Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
While doing some research for my upcoming book, I was rummaging through early papers on sea level data at the CU Sea Level Library. I found there the 1982 paper Global Sea Level Trend in the Past Century by Gornitz, Lebedeff and Hansen, all of NASA’s GISS. I enjoyed a brief mention of past global temperature it contained and thought you might enjoy it and another statement, too.
While presenting the typical alarmist conjecture about the possible collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, they made a statement that is atypical of alarmists:
A key application of the sea level trend concerns the potential destruction of the marine West Antarctic ice sheet (1). It can be argued that the ice sheet is not close to disintegration, because it survived the Altithermal ( ~ 5000 years ago) when the global mean temperature was perhaps 1 deg C warmer than today.
“Altithermal” is another term for the Holocene Climate Optimum.
Global surface temperature data produced by GISS indicate global surfaces have warmed since 1982, and, of course, the weasel-word “perhaps” means it may have been warmer or cooler during the Holocene Climate Optimum than the claimed 1 deg C. But I found it amusing that Hansen and others were noting in 1982 that global surface temperatures may have been warmer in the past…without the assistance of human emissions of CO2.
After the presented quote, Gornitz, Lebedeff and Hansen then go on to explain how the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is still possible, but they hedged their bets with a plethora of weasel-words…and the following statement:
We should emphasize that we have no evidence for such a process.
Not much has changed over the past 30+ years from the alarmist wing of climate science: lots of weasel-words and lots of imaginative speculations, which are not even supported by their climate models…models of a planet that bear no relationship to Earth.
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when the global mean temperature was perhaps 1 deg C warmer than today….
====
Was that before or after adjustments
Take a guess after reading what alarmists say now. Somehow a full degree of warming during the Medieval Warm period has disappeared since 1982. NewScientist now considers it to be cooler than today. Apparently, Hansen was promoting a “myth” back in 1982. Notice also how they refer to the “medieval warm period” as just the “medieval period” in this paragraph:
Latitude — good one — Eugene WR Gallun
Thanks, Bob. This was a good find.
But surely, if one writes a modeling program, and then uses its results as data for a re-run, the positive feedback will produce catastrophic results,
Ya gotta hand to Hansen; he knew a good gravy train to latch onto when he saw it.
So alarmists like Hansen have been predicting the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet for at least 33 years. How much longer do we allow them to cry wolf before we stop listening to them?
1948 – Scientists Wanted To Nuke Antarctica To Speed Up Melting
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/1948-scientists-wanted-to-nuke-antarctica-to-speed-up-melting/
My favorite Nuke was Hardtack Teak. The disturbance it caused in The Force led to my birth four days later.
http://spaceplasma.tumblr.com/post/65544501403/the-debris-fireball-and-aurora-created-by-the
Today obliquity is less then it was around 8000 BC , more favorable for glaciation ,as well as Precession being much more favorable for glaciation. .
During the period around the time of 8000 BC , the N.H. experienced Perihelion during the summer less favorable for glaciation in contrast to today when the N.H. experiences Aphelion during the summer.
Based solely on Milankovitch Cycles the earth is much more favorable today for glaciation as opposed to 8000 BC.
Orbit eccentricity if taken into account being more or less neutral during that time span 8000 BC- 2000 AD.
What is interesting is from the Holocene Optimum through today each warm period, those being the Minoan, Roman, Medieval, and the Modern Warm Period just recently, has tended to be cooler then the one previous to the most recent one.
This is confirmed by the data this article is showing.
I think the slow moving cycles such as Land /Ocean Arrangements, Milankovitch Cycles , to name two are in a gradual cooling trend with solar variability secondary and primary effects being superimposed upon this gradual cooling cycle. PDO,AMO,ENSO and volcanic activity being superimposed upon all of this to give a further refinement of the temperature trends, which I think might be linked to earth’s LOD, the spin rate of the earth.
Future, random events( terrestrial/extra terrestrial ) must always be taken into some consideration which would be superimposed upon the climate cycle due to all of the items I mentioned in the above.
The upshot being(the random element aside) the climate is heading to a potentially very cold period if solar variability continues to decline along with the geo-magnetic field of the earth . This next cold period has a chance to at least equal Little Ice Age conditions if not exceed them in my opinion.
Supporting article to follow.
Yes, Salvatore. Thanks for pointing this out.
Unfortunately, it seems like the only way to calm the global warming alarmists is a drop in global temperatures, which is looming.
