This really is abuse of Hansen’s position at NASA, what next? Meanwhile China keeps building coal plants, where’s your letter to them Jim? Of course China would tell Hansen to go suck rocks, and Hansen knows it, so he doesn’t try. – Anthony
Guest post by Kirtland Griffin
James Hansen, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, copied me on a letter to the President of Slovenia and their National Assembly. Don’t ask, it’s a long story. But suffice it to say, I got copied.
Seems the Assembly and the President are deciding whether to build a lignite powered electrical generation plant. The actual discussion is financial support. Yes, I mean ONE PLANT. To read this letter, you’d think the destiny of the planet depended upon this one plant. News flash! …. IT DOESN’T!
So how does a US private citizen tell a foreign government not to build a power plant? We are to believe Dr. Hansen is writing as a private citizen and not as a NASA Director. Otherwise it would not be within government policy. Got it?
The most outrageous piece from a quick glance has to be the global tempereature chart going from 1880 to 2012. It is an anomaly chart based on the average of a 40-year period just after the Little Ice Age was beginning to wane. You could not get a more biased chart. Think of measuring the amount of solar radiation received in a particular location as the Sun rose and then compare that to the solar radiation at noon. That should give you some idea.
One interesting piece is this:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1, 2) summarized broad-based assessments with a “burning embers” diagram, which indicated that major problems begin with global warming of 2-3°C. A probabilistic analysis (3), still partly subjective, found a median “dangerous” threshold of 2.8°C, with 95% confidence that the dangerous threshold was 1.5°C or higher.
OK, the beginning of the problem is 2 to 3°C, being partly subjective (fantasy?) So much for evidence.
Then he talks about Greenland and Antarctic ice loss that is accelerating. If he means it is accelerating in the growth direction, he may have something. That is not where he is going.
The facts that Antarctica and Greenland are losing mass at an accelerating rate (5, 6) and sea level is rising at a rate (+3m/millennium) much higher than during the past several thousand years provide strong evidence that the temperature in the past decade (+0.75°C relative to 1880-1920) exceeded the prior Holocene maximum.
Yes, he thows in rising sea levels which aren’t, and somehow this disputes all the evidence that the Holocene Maximum was warmer than now. Peter Pan has nothing on this story.
He then goes on a dissertation about the causes of radical changes in the distant past, which of course have nothing to do with the Sun and its variations. No, it’s all about CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Rule #1: Never admit the Sun changes anything.
Then he goes over the edge with a long discussion of CO2 and it’s predicted effects based on climate models which Phil Jones, Head of the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia, UK says, “none of them work”.
Go ahead and read the rest of the letter and keep in mind that all predictions are the result of models that do not work. When he talks about current temperatures and other climate data, go look on the Internet to see what is happening. Go to original sources, not what someone else says. The links in this article may help you get started. You will begin to wonder where this fellow gets his information.
As for Slovenia, go ahead and build your power plant. China is building more than one a week. Your contribution is a drop in the bucket, but a very important bucket for Slovenia. If your people need power, give it to them.
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RE
meemoe_uk says:
@ur momisugly April 4, 2012 at 12:37 am
A peurile thing to say and not just because it’s completely untrue but also because it implies the only racial group represented in Amercian politics in teh 1970s was from “anglo” stock.
You must be a bit like Woody Allen’s character in that film featuring the “orb” – at the start when he get’s wheeled out of deep-freeze hibernation after a few hundred years – bumping into things, talking jibberish…
meemoe_uk says: April 4, 2012 at 12:37 am
“…..The real reason is that cheap energy brings prosperity to a nation, and enables it to compete better internationally ……They don’t want countries to compete ….”
As I got older I gradually realized behind most of these “save the world” causes, whether it be saving the Amazon, or the world from communism, or one of dozens of other wonderful schemes, is usually the motivation of political/financial dominance.
Hansen is a coward, he knows if he did the same to the Chinese that they would demand his head on a plate and get it from Obama.
Maybe we should challenge Hansen to either take on the Chinese or admit he’s an opportunist bully.
DR says:
April 3, 2012 at 8:21 pm
As I recall, Hansen praised China as the example for the world to follow, didn’t he?
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Yes, the guy is seriously WACKED. I can not believe he is paid with tax dollars by US citizens. Makes one wonder about the loyalty to the USA of what ever power monger is making sure the guy keeps his job. Hansen should have been given the boot a long long time ago.
Dr Burns says:
April 3, 2012 at 10:53 pm
+/- 0.1 degrees error at 1890 ! Nuts !!
