Boiling Oceans and Burning Reputations with James Hansen

…..And I read, you can add this to the text: “The real survivors on Earth will
be the Penguins, because they can breed on the rocks of the Antarctis by
holding their eggs between the legs….
and I remember some time ago that they were honored with a festival: Rock
for the Penguins ….so its time for us to die out….the trilobites suffered it before….
Cheers JS

One shouldn’t try to muzzle old Jimmy. His effusive mumbling is mightily efficient at rendering him useless, all on its own. Is there any dross in the public record about the Penguin Summer Cruise? I notice a peculiar absence of any stories on the subject….perhaps the realization of the reversal of the Austral seasons?

Having done an admittedly brief rummage on the topic of water on Venus a little while ago, my personal impression was that the science available regarding whether there ever was much more water on Venus than at present is mostly vague, largely unsupported speculation. The papers I found took data from quite brief satellite missions and attempted to apply the dubious science of paleoclimate proxy reconstructions, without of course any actual proxy variable, to try to justify wonderfully imaginative narratives of events which would have occurred long before humans even existed. Modern science hasn’t been able to provide a reasonably certain version of what was happening on this planet even a millennium ago, yet Mr. Hansen et al are sure they know what happened on a far distant planet possibly as far back as the birth of the solar system. Me, I’m not so sure.

When do these guys spontaneously combust???

The more I hear Hansen’s end of the world scenario repeated,
the more I think the guy handcuffing him needs to be wearing a white coat.

Hansen MUST be fired by the next President. Mere retirement is not enough for this jerk.

My attention was drawn, earlier today, to this 1967 paper which explains surface temperatures on Venus, without the need to invoke the “greenhouse effect”
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1967ApJ…149..731S
The real kicker is the author of the paper…….

Wasn’t this EXACT same video already featured in a story on WUWT two months ago with reference to the EXACT same Wikipedia quote? This feels like déjà vu…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/12/quote-of-the-week-dr-james-hansen-of-nasa-giss-unhinged/

Call me a sceptic if you like, but isn’t Venus just a tad closer to the Sun than we are? And doesn’t the Sun’s radiation footprint vary according to inverse square of distance (at least from memory of school-day physics), so with Venus about 67 Million Miles versus Earth’s 93 Million Miles – that’s about 72%.
Inverse square logic using my pocket calculator yields 92% more heat reaching Venus than Earth – ie nearly twice as much heat input
Now why is it hotter there?
Someone please correct my schoolboy physics – or give me a grant !!!

The sheer arrogance.

This guy must have some naughty pictures/video of someone in a high place. He has violated so many laws with his extra income it isn’t even funny anymore. I can’t even give a federally employed engineer a pen without him getting into trouble yet this guy can take well over a million.

@Andi Crockroft atmospheric pressure on Venus is 92 times that of Earth or there about, so it’s a giant pressure cooker, also it’s day is 243 days long, and it’s axial tilt is 178 degrees. Add to that retrograde rotation, you have a planet that’s not Earth’s twin.

IMHO James Hansen is unhinged so I could not resist mocking him here:
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/unified-theory-of-climate/
Even so, I do agree with one of Hansen’s scary scenarios. He says that if the oceans should boil there is no way to return to a cooler Earth. I agree with this statement because the mass of the oceans is so great that the surface pressure would be 320 bars or roughly four times that of Venus. This would guarantee temperatures much higher than on Venus.
It is generally believed that Earth’s surface constisted of molten rock shortly after its formation 4.5 billion years ago and again when the collision that formed the moon ocurred. If Earth’s water was present at either of those times this planet would have a steam atmosphere. As that is not the case I surmise that our water arrived after the planet had time to cool down somewhat.
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/06/12/venusian-mysteries/#comment-3240

gallopingcamel says:
March 14, 2012 at 10:48 pm
“IMHO James Hansen is unhinged so I could not resist mocking him here:
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/unified-theory-of-climate/
Even so, I do agree with one of Hansen’s scary scenarios. He says that if the oceans should boil there is no way to return to a cooler Earth. I agree with this statement because the mass of the oceans is so great that the surface pressure would be 320 bars or roughly four times that of Venus. This would guarantee temperatures much higher than on Venus.”
But that situation isn’t stable. The higher layers of the atmosphere would constantly precipitate water out; while this precipitation falls, it would boil away again in the lower, hotter layers. Result: The fastest biggest heat engine ever, resulting in a very fast transport of heat upwards by convection. And what can water vapor do very well? Right: Emit IR to space, resulting in enormous radiative cooling.
The tendency of that system would be to become cooler, not warmer.

