From NASA: Research Links Extreme Summer Heat Events to Global Warming
A new statistical analysis by NASA scientists has found that Earth’s land areas have become much more likely to experience an extreme summer heat wave than they were in the middle of the 20th century. The research was published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Earth’s Northern Hemisphere over the past 30 years has seen more “hot” (orange), “very hot” (red) and “extremely hot” (brown) summers, compared to a base period defined in this study from 1951 to 1980. This visualization shows how the area experiencing “extremely hot” summers grows from nearly nonexistent during the base period to cover 12 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere by 2011. Watch for the 2010 heat waves in Texas, Oklahoma and Mexico, or the 2011 heat waves the Middle East, Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio |
Anthony comments on the NASA animation by Dr. James Hansen of surface temperature trends from 1955-1999:
There are many issues with this presentation. It seems to be a big Cherry Picking exercise.
1. Note all of the missing southern hemisphere data. There are operating weather stations during his time, but they are excluded from the analysis. Why?
2. The period chosen, 1955-1999 (in the bell curve animation) leaves out the warmer 1930’s and the cooler 2000’s. Why?
3. The period from 2000-present has no statistically significant warming. Leaving that period out (of the bell curve animation) biases the presentation.
4. The period chosen exhibits significant postwar growth, urbanization is not considered.
5. As for severe weather, Hansen ignores the fact that neither tornadoes nor hurricanes have shown any increase recently. Only smaller tornadoes show an increase, due to reporting bias thanks to easily affordable and accessible technology. NOAA’s SPC reports that July 2012 seems to be at a record low for tornadoes.
6. My latest results in Watts et al 2012 suggest surface station data may be biased warmer over the last 30 years.
The statistics show that the recent bouts of extremely warm summers, including the intense heat wave afflicting the U.S. Midwest this year, very likely are the consequence of global warming, according to lead author James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.
“This summer people are seeing extreme heat and agricultural impacts,” Hansen says. “We’re asserting that this is causally connected to global warming, and in this paper we present the scientific evidence for that.”
Hansen and colleagues analyzed mean summer temperatures since 1951 and showed that the odds have increased in recent decades for what they define as “hot,” “very hot” and “extremely hot” summers.
The researchers detailed how “extremely hot” summers are becoming far more routine. “Extremely hot” is defined as a mean summer temperature experienced by less than one percent of Earth’s land area between 1951 and 1980, the base period for this study. But since 2006, about 10 percent of land area across the Northern Hemisphere has experienced these temperatures each summer.
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James Hansen and colleagues use the bell curve to show the growing frequency of extreme summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, compared to the 1951 to 1980 base period. The mean temperature for the base period is centered at the top of the green curve, while hotter than normal temperatures (red) are plotted to theright and colder than normal (blue) to the left. By 1981, the curve begins to shift noticeably to the right, showing how hotter summers are the new normal. The curve also widens, due to more frequent hot events. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio |
Comments from Anthony:
This bell curve proves nothing, as it has the same problems with data as the surface temperature visualization above: cherry picking period, missing data, and contradictory severe weather statistics. This is nothing but a political ploy from a man who has abandoned any pretext of professionally done science in favor of activism. However, in spite of this, it will be used as “proof” by non-thinking individuals like Bill McKibben to promote a political end. Prepare for a barrage of such stories trying to link any observed weather aberration to climate. They’ll use the same level of fact checking like we saw with the melting street lamps last week.
In 1988, Hansen first asserted that global warming would reach a point in the coming decades when the connection to extreme events would become more apparent. While some warming should coincide with a noticeable boost in extreme events, the natural variability in climate and weather can be so large as to disguise the trend.
To distinguish the trend from natural variability, Hansen and colleagues turned to statistics. In this study, the GISS team including Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy did not focus on the causes of temperature change. Instead the researchers analyzed surface temperature data to establish the growing frequency of extreme heat events in the past 30 years, a period in which the temperature data show an overall warming trend.
NASA climatologists have long collected data on global temperature anomalies, which describe how much warming or cooling regions of the world have experienced when compared with the 1951 to 1980 base period. In this study, the researchers employ a bell curve to illustrate how those anomalies are changing.