It’s about time a statistician did some proper analysis.
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A NASA engineer did (An engineer’s thinking has to be real world based)
See AJ Strata’s analysis:
“I am an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University” <– That says it all.
How anyone can believe that a slight increase in a trace gas – 0.039% – by volume of earths atmosphere can destroy the earth is mind numbing to put it mildly. Look up the history of Greenland and you will find that at one time it was lush green farmland. Applying a little common sense will help also.
What sickens me to death is when comfortable people from the West tell developing or emerging economies (Slovenia??) to not try to get energy from coal/oil, while those comfortable b@ur momisugly#$%%$s partly rely on coal/oil to power their office computers and warm their homes. I am sick to death of the hypocrisy. Something I pointed out to some time ago to Warmist commenters at the Guardian.
How many air miles has this ‘green’ Pinocchio traveled over the past 5 years? I have not traveled by air in over 10 years. Sheeesh!
Gail Combs said:
“The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization.”
That was stated in Jawoworowski’s paper,”CO2, The greatest scandal of our time” at a private meeting of world leaders, including Al Gore as a means to reduce the planet’s population. The how to get countries to do it voluntarily was through the CO2 global warming scam. And they were right. It is working as planned. Stupid people!
Gail Combs Writes:”One rule of reality is you cannot process data (run statistics) to create more accuracy than originallly captured in the raw data. ”
This fellow is incorrect, sort of…… One can achieve accuracy through precision or multiple measurements. You can achieve accuracy in the thousandths of an inch with a scale with 1/4 inch lines if you do it enough times. The proplem with Hansen and company is they are not measuring the same thing, like the temperature on a given day at a specific time. So, in that he is correct. I have determined the length of a steel rod to within .ooo3″ using this principle. For a ficticious parameter like the temperature anomaly of the planet, I suspect one can take liberties. Where is the precedent?
Bill Tuttle says:
April 3, 2012 at 11:37 pm
…….There are seven Slovenian techies working on a project here (in Kabul) ….
@ur momisugly Tucci78 I asked one what “Shove that watermelon all the way up your dupa, Cargo Cultist?” was in Slovenian, and he’s still laughing hysterically…
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Any bets that comment is translated and then makes the rounds in Slovenia….
At this point the best weapon in our arsenal is laughter and Hansen provides lots of ammo.
I don’t believe a word Hansen has to say.
1) Would you trust a scientist who is an activist?
2) Would you trust a scientist who constantly fiddles with settled temperature from the past?
3) Would you trust a scientist who said that the oceans would boil (when even someon at the IPCC calls runaway warming it highly unlikely)?
4) Would you trust a scientist whose very livelihood/reputation depends on continued warming?
By the way Hansen, how are your temperature projections from 1988 doing? FAIL!
Hansen may not get the reply he is hoping for. Eastern European countries have taken a EU carbon related diktat to the courts and won.
From the link http://thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/5352-dominic-lawson-britain-has-finally-rejected-the-bogus-economics-of-climate-change.html
Germany, where almost half the world’s solar energy is produced — in a country with just an hour of sun on an average December day — is now drastically cutting back (as is the much sunnier Spain, whose central plains are littered with bankrupt solar farms).
And which energy source is ecologically correct Germany now developing faster than any other? Lignite, otherwise known as brown coal, the most carbon- intensive fuel known to modern man.
This makes the countries on the European Union’s eastern borders (notably Poland, for which indigenous coal is a dominant energy source) even more reluctant to accept the national emissions targets promoted by Brussels. Eight of these nations launched a legal challenge and last week they won a ruling by the European Court of Justice that Brussels had exceeded its powers in imposing such limits. The court brushed aside the European commission’s complaint that it would not otherwise be able to “protect the integrity of the EU-wide market of [carbon] allowances”.
The most telling point is that this verdict gained almost no coverage. As Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, observes: “In the past, Poland’s intractable hostility to green unilateralism was greeted by protestation in capitals around Europe. Today it is hardly noticed by the media, while green campaigners have become limp . . . Other and more pressing concerns are taking precedence and are completely overriding the green agenda.”
Thank you Gail Combs ! An excellent start. However he does not take into account some of the major sources of error I have mentioned in previous posts. I’m surprised Anthony or Willis haven’t picked up on this.
Phil Jones’s approach implies that we could for example, plot the precise length of the average automobile to a fractions of a mm, and greater than measurement accuracy, simply by including every model of every brand manufactured around the world each year. The more models, the greater the accuracy … utter nonsense of course. When it comes to temperature, people seem to swallow this approach.