Every way you look at it we loose.
@SDP. Earth is probably cooling because the NH is about 9 kyr after the last NH obliquity precession max. That will run for another ~2 kyr. But other orbital cycles, especially the ~100 kyr eccentricity one, are near a minimum. So Earth is not likely entering a significant glacial period.
When the NH experiences a TOA insolation min (almost now), the SH experiences a TOA insolation max. Thus, issues of energy storage and transfer via ocean currents, cloud albedo, and land surface albedo changes also play important roles in whether a glacial period is entered.
I think one has to think a little outside of the box Donb.
One other point is the SH. and N.H. are not created equally when it comes to their response to Milankovitch Cycles.
The S.H. is set up as such , that it does not really matter if summer time insolation increases or decreases because the area of land that is entrenched in snow/ice is going to remain essentially the same regardless of summer time insolation changes , in contrast to the N.H. where a difference in summer time insolation can cause a significant difference in the land area covered by snow/ice, thus effecting the albedo of the entire planet.
S.H. albedo remaining steady while N.H. albedo increasing due to favorable Milankovich Cycles.
In addition LOD have to be considered in the scheme of climate change which can be shown to be tied to geological activity and solar activity in that length of day decreases when geological activity is high /solar low which corresponds to a decrease in temperature and a more meridional atmospheric circulation the meridional atmospheric circulation being associated with lower global temperatures.
Data forthcoming next post.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/Y2787E/y2787e03.htm
Good info and data to back it up with on ACI/LOD.
This is from a study that contends TSI for the earth as a whole is less when the orbit is more circular.
Interesting.
I also said the earth is entering a cooling period not necessarily a glacial period.
Rather than just causing a seasonal difference, changes in eccentricity also have an effect on the total amount of solar radiation (TSI) arriving at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere (TOA) on much longer timescales. This is because during periods when eccentricity is higher, the Earth takes longer to transit the half of its orbit where it is further from the Sun than it does to transit the half of its orbit where it is closer to the sun. This is Keplers second law: the motion of the orbiting body sweeps out equal areas in equal times. So when the orbiting body is further from the Sun, the longer radius creating a bigger area per angular segment is compensated for by the fact the Earth travels along the orbital path bounding that segment more slowly than when it is closer to the Sun. The upshot of this is that TSI averaged over a year is going to be less than when the orbit is more circular.
@SDP: Yes, the NH & SH are quite different, and their different responses to cooling is probably why glacial cycles correlate with significantly decreased TOA insolation in the NH and not the SH. Thus, orbital cycles may act as initiators of glaciation, but cannot be the full explanation. This is what I was saying above.
http://iceagenow.info/2015/06/now-almost-the-coldest-in-8000-years/
Analysis to determine the cause of climate change is not complex:
1. Establish a least-biased assessment of all reported measured average global temperatures (AGT).
2. From examination of historical AGT and historical solar cycles, form the hypothesis that a relation exists between sunspot numbers and the planet warming and cooling.
3. From examination of historical AGT and other information, determine that ocean cycles contribute to AGT and the effect of ALL ocean cycles on AGT can be approximated by a saw-tooth function with period 64 years and amplitude of approximately ±1//5 K (to be determined more precisely later).
4. Apply the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy) to obtain an equation relating the historical measurements. Incorporate coefficients on each term in the equation to facilitate optimizing the equation to best match the calculated temperature anomalies to the measured temperature anomalies.
5. Apply the mathematics of coefficient of determination, R2, to compare the calculated temperature anomalies to historical measured temperature anomalies.
6. Adjust the coefficients in the equation alternately and repeatedly to obtain the absolute maximum R2. This results in R2 greater than 0.90 irrespective of whether the influence of CO2 is included or not and an equation which predicts a future down trend in average global temperatures.
7. After Schwartz (2007) and other considerations, rapid (year-to-year) variations in reported average temperatures contain substantial random uncertainty as to the true energy content of the planet. This uncertainty is substantially removed by taking a running average of reported measurements. A 5-year running average increases R2 to greater than 0.97 leaving less than 3% to explain all factors not explicitly considered such as volcanos, aerosols, measurement errors, noncondensing greenhouse gases (the average sunspot number is a proxy accounting for average water vapor, the sunspot number anomaly is a proxy which accounts for cloud variations), difference from assumed wave form of ocean cycles, ice change, etc.
This analysis, along with independent proof that CO2 has no effect on average global temperature (and therefore no effect on climate) is at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com .