A bell curve is a tool frequently used by statisticians and society. School teachers who grade “on the curve” use a bell curve to designate the mean score as a C, the top of the bell. The curve falls off equally to both sides, showing that fewer students receive B and D grades and even fewer receive A and F grades.
Hansen and colleagues found that a bell curve was a good fit to summertime temperature anomalies for the base period of relatively stable climate from 1951 to 1980. Mean temperature is centered at the top of the bell curve. Decreasing in frequency to the left of center are “cold,” “very cold” and “extremely cold” events. Decreasing in frequency to the right of center are “hot,” “very hot” and “extremely hot” events.
Plotting bell curves for the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the team noticed the entire curve shifted to the right, meaning that more hot events are the new normal. The curve also flattened and widened, indicating a wider range of variability. Specifically, an average of 75 percent of land area across Earth experienced summers in the “hot” category during the past decade, compared to only 33 percent during the 1951 to 1980 base period. Widening of the curve also led to the designation of the new category of outlier events labeled “extremely hot,” which were almost nonexistent in the base period.
Hansen says this summer is shaping up to fall into the new extreme category. “Such anomalies were infrequent in the climate prior to the warming of the past 30 years, so statistics let us say with a high degree of confidence that we would not have had such an extreme anomaly this summer in the absence of global warming,” he says.
Other regions around the world also have felt the heat of global warming, according to the study. Global maps of temperature anomalies show that heat waves in Texas, Oklahoma and Mexico in 2011, and in the Middle East, Western Asia and Eastern Europe in 2010 fall into the new “extremely hot” category.
I’ve looked at the paper now and the “analysis” based on good ol’ GISTEMP (ugh). And it has it’s highly charged political closing paragraphs (a Hansen trademark).
But if you think this is bad (and it is), just wait until PNAS publishes this:
Scientific case for avoiding dangerous climate change to protect young people and nature. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., submitted.
Some highlights:
“The most basic matter is not one of economics, however. It is a matter of morality – a matter of intergenerational justice. As with the earlier great moral issue of slavery, an injustice done by one race of humans to another, so the injustice of one generation to all those to come must stir the public’s conscience to the point of action.”
“Can the human tipping point be reached before the climate system passes a point of no return? What we have shown in this paper is that time is rapidly running out. The era of doubts, delays and denial, of ineffectual half-measures, must end. The period of consequences is beginning. If we fail to stand up now and demand a change of course, the blame will fall on us, the current generation of adults. Our parents did not know that their actions could harm future generations. We will only be able to pretend that we did not know. And that is unforgiveable.”
Yes, you read that right (first paragraph) – Hansen just compared “ending” global warming to slavery! This is perhaps the most repulsive and repugnant statement I’ve ever seen a scientist make in printed media…
Please, read it all…and don’t be surprised when you start to see lawsuits based on the Hansen junk science, which cause your energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket” (to use phrase from our current president).
Greenhouse gas warming theory predicts nights warm faster than days, winter warms faster than summer. Hansen has produced clear evidence the observed warming is not due to greenhouse gases, because it predicts the least warming in summer days. Thus there should be less record hot days in summer than in winter. The decrease in record winter night time cold should greatly exceed record hot days in summer.
Hansen’s dishonesty is in not pointing this out.
1. Note all of the missing southern hemisphere data. There are operating weather stations during his time, but they are excluded from the analysis. Why?
See Michael Sweet’s post.
2. The period chosen, 1955-1999 (in the bell curve animation) leaves out the warmer 1930′s and the cooler 2000′s. Why?
Globally, the 1930’s were at about the same temperature as the 1951-1980 period, and colder than the 2000’s, which were globally the hottest decade on record. Furthermore, the 2000s ARE taken into account in the paper, if not in the animation–and considering that the paper is available to you, it puzzles me as to why you’d expend energy criticizing the animation.
3. The period from 2000-present has no statistically significant warming. Leaving that period out (of the bell curve animation) biases the presentation.
The mentioned period is covered in the paper itself, and is also present in the animation.
