirder if we kept finding Bose-Einstein condensates throughout space, as a normal expected state of “cold” gaseous atoms in space.
And although NASA says that, that’s not NASA GISS and doesn’t involve temperature records on Earth, so you can trust them about it.
Oh, and there are no degrees Kelvin, only kelvins, no “degrees.” So you know.
The supposed “difference” is a false one and a false analogy. The are numerous examples of a person falling from between 500 feet to 30,000 feet AGL (Above Ground Level) without a parachute or without a functional parachute and survived the fall to tell the tale. During the Second World War there were a number of incidents where an aircrewman survived after falling from miles above the Earth after their aircraft were shot out of the sky. In one such instance the airman fell thousands of feet, struck the branches of some trees and impacted in a deep snow drift. The impact broke many of his bones, but he survived the fall only to be arrested by the German Gestapo, the NAZI secret police. It seems they refused to believe he was an airman because he was found to have no parachute and therefore must have been a spy!
Hansen’s projections are more akin to the projections of Pinnochio’s nose. The projection of Pinnochio’s nose is by definition and action synonymous with the prediction of Pinnochio’s nose. The outcome of a fall from 500 feet or above AGL is less certain than the results of Pinnochio’s nose and Hansen’s projections, predictions, and/or his lack of credibility.
juraj V-
many thanks for your 12:05 post and link. Those satellite records are the only real data we have — everything else is subject to way too much — honest — error. And those sat records destroy Hansen and the IPCC and that corpulent charlatan Al Gore, because CO2 over that time increased more than “projected” and temps did increase during the 1998 super el nino and for several years thereafter, and have dropped since.. Those sat records also show Hansen is a very bad man and his GISS temp record is a sham. His GISS ‘adjustments’ are nothing but obvious attempts to validate his erroneous ‘projections’.
A lot of debate about prediction v. projection, but you’re missing the main event altogether. The words are interchangeable when used by a preacher. He was there to proselytize, not submit a scientific paper. He also probably didn’t give a crap whether we thought F or C. Stil, about as reliable as the ozone fear of the day – which was also misanthropically scriptured by ideologically compromised scientists.
It is not fair to hold AGW believers to standards like truthfulness, honesty, integrity or accuracy.
Projections are certainly predictions. In both cases, you are taking a model and making a prediction of an outcome at a future time, based on the conditions between now and then. The only slight and temporary difference is that projections tend to be made in groups, with various scenarios (parameters, models).
Once time has passed and we know which scenario is closest to reality, your projection then collapses into a prediction and is either accurate or not. We don’t even need to wait to see which scenario turns out to be closest to reality if you *a priori* state that one scenario is significantly more likely than others: you’ve made a prediction from the start. Not to mention that when you have “High” and “Low” scenarios, you’ve made a prediction for what will *not* happen from the start.
Myrrh:
You make factually accurate points in your post at March 9, 2012 at 4:01 am but they are not relevant.
Yes, the IPCC glossary does provide definitions of the terms “prediction” and “projection” as they are used in IPCC Reports. Simply, an IPCC prediction has high confidence and an IPCC projection is a prediction that has low confidence.
And, yes, the IPCC does make some specific predictions according to its own definition
(e.g. as I have repeatedly pointed out in several places including on this blog, the IPCC AR5 prediction of warming in the period 2000 to 2020 they claimed was certain as a result of “committed warming”, but it has not happened).
However, whilst you are correct in saying the IPCC defines what irt meansd by “prediction” and “projection”, those definitions are not pertinent for two reasons.
Firstly, as I explain in my post above at March 9, 2012 at 1:04 am, any “projection” IS a prediction. The IPCC cannot avoid the fact that ALL of its predictions ARE predictions and some not but are merely “projections” when they have low confidence.
Several people here understand this and have said it in a variety of ways. And their understanding can derive from everyday experience.
For example, a gambler may predict that a horse will win a race and place a bet on it. A bookmaker assesses the probability of that horse winning and sets odds accordingly. The gambler is not entitled to not pay for his bet when the horse was loses merely because the horse was a 100:1 outsider. He made the prediction and it was wrong: claiming the prediction that had low probability so it was merely a “projection” does not cut it (he may get a visit from Big Al if he tries to make that excuse for not paying).
Secondly, Hansen’s statements being discussed in this thread were made to newspaper reporters. They were not written in IPCC Reports. Therefore, his statements can ONLY be understood in everyday terms. Those satement cannot be excused as being IPCC-speak unless he can prove he explained to the reporters that he was not speaking English but was using another language which is defined in the IPCC Glossary.
I commend that you read the above post by ‘Larry in Texas’ at March 9, 2012 at 1:23 am.
Richard
Myrrh et al.:
I need to make a clarifying correction to my most recent post here. A paragraph I wrote should have said:
Secondly, Hansen’s statements being discussed in this thread were made to newspaper reporters. They were not written in IPCC Reports. Therefore, his statements can ONLY be understood in everyday terms. Those statements cannot be excused as being IPCC-speak unless he can prove he explained to the reporters that he was not speaking English but was using another language WHICH WAS LATER defined in the IPCC Glossary.
Richard
steven mosher says:
the difference between a projection and a prediction is easy to understand.