It’s often said that ‘correlation is not causation.’ But then, it isn’t often acknowledged that a lack of correlation is not a lack of causation. It may sound counterintuitive or even absurd. But since this is not an experimental discipline — but a purely observational one — we cannot simply find a lack of current correlation, state ‘ceteris paribus there is no correlation therefore there is no causation.’ We can state that if there is causation that we are missing, it is necessarily contingent on factors not observed. This is the same basic issue with ‘correlation is not causation.’ It may be causal, contingently causal, a spurious correlation, or co-caused by something else.
To even establish that the correlation itself is valid requires that we manipulate that hypothesized cause experimentally and watch the consequence vary with it — both up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards. But again, this is a purely observational matter in climate. And we simply have not watched CO2 vary in both directions in the modern era. And we can not control that, unless we engage in human testing by shutting down energy production. Putting aside the ethical matter of informed consent necessary for human experimentation; there is the larger ethical issue of mass death that will occur by consequence of such an experiment.
But it can be shown, by our ‘best’ understandings and not necessarily the ‘correct’ ones, that CO2 has been higher and lower. That temps have been higher and lower. That CO2 has lagged temp; and unless I’m confused, has led temp. The current notion of AGW then would seem to be a case of Special Pleading: That it’s different this time.
But it is different this time. Ignoring CO2 for the moment, anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a proxy for energy production: The conversion of energy locked in the Earth’s chemicals back into heat. And it is hardly illogical or unreasonable to assume ‘ceteris paribus’ that this means that heat generation at the surface will increase heat at the surface locally. Globally is a matter of dealing with all the fiddly bits that we have yet to characterize in any proper sense. eg. Eschenbach’s Cloud Thermostat. That is, we neither know the limits, variances, or hysteresis in the concept.
But if we were to get the vapors over this obviously reasonable thing, then we’d need to get the vapors over bio-fuels as well. An existing tree that locks away down-welling radiation in its structure will not participate in any increased temps unless we go burn it somewhere. And this will remain true regardless of any biological carbon-cycle.
But do have a care when dealing with such proofs that you aren’t afoul of the same manner of fallacy that has generated and popularized this scientific doomsday cult. (Yes, cult. No astrophysicist gets the vapors over the heat-death of the universe.)
The near perfect correlation with the up-and-down trends of calculated vs. measured average global temperature anomalies is certainly indicative but the possibly more powerful discovery is that the correlation is not significantly changed irrespective of whether the influence of CO2 is considered or not. The comparison is documented in Table 1.
As to the proof that CO2 has no effect on climate, a bit depends on what is meant by “modern era”. It appears that many do not grasp that temperature changes as a transient in response to a forcing change. Vostok and other ice core data do not show a transient response. This proves that CO2 is not a forcing. A slightly more complex assessment demonstrates that CO2 had nothing to do with the warm up since the depths of the LIA. This is corroborated by estimates of CO2 level and average global temperature over the entire Phanerozoic eon.
Proof that CO2 has no effect on temperature proves that the added CO2 from burning fossil fuels has no effect on average global temperature.
Makes me wonder if wonder if anyone has put a declining trend of CO2 into the models. Just by taking the CO2 level from 1900 until now and put them into the model in reversed order from now on and forward in time. I wonder what that test would reveal.
“lack of correlation is not a lack of causation”
I guess that would only be the case if there are influencing variables which are not properly known and included in the search for correlation – or if the functional relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variable is of another kind than what is applied when searching for correlation. Hence – lack of correlation means that you do not have a proper understanding of the functional relationship and the influencing parameters / variables. So lack of correlation does not prove that there is no causation, but it falsifies a claim about having properly understood the complex.
For 5,000 years, humans agreed that warmer global temperatures were good and colder global temperatures were bad for life on this planet. The evidence for this assumption was powerful and everywhere.
Things that contributed to plants growing bigger and faster………… a no brainer positive.
To hell with the benefits to life of this modest warming and the beneficial atmospheric fertilization from increasing CO2 to plants.
Now we have smart humans with computers and mathematical equations that represent the physics of CO2 that have set the ideal temperature of the planet as being the temperature that the planet was at 100 years ago and the ideal amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, as the amount of CO2 that was in the atmosphere 100 years ago.