4. The period chosen exhibits significant postwar growth, urbanization is not considered.
Urbanization is considered, actually, as the data used has already been adjusted and homogenized specifically in order to remove spurious temperature trends, including the UHI effect. I’m aware, mind, that you don’t think that those adjustments are done correctly; fair enough. I’m just pointing out that from Hansen’s perspective, he doesn’t NEED to take urbanization into account because it’s already been taken into account.
5. As for severe weather, Hansen ignores the fact that neither tornadoes nor hurricanes have shown any increase recently. Only smaller tornadoes show an increase, due to reporting bias thanks to easily affordable and accessible technology. NOAA’s SPC reports that July 2012 seems to be at a record low for tornadoes.
Hansen makes no specific claims regarding tornadoes or hurricanes in his paper, which deals primarily with departure of temperature from the mean, not with extreme weather. This “criticism” is irrelevant to this specific paper.
6. My latest results in Watts et al 2012 suggest surface station data may be biased warmer over the last 30 years.
Watts et al 2012, while no doubt representing a significant effort on your part and on the part of others (and, furthermore, very useful in that it updates your previous surfacestations classifications, bringing them up to currency with the standards introduced by Mennes et al 2009), does not take into account known biases in the temperature record and therefore, as is, says little to nothing about the actual global temperature trend. I eagerly await, though, your application of the necessary adjustments for station relocation, instrumental changes, and time of observation changes to the stations you’ve classified, at which point you should be able to actually say something defensible about what United States temperature trends are.
“does not take into account known biases in the temperature record and therefore, as is, says little to nothing about the actual global temperature trend.” -Sam Yates
I particularly enjoyed that little pretzel, chestnut, whatever, …… buahahahahahaha
He forgot to add Barbecue, .. hahahahaha
TomRude says:
August 6, 2012 at 6:29 pm
It’s so nice to see that Hansen’s paper is not behind a pay wall… Thank you Rattus.
“The climate dice are now loaded to a degree that a perceptive
person old enough to remember the climate of 1951–1980 should
recognize the existence of climate change, especially in summer.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Having been around to watch the heat, the floods, the storms, and the heavy snows and resultant devastation from rapid spring melts during that period in the area where I grew up, especially in the early 1960’s when asphalt was melting in the streets; and having my parents talk of ranching and farming through the 30’s, I can hardly get excited about our current weather as I have seen it all before. Nothing new here. Let’s move on ;-P
Hansen must be around my age so I can only conclude he is a Charlatan.
Sam Yates;
Globally, the 1930′s were at about the same temperature as the 1951-1980 period, and colder than the 2000′s, which were globally the hottest decade on record. Furthermore, the 2000s ARE taken into account in the paper, if not in the animation–and considering that the paper is available to you, it puzzles me as to why you’d expend energy criticizing the animation.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oddly they were warmer for the longest time until adjustments made them colder than they originally were. Was there new temperature data obtained about the 1930’s in the last 20 years or so to justify this downward adjustment? No? Please explain.
As for the animation, so what you are saying is that it doesn’t represent the paper, than I’d like to know if you think that was a deliberate misrepresentation or not?
Sam Yates;
Globally, the 1930′s were at about the same temperature as the 1951-1980 period, and colder than the 2000′s, which were globally the hottest decade on record.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
All the more reason to include them. If heat waves similar to the current period happened in the supposedly cooler period, that would pretty much falsify the while paper wouldn’t it? How is it that all that time and effort went into the paper and yet excluded data on hand for a time period when historical references makes clear had extreme heat waves? In the era of computer simulations, how hard would it have been to include the extra few decades of data and compare heat waves then to heat waves now?
Leaving them out is inexcusable, and when one considers how easily they could have been included, one can only draw a negative inference from the fact that they were not.
Theo … try actually watching the thing. It runs through to 2011. The commentary is flat wrong. FAIL.
REPLY: Look at the bell curve
1. The comments were obviously about the temperature anomaly animation.
2. The ‘bell curve’ animation also includes runs up until 2011. Really, is is so hard to actually watch a 17 second animation before jumping in with the confirmation bias?