Yes, it is. It is also easy to understand when someone is not making that distinction, and thus when it is inappropriate to use that distinction to interpret what they have said.
Whe someone says “We must act or X will occur”, they are not saying “If Y then X”, they are asserting both Y and X.
Hansen does not speak or act in terms of unassessed hypotheticals with unassigned probabilities. Those do not imply “death trains”. He predicts. Period. Until he gets caught holding a failed prediction, then he and his apologists weasel the words. This is dishonest semantic game playing.
You understand this.
Thanks Kadaka.
I didn’t know that the temperature in space was 2.7 kelvins.
I made an error of about 1%!
All the best
Jim Petrie
hunter says:
March 9, 2012 at 6:18 am
It is not fair to hold AGW believers to standards like truthfulness, honesty, integrity or accuracy.
____________________________________
The CAGW peddlers would of course agree with that. http://climatesight.org/2009/04/12/the-schneider-quote/
The Schneider Quote:
“….Dr Stephen Schneider, of Stanford University, is a well-respected climatologist [cough, cough]
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.…”
CAGW is about politics, it has always been about politics, about controlling and the harvesting of the Sheeple.
Re “It was a projection not a prediction dont you guys know anything!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
How many exclamation marks are needed to indicate irony? Maybe people who didn’t see it as ironic should get out a little more.
JJ.
I’m trying to clarify a rather simple matter for Roy Spencer and others. I think hansen is full of shit
but, he is not my topic.
People here are playing stupid by pretending they dont get the difference between a prediction and a projection.
I build a building. I do analysis. I tell you it will survive a earthquake of mag 9.
Is my statement unfalsifiable simply because I cant test it until a mag 9 quake comes along?
If a magnitude 8 quake shakes the building down, is my model falsified?
Really? including the part of my model that has the law of gravity in it? Is the whole thing wrong?
do we question all the science in my model or do we find the parts that need improving..
This stuff about degrees Kelvin reminds me the efforts by biologists that we rename starfish “sea stars” and jellyfish “jellies” because they aren’t actually fish. Those people to whom this matters are free to speak however they please, but when ordinary people use ordinary English in the manner to which they are accustomed, they should not be corrected by technicians. In English we refer to temperature with the word “degree” and, if necessary, follow that with the scale. We say 2.7 degrees kelvin. This may not be what people who write physics textbooks would do. They should be free to write their textbooks but leave the rest of us be.
Steve Mosher March 9, 9:01 am:
Steve, let me clarify a simple matter for you, probably well understood by Roy Spencer and others. When you make a “projection” to a newspaper reporter or a grade 6 class, or Congress, what do you think the statement is going to be understood as? What do you think the statement is intended to be understood as? And yes, if your building falls down, your prediction is falsified. If we had to also falsify Newton/Einstein gravity – then all models are unfalsifiable – like climate science models. Imagine a railway bridge collapsing when a mouse walks over it: Newton’s theory remains essentially in tact but the design of the bridge is not a qualified success because of the gravity component.
@Mosher,
I like your definitions.
I look at it this way:
Formal experimental predictions in science are usually made at the outset of an experiment so that you have something to test the results against–the prediction is born strictly from the hypothesis and so is used to test the hypothesis. Hypothesis->Prediction. That is the meaning of prediction in science; it DOES NOT relate to the ability to control variables, it DOES relate to a testing of the hypothesis either experimentally or observationally.
A projection is usually a -marketing term- talking about trends and where those trends are likely to go given how they are responding to current variables and where we believe those same variables will be later. It’s a trend related term, not a hypothesis or experiment related term.
Projection = Future trends given current trend given currently known variables that may act on that trend.
Prediction = Statement made from assumption hypothesis is true about effective relationship between variables when varying one such variable.
Steve,
“People here are playing stupid by pretending they dont get the difference between a prediction and a projection.”
Please point to a definition descibing the two? To layman and the press prediction and projections are synonyms—they will do like I did and look it up in a dictionary—so unless you point out somewhere where the two are plainly deifined I think like others say this is IPCC speak
@Mosher,
In the end though, prediction and projection are statements about the future, and so are interchangeable and synonyms in that sense. For every day language, you can use either. For functional scientific language the term is prediction (since science is a hypothesis based methodology). Projection is NOT part of science, no matter who tries to argue it is, according to how I defined it above (and how I am reading you are defining it). Again, it’s marketing speak. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a different -type- of knowledge evaluation separate from the methodical one we call science; projections are, but they aren’t scientific, only predictions (to test a hypothesis) are science.
Again, for those watching, science is a METHOD of knowledge gathering and evaluation, oriented around hypothesis (and a hypothesis that survives many predictions gets upgraded to a theory). Science is not a THING, other than how the word is often used to refer to the collection of knowledge gained by the scientific method specifically.
Is this kick Mosher day? Must’ve missed the memo.
Maybe I’m suffering from simpleton-chicken-crap-itis (chronic condition), but I didn’t understand Mosher to be doing ANY of these things: 1) advocating for the use of the word ‘projection’ OR 2) suggesting anything about Hansen’s statement either way. It looks to me as if he was trying to give a simple answer to a question.
~shrug~