@curiousgeorge: not ALL of the disaster-prepping is a waste of time and money. I’m thinking not of climate armageddon or something, but of much more mundane catastrophes like earthquakes, hurricanes, unseasonal weather causing week-long power outages,… all of which HAVE happened in the USA in recent memory.

I haven’t read all the comments above, so maybe someone have already said this. But I need to get it out of my system. The notion of a runaway greenhouse effect is just that, a notion. There is absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever that Venus was ever our twin. She is very different from our world, and has always been. The only similarity is shape and size. The early astronomers and skywatchers fell for the romantic notion of the Erath having its celestial twin, and from there has come a variety of stories based on this notion. The runaway greenhouse is one of them.
For all the facts we have about Venus, there is absolutely nothing to indicate there ever was an ocean or any mechanism needed to start the runaway greenhouse effect. The most probable explanation, also based on the exuberance of examples throughout the known universe (i.e. our own solar system), is that Venus has always been such an inhospitable place compared to our own habitat.

AndyG55 says:
March 14, 2012 at 8:23 pm
Venus,.. did you know that over the “equivalent pressure range” as Earth’s atmosphere, Venus’s atmospheric temperature is very close to 1.176x that of Earth (in K deg). This is EXACTLY what it should be if the distance from the sun was the ONLY DRIVER of global atmospheric temperature.
Yet Venus has 96.5% CO2 in its atmosphere, and Earth has 0.04%. !
hmmm !!!
Well pointed out! isn’t CO2 a reactive gas? i.e. it responds to either heat or cold, heating up or cooling down, implying that it does not drive anything but simply reacts to external influences like heat & cold? Mars has around the same amount of CO2 as Venus’ atmosphere, it is farther away from the Sun by half an AU, & a darn sight colder to boot with an ave surface temp of about -65°C or so. Yet Mars still receives oodles of sunlight! Not sure how to do the direct maths, but does that fit too? Anybody?

Correction of reply at 3.04 am.
I am sure Tim Flannery said on the video that “population will stabilise at 8 million as against 9 or 10 million”.

Gras Albert
Oh funny, I think I clicked something wrong and ended up with a 1967 paper from Carl Sagan about Venus temperature.

His TED talk is laughable. 400K atomic bombs per day?

Hanson does not say what stops runaway green house and how someone may reverse green house on Venus. Geoffrey Landis does cover these in several publications. Plants cycle the CO2 out of the atmoshphere and Corals and other calcium shelled organisms store it perminantly as reefs, chalk, and limestone. If we could introduce organisms that did this into venuses upper atmosphere we could terraform the planet in about 300 years. The catch is they need to be flying plants or corals. Landis suggests airship based coloines flying at 50 km high, just above the nice sulfuric acid clouds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_habitats_and_floating_cities
A population of essentiall self replicating airships with plants in most would do the job. It wont happen in the 21st century but someone will have a go.
In other words Hansen is again ignoring the reason the earth is habitable. Natural negative feed back systems. We have life and that generates soluds phases of Carbon: wood and carbonates. Life also generates dimethyle sulphide the major cloud seeding agent.
The rest is just Lovelock’s daisy world. Its funny that the greens were so much into Gaia Hypothesis in the 1970’s and 80’s but now have totally discarded its key idea. Homeostasis via biologically moderated negative feed backs.

J. Philip Peterson says:
March 14, 2012 at 7:41 pm
“The new president should fire all the global warming kooks in the EPA, NASA, Energy Dept., ETC.”
This is a good time to remind all U.S. citizens to please VOTE appropriately in November so we can clean house at these government agencies…
Hansen, by the way, is no longer a scientist but in fact is just another eco-advocate.. Just read any of his journal papers – most are laced with inappropriate political language and commentary that apparently doesn’t seem to bother the reviewers at these journals.