Davidmhoffer: I’m not sure what you’re referring to; as far as I know, in no data sets, adjusted or otherwise, do global temperatures during the 1930s and 1940s compare with temperatures now. Are you talking about this US adjustment? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/28/nasa-giss-adjustments-galore-rewriting-climate-history/ If so, it had little effect other than to shift a few records around, and the trend was left mostly as it was–and in any case, concluding that an adjustment is false because it results in warming, without even being familiar with why the adjustment is being performed, seems to me like it might get you into trouble. What are your reasons for believing that the adjustments aren’t valid?
As for your concerns about the time period used, Hansen et al defend that choice in their paper:
“We choose 1951–1980 as the base period for most of our illustrations, for several reasons. First, it was a time of relatively stable global temperature, prior to rapid global warming in recent decades. Second, it is recent enough for older people, especially the “baby boom” generation, to remember. Third, global temperature in 1951–1980 was within the Holocene range, and thus it is a climate that the natural world and civilization are adapted to. In contrast, global temperature in at least the past two decades is probably outside the Holocene range (7), as evidenced by the fact that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are both losing mass rapidly (8, 9) and sea level has been rising at a rate [3 m∕millennium, (10); updates available at http://sealevel.colorado.edu/%5D well above the average rate during the past several thousand years. Fourth, we have used this base period in scores of publications for both observational and model analyses, so it is the best period for comparisons with prior work.”
I would recommend, incidentally, taking a gander yourself at, say, drought indices over the 20th century (here, for example: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/jhm-386.1), as well as the times during which heat records were set (readily available on Wikipedia); I think you’ll find that in the former case, drought has been steadily increasing during this century, and in the latter there have been far more high temperature records set in the 2000s than is, statistically speaking, likely.
I think the analysis is a very good way of visualising variations in climate it would be very interesting to see the rest of the story Hansen does not want to tell us.
All he shows here is that there was a warming in the recorded temps over that period. I don’t think anyone disagrees with that (Watts et al 2012 notwithstanding).
What they do not point out is that before 1980 the gaussian profile actually _cools_ a bit before rising later. This is climate varation. The broadening they note is a significant change in climate patterns so what does it mean? Do computer models show similar changes ?
How hard would it be for someone to run this same analysis back to 1900 ? How about looking a winter temps? Southern Hemisphere?
Though Hansen has his usual activist cherry picking presentation this approach is probably more reliable than the often criticised “global mean temperature”.
This should not be dismissed out of hand , it just needs doing for the full range of available data to get the full story.
“Global maps of temperature anomalies show that heat waves in Texas, Oklahoma and Mexico in 2011, and in the Middle East, Western Asia and Eastern Europe in 2010 fall into the new “extremely hot” category.”
Britain this summer falls into the “fairly cold and wet” category. I’d rather be where I could pick cherries like Jimbo.
3. The period from 2000-present has no statistically significant warming. Leaving that period out (of the bell curve animation) biases the presentation.
No. Actually the legend labelling this as 1955-1999 is misleading. The last frame of the bell amin. shows data 2001-2011. Replaying the anim. does indeed show no noticable progression in the bell centre line over the last ten years worth of ten year groupings. ie data from 1991-2001 to 2001-2011
What need to be done here is actually fit the gaussian at each step , find its mean and std deviation (sigma) and plot how that varies over time.
That would be a good demonstration of how little warming there has been recently.
This does seem to be a shift in policy by Mann et al. Rather than predict terror in the future, prove we’re already suffering now. You can see the attraction: no need to use those flaky models, just rely on people’s perceived recent experiences.
Already I hear people saying how the weather is “weird” now, that it’s hotter/wetter/colder/you name it. The tactic is working because people remember the odd days and forget the normal ones.
So I guess we’ll see more of this. If it requires a dependence on ignoring half the world, leaving out the last 10 years and using distorted temperature records then so be it. The end justifies all possible means for these people.
P Solar says:
Though Hansen has his usual activist cherry picking presentation this approach is probably more reliable than the often criticised “global mean temperature”.
I agree, but with one caveat. Minimum temperatures are significantly affected by changes in early morning solar insolation. This is especially true in winter at mid to high latitudes.
Hence, winter minimum temperatures are an unreliable measure of winter night time cooling.