>>http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11420
Here’s an example of 1850 average temperature measurement for which CRU claims ridiculously small errors of +/- 0.1 deg C:
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Analysis of the 1850 Ft. Snelling record reveals that the 1850 temperature record (like temperature records for several years in the mid-1840’s) may have been compromised by improper instrument exposure and/or erratic observational schedules. Specifically, fixed time temperature readings taken during the warm months of 1850 show inordinate “compression” of daily readings taken at 0900 and 1500 hours. This suggests, of course, that the station thermometer may have been exposed to the mid-morning rays of the spring and summer sun and/or that observations were often taken at times significantly different than the times indicated in the official record .
The foregoing 1850 climatological record includes both unadjusted (UNADJ) and adjusted (ADJ) mean temperature values. The unadjusted record, in turn, includes two monthly mean temperature values: a) the simple average of fixed time readings taken daily at sunrise, 0900, 1500 and 2100 hours; and b) the simple average of fixed time readings taken daily at sunrise, 1500 and 2100 hours ONLY. Because it disregards the often anomalous 0900 hour readings, the second set of unadjusted averages illustrates the extent to which sun contamination may have distorted the 1850 Ft. Snelling temperature record.
I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to find out from Slovenia, but I did note a curious item. At the bottom of page 3, the last line, Jim Hansen gives his NASA e-mail address as official contact. Is that legal? If he were representing himself as a private citizen of the United States and used his private e-mail, that would be one thing. But in giving his government e-mail address, is he representing NASA’s position? As I understand it, it is illegal for a government employee to receive outside compensation to actively effect government policy. When Mr. Hansen gives a paid speech on
Global WarmingClimate ChangeGlobal Climate Disruption and is recommending political solutions, isn’t that against NASA’s and government policies? I remember all throughout the Pres. Bush (43) years that he was crying about how the administration was trying to censor him, but someone tallied up all that he earned in speaking fees on AGW and what was needed to correct it, and it was over $700k for 5-7 years of speeches. I don’t see much censoring going on.Does anyone know if this policy is real? If a government researcher, being paid with public money to do research for the public, if they are allowed to then actively effect public policy and get paid to do so by outside organizations?
It would be interesting and important to know NASA and wider Federal Government policy on how to separate one’s private advocacy from one’s official capacity. Hansen could have written his letter without reference to his academic and government titles, but he took care to include them, early and prominently, “for identification.”. That seems disingenuous. For “identification,” Dr. Hansen, you need provide only your name. Not your affiliation or your achievements. These latter are brought in not to establish who you are, but “who” you are: your qualifications, your reputation, your influence. The reason why the Slovenians should read further and give more weight to your words than they would to some zealous crackpot.
I think he may have crossed a line here, but I thought that about his civil disobedience pranks a few years back, and he seems to get away with it. The eventual housecleaning at NASA will be something to see.
The commenters are being much too kind. Hanson has no illness, and he’s no dummy. He’s a millionaire fraudster who if fighting tooth and fang to keep his dying fraud alive.
Tucci78 says:
April 3, 2012 at 8:31 pm
Jeez.
So what’s the Slovenian translation for “Shove that watermelon all the way up your dupa, Cargo Cultist?”
“Skidaj svojo lubenico globoko v svojo rit, kargo kultist!” But that is a bit unatural. Better is:
“Kargo kultist Zalet’ se v rit!”- “Cargo cultist, collide with your ass!”
globalcooler says:
April 4, 2012 at 4:57 am
Gail Combs Writes:”One rule of reality is you cannot process data (run statistics) to create more accuracy than originallly captured in the raw data. ”
This fellow is incorrect, sort of…… One can achieve accuracy through precision or multiple measurements….
I will agree that if you use a calibrated ruler with only inch markings and measure it multiple times estimating the first decimal place you can come up with a decent estimate of the object to a tenth of an inch. (Sample size of N>10) On my 1990’sVWR min-max thermometer I do not think you could even estimate much more than 0.5 degree fahrenheit. However you are certainlynot going to get an estimate of the hundredths place in either case. As you said Hansen and company are not measuring the temperature at the same spot at the same instant in time. Therefore you are dealing with a sample size = one and not a sample size of thousands.
In Austriala 20-30% of all the measurements back then [prior to 1972] were rounded or possibly truncated…as many as 85 -95% of all Australian sites in the pre-Celsius era (before 1972) did not comply with the BOM’s own stipulations.
In the USA, Anthony’s Surface Station auditing crew found that only 80 of the 1007 sites surveyed in the 1221 station network met the criteria of CRN 1 or CRN 2 sites – those deemed appropriate for measuring climate trends by NCDC.