@ New Class Traitor says:
March 15, 2012 at 12:12 am
@curiousgeorge: not ALL of the disaster-prepping is a waste of time and money. I’m thinking not of climate armageddon or something, but of much more mundane catastrophes like earthquakes, hurricanes, unseasonal weather causing week-long power outages,… all of which HAVE happened in the USA in recent memory.
===========================================================
I’m quite aware that there are rational reasons to be reasonably prepared for common events. I live in Tornado country and have had more than one pass within 1/2 mile of my house. What I’m referring to is the paranoia that is associated with the TV shows I mentioned, and people like Al Gore, Hansen and others (both in and out of gov’t ) who prey upon, and feed, the irrational fears of individuals and a susceptible public.

GeneDoc says:

His TED talk is laughable. 400K atomic bombs per day?

What is laughable about this? His exact statement is that the amount of energy absorbed due to a power imbalance of 0.6 W/m^2 over the surface of the Earth each day is equal to the energy from exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. It is a simple exercise to verify that this is correct.
To calculate the energy absorbed in a day over the surface of the Earth:
Energy = (0.6 W/m^2) * (5.1 x 10^14 m^2) * (86000 sec / day) = 2.6 x 10^19 Joules
The energy released by the Hiroshima bomb is 50 to 63 x 10^12 J (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield )
If you divide the first number by the second, you get ~400,000 – 500,000 Hiroshima bombs. So, Hansen took the low end of that range.

Hansen better have word with the chaps at the IPCC.

May, 2004
IPCC Expert Meeting on The Science to Address UNFCCC Article 2 including Key Vulnerabilities
Thresholds of type II might be those that are linked directly to the key intrinsic processes of the climate system itself (often non-linear) and might be related to maintaining stability of those processes or some of the elements of the climate system discussed earlier. Some thresholds that all would consider dangerous have no support in the literature as having a non-negligible chance of occurring. For instance, a “runaway greenhouse effect”—analogous to Venus–appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities. So our focus will be on those events that the literature suggests have a non-negligible chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities.
http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc29352/m1/90/

@ New Class Traitor says:
March 15, 2012 at 12:12 am
@curiousgeorge: not ALL of the disaster-prepping is a waste of time and money. I’m thinking not of climate armageddon or something, but of much more mundane catastrophes like earthquakes, hurricanes, unseasonal weather causing week-long power outages,… all of which HAVE happened in the USA in recent memory.

Very little, however, of the ‘mitigation’ or pre-adaptation spending on putative global warming has any value whatsoever in the event of other disasters. And it is all very contra-survival in the (far more likely) event of global cooling. As much of the UK and Europe recently discovered/experienced.
King of the Hill is, of course, the “necessarily skyrocketing energy prices”. That’s outright deliberately murderous.

Speaking of Venus, as many were, there’s been a sudden (~20 yr) slowdown in its rotation, by about 6½ minutes a day, out of about 243 days (actual retrograde rotation period; the sun appears to circle the planet every 117 days because the year is 225 days; got that?? 🙂 ). Whether it is due to planetary interaction or circulation changes in the dense atmosphere or internal sub-crustal changes is unknown.

Michael W says:
March 14, 2012 at 7:58 pm
When I was a government employee, one arrest would have resulted in a suspension, and two would have resulted in dismissal. How many times has this guy been arrested? Why is he still a government employee?
______________________
As seems appropriate I am going to use WIKI as a source (snicker)
From Quigley’s one-volume history of the twentieth century entitled “Tragedy and Hope” (1966}

“….There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the Radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other group, and frequently does so. I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records…..
….It was this group of people, whose wealth and influence so exceeded their experience and understanding, who provided much of the framework of influence which the Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers took over in the United States in the 1930s. It must be recognized that the power of these energetic Left wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the power of the international financial coterie…..
….The Eighty-third Congress set up in 1953 a Special Reece Committee to investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. It soon became clear that people of immense wealth would be unhappy if the investigation went too far and that the “most respected” newspapers in the country, closely allied with these men of wealth, would not get excited enough about any revelations to make the publicity worthwhile. An interesting report showing the Left-wing associations of interlocking nexus of tax-exempt foundations was issued in 1954 rather quietly. Four years later, the Reece Committee’s general counsel, Rene A Wormser, wrote a shocked, but not shocking, book on the subject called “Foundations: Their Power and Influence”.
….The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole….. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds’ central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups….” Tragedy and Hope 1966 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley

None of us here should be surpised there is a major “Money Influence” element to our politics. See JoNova’s Website ~ Climate Coup — The Politics: How the regulating class is using bogus claims about climate change to entrench and extend their economic privileges and political control.
Guest Post: Dr David M.W. Evans http://joannenova.com.au/2012/03/climate-coup-the-politics/#comment-1014902

Markon says:

Greens have already managed to wipe 50,000,000 from the planet with the ban on DDT.

This is a complete falsehood. For one thing, DDT was never banned globally. It was banned in the U.S. where malaria was eradicated.
Secondly, one can’t blame the malaria deaths on countries choosing not to use DDT or even being discouraged from using DDT. In fact, in many places DDT became ineffective against mosquitoes for exactly the sort of reasons that Rachel Carson warned about: Its indiscriminate use in agriculture caused the mosquitoes to develop resistance to it in a textbook example of evolution in action. In India, for example, it is documented in a Nature article that the number of malarial cases skyrocketed at a time when DDT use there was very high and increasing.
There are many reasons why malaria has not been eradicated. To blame these deaths on some supposed worldwide ban on DDT that never existed is a complete fiction. And, to ignore the fact that it was the indiscriminate outdoor use of DDT in agriculture that led both to the largest environmental concerns and very real problems with mosquitoes developing resistance is just to engage in ideological propaganda.

Joel
Laughable due to the “over the top” nature of the scaremongering. I don’t doubt the math. But what does it mean in context? Sure sounds terrible! What’s the total number of Hiroshima bombs’ worth of energy received by Earth every day? And what is the delta due to this “power imbalance”? Let’s see, solar constant is around 1360 W/m2… Less than 0.05%? Or maybe we should use the 1/4 value to represent what reaches Earth? So 4x more: 0.2%? So we typically set off 200 million or so Hiroshima bombs a day? What’s another half million?
And the trillion dollar question still remains: Can we measure it? If not why not? Is it a tragedy that we can’t? Gosh, half a million Hiroshima bombs! Surely we can measure that!
It’s theater, not science, and I try to laugh so I’m not completely disgusted by it.

Is there any evidence that Venus ever had oceans? And there is way way way more CO2 (96.5%) in the atmosphere than water vapor (20 ppm). The atmosphere on Venus is simply in no way comparable to any conceivable atmosphere on Earth.

James Paggett says:

I disagree. They are extremely similar – an almost exact paraphrase.
…
Perhaps both he and wikipedia used the same source – that seems highly implausible, but if true you still have the problem of appropriating another source’s words and passing them off as your own.

You are not using Occam’s razor. You are just being ridiculous. How is one possibly supposed to describe the phenomenon of a runaway greenhouse effect due to water vapor feedback without using several words in common? By your standard, one would conclude that every physics textbook has “appropriat[ed] another source’s words” on a wide range of topics. In fact, you would find that practically every scientist in the world was a plagiarist.
I also doubt that one couldn’t find statements from Hansen describing the runaway greenhouse effect with many of the same words or phrases that predate the Wikipedia, but frankly it is not worth my time to check this because you argument is so ridiculous on the face of it.

“In his ” Storms of My Grandchildren ” he [Hansen] says oil shale mining will result in runaway greenhouse on Earth.” (Wiki, Earth) Decidedly, anything goes for this guy.

@joel
The banning of DDT was wider than just the USA. Many countries were pressured to ban it and finally South Africa did so. After one year the resurgence of Malaria was significant and DDT was reintroduced because nothing else was as effective. This is still the case.
DDT has been used for malarial spraying programmes in Swaziland, Mozambique, South Africa and other SADC countries since the 1950’s. It is still effective which is why it is still used. It is only because of spraying DDT in the lowveld of Swaziland that the area was opened to cattle and sugarcane 50 years ago. Malaria remains endemic in Mozambique because the low level spraying was ended. Travellers from Mozambique continuously carry malaria into all the neighbouring countries as a result. The Swaziland and Kruger Park lowveld receive malarial doses, so to speak, each summer as the mosquitoes travel upstream from Mozambique. They are frozen out each winter.