Following the NASA link at the top it reports the data source :
“Platform/Sensor/Data Set: GISS Climate Dice Analysis (1950 through 2011)”
I guess that project means dice as in loaded dice.
Other problem is that data link gets a 404 error !
Hey if one of the USA’s top scientists can cherry pick so badly and get away with it in th MSM then I’m going to give it ago.
[SNIP: A trifle too risque. Let’s aim for higher goals, OK? -REP]
” = inch.
and they call this advancement in science what a joke, we really are still living in caves but at least we can tweet our cave drawings to each other.
Philip Bradley says:
Hence, winter minimum temperatures are an unreliable measure of winter night time cooling.
I’m not quite sure what your point is. I suppose it depends upon what we are implicitly assuming all these temperatures mean.
Are we assuming that changes in global mean temp is some measure of global heat content. For land probably not. Land temps do relate to what we live in and how frosts etc affect crops that we need to eat and livestock.
Minimum daily temperature would seem to be an important parameter irrespective of whether it depends on early morning cloud. If it freezes crops still fail irrespective of just why.
This is why I think looking at the distribution as is done here is more informative. I’d like to do the same thing for winter if they’d only fix the broken link to their dicey data.
Drought and heat are not the same thing. Hansen claims the current drought is caused by climate change. The IPCC says droughts have become less frequent in the US. (Quoted by Roger Pielke Jr here: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.no/)
Heat and wildfires are also not the same thing. Here in Norway (not the hottest country on earth) we had forest fire warnings before Easter last year.
Here’s a copy of the comment I left on the YouTube page:
Garbage in and garbage out, as the paper mill churns. I’ll stick with the PDO and AMO.
Giant cherry picking excercise? I must say, Anthony, you must have some balls to say that… Excluding Antarctica, just how much of the Earth’s land surface is actually in the southern hemisphere? How does the answer compare with the proportion of stations in urban locations?
And in any case, none of your alternative hypotheses can possibly explain the steady shift decade-after-decade (i.e. observed reality not model prediction) that has now resulted in extremely hot weather events (i.e. greater than +3 StdDev relative to baseline) being 50 to 100 times more prevalent in the northern hemisphere – because your alternative explanations are either random or cyclical – end of story.
REPLY: Hey, you have the same lack of perception as Hansen. Martin Hoerling of NOAA thinks the paper is crap too, saying:
Dr. Hoerling has published research suggesting that the 2010 Russian heat wave was largely a consequence of natural climate variability, and a forthcoming study he carried out on the Texas drought of 2011 also says natural factors were the main cause.
Dr. Hoerling contended that Dr. Hansen’s new paper confuses drought, caused primarily by a lack of rainfall, with heat waves.
“This isn’t a serious science paper,” Dr. Hoerling said. “It’s mainly about perception, as indicated by the paper’s title. Perception is not a science.”
Be as upset as you wish.
– Anthony
Just for grins, I went over the Hadley Centre and downloaded the entire Central England temperature series — the one that’s uninterrupted from 1659 to the present. The Hadley has a chart up showing the anomaly compared to the 1961-1990 average, and it shows lots of negative anomalies up until the 1930s, then a mix, then a big positive bump from 1980 on.
My first thought is “Why limit the average to 1961-1990?” Oh, I know thirty years is some kind of magic climatical number, but lies, damn lies, statistics, etc. So I loaded the annual averages, rounded to the nearest single decimal point — HadCrut had two significant digits, on a dataset that had to have a measurement error of at least 0.5C — and worked out the anomaly compared to the entire 353-year record.
That modified the chart quite a bit. it put a LOT more negative anomalies all along the chart, instead of piling them all at the beginning. There is a lot more balance all along the series. There is still a pile of positives starting at the last 30 years or so — has the station been analyzed for siting issues? — but to me the significant feature is that none of the recent anomalies are significantly higher than any that have come before. In other words, it hasn’t gotten warmer, it just hasn’t been as cold as in the past.
That may be considered a global warming signal to some, but to me it just looks like the cold extremes has mostly gone away while they kept the nice warmth that was completely common before. If that’s AGW, I don’t see a problem with it.