These two countries represent a large part of the temperature record and can be considered to represent the “best” in measurement practices. The calculation of error also has to take into account the equipment, calibation and test method and not just the fact you can “read” a thermometer to the nearest tenth of a degree.
Did the temperature rise coming out of the LIA? Yes. Can Hansen & Co. measure it with an error of + 0.5 degree C possibly, but that is the best the older measurements are and I am being very generous.
If you look at NOAA’s error bar graph in light of the above, you can see it is full of bull paddies. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/global-jan-dec-error-bar-pg.gif
If they used a real world error estimate of + 0.5 degree C the rise in temperature would be within the error bars and therefore meaningless.
Hansen has an agenda and he is not about to let good scientific practices get in the way. That should be very obvious by now.
Even though the proposed coal-powered plant will blow considerably less smoke than Hansen, I suggest Slovenia name the generating plant after Hansen/NASA – The James Hansen NASA Climate Tipping Point Memorial of Slovenia. I’m sure that would impress the NASA bigwigs.
Tucci78 says:
April 3, 2012 at 11:23 pm
“(a) Move Dr. Hansen to a basement office ”
Don’t forget to take his stapler!
Willis, losing high-speed internet at home would be an end to life as I know it. Technically, Hansen isn’t exaggerating on that point, just making a specious argument that sounds impressive and frightening but is meaningless.
Ultimately, I’m in agreement with Hansen, that the government should not be funding this power plant.
However, as a libertarian, I come to the same position via a very different route. I generally believe that governments should not be providing financing (or guaranteeing loans) for any form of power production, leaving that role (along with the commensurate risks) entirely to the private sector.
Since I know nothing of the Slovenian constitution, nor of the powers and authorities held by their government, I think I’ll refrain from telling them how to run their country.
Just like Mann its actual in AGW skeptics interest to keep him in the public eye, especial given his behavior and the total lack of will from the ‘climate science’ community to public call him out when he indulges in such over the top BS. For give the people credit they sooner or later can smell the BS and will start to ask why others could not or did but said nothing .
“The fact is that most CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels stays in the surface carbon/climate system for millennia.”
A classic case of something being a fact not because the science supporters the idea but because a AGW prophet claims it to be?
MikeH says: @ur momisugly April 4, 2012 at 5:52 am
…Jim Hansen gives his NASA e-mail address as official contact. Is that legal? If he were representing himself as a private citizen of the United States and used his private e-mail, that would be one thing. But in giving his government e-mail address, is he representing NASA’s position? …
Does anyone know if this policy is real? If a government researcher, being paid with public money to do research for the public, if they are allowed to then actively effect public policy and get paid to do so by outside organizations?…
___________________________________
Here is the Department of Justice point of view on the conduct of Federal Employees. It is a lot longer than this and contains links to several points.
I would say that Hansen has been walking all over the DOJ code of conduct handbook that is issued by the Office of Government Ethics.
I wonder if private citizens can give the DOJ a prod and get them to investigate questionable ethics on the part of an employee. Hansen’s comments on democracy alone should have put him in the hot seat. When a newspaper (Washington Times) runs a story like EDITORIAL: NASA extremist advocates U.S. decline Radical green James Hansen pushes Chinese war on American economy You would think someone in the DOJ would at least look into it.
(Article has lots of links not duplicated here)
DOJ “…each Federal employee has a responsibility to the United States Government and its citizens to place loyalty to the Constitution, laws, and ethical principles above private gain. The public deserves and should expect no less….”
COntact information for the Department of Justice is here: http://www.justice.gov/contact-us.html
As for the “America, how did you let this happen thread”, here’s how.
Jim Hansen was hired into his position by Robert Jastrow, then-head of the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). Jastrow was a prominent skeptic on CAGW. So one day, about 15 years ago, I asked Jastrow (who, for a while, called me daily or thereabouts asking for climate information) why on earth he hired Hansen. His reply was that “he seemed like a smart guy”.
In reality, Jastrow hired Hansen into the NASA modelling position because he (Jastrow) knew little about climate and he was in awe of Hansen’s PhD advisor, James VanAllen, an astrophysicist who demonstrated the VanAllen belts in the ionosphere. None of the people involved–Jastrow, Hansen, or VanAllen–knew a lick about climate and none could probably construct a rudimentary weather map (I suspect Hansen still cannot). The reality is–however ironic–is that the buddy system in academic/government science, not any conspiracy, gave us Jimbo.