Can someone tell me if the earth’s atmospheric water vapor has increased appreciably in the last 10 to 15 years? If it has, then maybe that explains why sea levels haven’t risen as predicted by the CAGW models – the water is all in the atmosphere. I’m just being facetious, unless there is a lucrative grant available to research the problem. Then I’m deadly serious.

Larry in Texas says:
March 14, 2012 at 8:38 pm
Hansen MUST be fired by the next President. Mere retirement is not enough for this jerk.

I’m may be wrong, but I don’t think the President has such power. I am certain that he shouldn’t have such power.

Joel,
I’m amazed by your ability to read my thoughts. I believe that you used the term “ideological propaganda” somewhere in this thread. I find Dr. Hansen’s use of atomic bomb equivalents (without context) to fall into that category–using frightening images to influence people’s thoughts about how terrible atmospheric CO2 is. I understand the explanation that he’s trying to put the amount of energy into a unit that people might more easily comprehend. But he didn’t choose puppy dog equivalents (or a simple fraction of a percent of the total insolation). He chose to show images of his cute grandchildren juxtaposed with mushroom clouds. That’s manipulative. I find it amusing and irresponsible, but sadly predictable from someone with a message (and a book) to sell. Others are terrified. It seems to work. He received a standing ovation at TED.
My point about effects is this: If you can predict it, but can’t measure it, how do you know it exists? An example: Why have we spent so much effort and so many resources to observe a Higgs boson? Isn’t it enough to predict it? I have yet to be convinced by empirical data. Others have faith in predictions. How hard is that to understand? Why is it ideological? Why does Hansen need “ideological propaganda” to make his point? Could it be that the data are inadequate?

James Hansen’s loony radicalism brings NASA/Goddard into serious disrepute. It’s a mystery why he hasn’t been given the boot.

From where I sit at the moment the higher the concentration of water vapour goes the cloudier it becomes and the rain begins to fall while the corresponding air and surface temperatures are up to 5 or 6 degrees cooler than a clear March day.
What the hell is going on here and what have we done to the climate to break it so badly that it acts in the opposite to the predictions ?? More research I suspect !

SAMURAI [March 14, 2012 at 9:12 pm] says:
“Men are from Mars, Hansen is from Venus”

noaaprogrammer [March 14, 2012 at 9:16 pm] says:
“Hansen is as Hansen does.”

Dang! I wish I thought those up. ROTFLMAO!
P.S. Anthony and Mods … WordPress changed something again. Getting various messages like “You must be logged in to comment with that email address.” and “That email address is associated with an existing WordPress.com account, please log in to use it.”, while using the same email address as always. I noticed that Goddard’s site has also been on the fritz. Trying a different email address for now.
[Reply: Contacting WordPress.com Support will help resolve these issues. ~dbs, mod.]

Pull My Finger says:

Wonder if the head of NASA realizes that Venus is a couple million miles closer to the big hot ball of light in the sky, and that might have a *little bit* to do with heating up water and such?

Indeed, the general thinking in the climate science community is that the Earth is not in any danger of having a true Venus-style water vapor feedback runaway, at least not for a few billion years when the sun gets brighter. Why Hansen feels otherwise is not completely clear, at least in my mind.
James Padgett says:

Well, if one didn’t read the wikipedia article on the subject and simply described it according to their expertise/POV then they might say something along the lines of:

Your way is a little wordy…and might be the way that one would describe it to a more technical audience. It also has the benefit of having read the Wikipedia article so that you could make an explicit attempt not to use any of the language in there. I suppose that people like Hansen should now read through Wikipedia and all other popular sources and purposely avoid using any wording even minutely close, lest it be insinuated that they plagiarized!
By the way, if you want to see what real plagiarism really looks like, I suggest you look at Wegman’s stuff that was analyzed. You’ll see a huge difference between that and what you are showing here!

James,
Just to give you a picture of what plagiarism from Wikipedia actually looks like: http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/wegman-social-networks-v-2-1.pdf See the cyan-colored material…That is the part that is exactly the same in both sources? Makes your comparison look pretty lame, doesn’t it!?!