Watch and learn…
Regarding the warmth in the 1930s:
As unsurprising in the context of arctic temperatures in the 1930s being as warm as in the 1990s, as illustrated at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif , temperatures for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole also had major cooling in the 1940s-1960s. That is the reason the global cooling scare happened, before Hansen fudged the main dataset to hide the decline. Such is illustrated and discussed at http://www.real-science.com/hansens-tremendous-data-tampering
The former passes verification with what fits actual historical ice records as illustrated at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/02/cache-of-historical-arctic-sea-ice-maps-discovered/
The latter also fits such as a 1975 Newsweek article pre-dating Hansen’s data fudging, showing the sheer magnitude of 1940s-1960s cooling:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-o30PNIBahS0/T2KTNlu3RsI/AAAAAAAAAkY/cItxzMamChk/s1600/newsweek-global-cooling.jpg
And it also fits a 1976 National Geographic article’s temperature trend data:
http://img240.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=40530_DSCN1557_nat_geog_1976_1200x900_122_75lo.JPG
The prior Northern Hemisphere temperature illustration additionally passes verification with what fits sea level rise trends. For example, as Holgate et al. 2007 noted, sea level rise rate was greater in the first half of the 20th century than the second half (which is a mismatch to Hansen’s fudged temperature trend but supportive of the preceding illustration):
“The rate of sea level change was found to be larger in the early part of last century (2.03 ± 0.35 mm/yr 1904–1953), in comparison with the latter part (1.45 ± 0.34 mm/yr 1954–2003).”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006GL028492.shtml
(In fact, sea level rise in the late 19th century, part of recovery from the Little Ice Age, had a rate like that in the late 20th century, despite how human emissions increased by a factor of more than 10 over that period, not supporting claims that marginal increase in CO2 must have a large temperature effect by net positive feedback amplification as opposed to the actual negative feedback resulting from rise in water vapor clouds causing shading and extra reflectivity).
As seen in data before fudging, U.S. temperatures in the 1930s were warmer than in the 1990s: http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/1998changesannotated.gif?w=500&h=355v
Even regarding droughts, like http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008JCLI2722.1 notes, “globally, the mid-1950s showed the highest drought activity and the mid-1970s to mid-1980s the lowest activity.” (By continent, an illustration is at http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/drought_2010_fig3.GIF ).
Such is part of the same pattern as CAGW movement claims on other topics; for example, in reality, global hurricane frequency has not been rising in recent decades, like data from Dr. Maue of Florida State University illustrates at http://policlimate.com/tropical/global_major_freq.png (while U.S. landfall data back to the 1850s with no rise trend can be seen at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml ).
For temperature, a real picture of the past few thousand years is shown in the following, different from the ice age graphs people are used to seeing because it is not so zoomed out to million-year scale (which means the lag time of centuries for oceans thousands of meters deep to warm to their depths, for warming to cause CO2 increase afterwards, is not a mere pixel or overlapping line on a graph):
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
The extreme lack of correlation between CO2 and temperature in the graph above comes from NOAA data, with the original sources being:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
and
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/epica_domec/edc-co2.txt
Related:
“Does CO2 correlate with temperature history? – A look at multiple timescales”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/11/does-co2-correlate-with-temperature-history-a-look-at-multiple-timescales-in-the-context-of-the-shakun-et-al-paper/
Rattus Norvegicus: “Anthony, if you read the paper you wouldn’t look like such a fool.”
I could give a rats tail what the paper says, when the associated P.R. piece is written as to mislead the public as to what the paper says.
Hansen: “We’re asserting that this is causally connected to global warming, and in this paper we present the scientific evidence for that.”
Only in this post-scientific world would an “asserting” of “causally connected” be allowed to stand, let alone be published in J.P. of National Academy of Sciences.
As for N.A.S.A.’s Hansen, I no longer trust N.A.S.A. in that a reputable organization, especially one funded by we Taxpayers, would have at least shuffled a political activist hack to a back room in middle of nowhere. If not terminated him or her; rather than allowing said person to continue to be their face and abuse their past-reputation.
Apologies to team members of Spirit, Opportunity, & Curiosity, but N.A.S.A.’s mismanagement is overshadowing your excellent work.