Warmer=bad
CO2=pollution
Sunshine +H2O + CO2 + Minerals = O2 +Sugars(food)
is now:
Sunshine +H2O + Pollution + Minerals =O2 +Sugars(food)
Mike, as someone said on another thread recently:
“To err is human; To really f**k up you need a computer”.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/crux-of-a-core3.html
The true picture of co2 versus temp. and the global temp trend last 10,000 years or so..
Climate Science is in it’s infancy.
Now for some comparative verbal wandering.
Genetics as a science is less than 100 years old. Darwin wrote “Origin of the Species” over 150 years ago using the scientific method and observation without any knowledge of genetics. Hotly debated even today. Mendel published his research on genetics in the late 1860’s but it was rejected and rediscovered in 1900. Genes were discovered a mere 100 years ago in 1915.
“In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.” Chromosomes.
We have only started on figuring out our own genetic make up.
Climate Science will evolve and go down a lot more dead ends before we develop better understanding, assuming we ever do. The precautionary principle is the biggest issue as it will easily be used for useless anti-development activities that will cause more harm than good.
Sadly, it is clear we know very little for sure about how the aggregate of climate systems work. Heck, even weather forecasts are only moderately successful. They are useful, but to be used with caution. Systems get stalled, the move faster than predicted, they get deflected. I read the weather report when deciding to do outside, then I look at the radar, and then in the morning I look at the sky and make my final decision. The great thing about weather forecasts is that we know why we got them wrong. We have been doing good weather forecasts for 75 years, they were very important in picking D-Day in 1944.
Can’t do that with climate. Darwin took 30 years to write and document his ideas in “The Origin of the Species. Now there is a huge “RUSH TO PUBLISH” that results in publishing a lot of material that has not been fully reviewed. Driven by money, grants and (ego?). Sometimes I think the information discussions on this blog and the disagreements on causes are some to the best information I see. The details and mathematics are beyond my simple long forgotten engineering but the discussions in this forum, for and against are great.
This site is a great site for reviewing new information and correlation but it is likely to be many years before we (Royal We as in Humans) come close to getting all the inputs that affect climate in major ways. Some say we have them now, (ENSO, PDO, AMO, UHI, Land changes, the Sun, Clouds, Cosmic Rays, Albedo,Global Ocean Overturning, Orbital mechanics, Volcanoes, Asteroids, Comets; Radiation balances; and oh yeah that little input, CO2) but it appears to be hotly debated as to which inputs have the most influence.
Someday, someone will write some new code from scratch rather than to try to fix the error prone patchwork we now have. They will incorporate many of these features and they may get something close depending on just how chaotic the climate really is; and if they can get computers not to run off in crazy uncontrolled directions pumping out GIGO while thinking the computer is putting out good data. In the old days, we checked computer output with slide rules to ensure we at least had the order of magnitude right. (That tells you how old I am, our engineering magazine was called “Slipstick”.) We built small checkable subroutines. Someday, someone will get close, but right now, I think this site is as good as any in discussions of climate, including those who think the debate is settled. For them, I suggest they take a look in the review mirror. Climate always changes and everything adapts. Read Darwin. You don’t need a mult-trillion dollar computer to figure out that climate will always change and likely in ways we don’t currently expect. (Law of unintended consequences)
Who knew two brown eyed people could have blue eyed children. It’s just a lack of melanin. Medelian genetics don’t apply as eye colour has many genes affecting it.
Who knew that human Chimeras actually exist with multiple blood types, multiple DNA etc, :
“Humans[edit]
The Dutch sprinter Foekje Dillema was expelled from the 1950 national team after she refused a mandatory sex test in July 1950; later investigations revealed a Y-chromosome in her body cells, and the analysis showed that she probably was a 46,XX/46,XY mosaic female.[13]
In 1953 a human chimera was reported in the British Medical Journal. A woman was found to have blood containing two different blood types. Apparently this resulted from her twin brother’s cells living in her body.[14] More recently, a study found that such blood group chimerism is not rare.[15]
Another report of a human chimera was published in 1998, where a male human had some partially developed female organs due to chimerism. He had been conceived by in-vitro fertilization.[3]
In 2002, Lydia Fairchild was denied public assistance in Washington state when DNA evidence showed that she was not related to her children. A lawyer for the prosecution heard of a human chimera in New England, Karen Keegan, and suggested the possibility to the defence, who were able to show that Fairchild, too, was a chimera with two sets of DNA.[16]” Cut from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)
A tincture of time will help us figure climate out but for now, we are just at the beginning. Take everything with a grain of salt and dial back the hormones.
“Everything will be alright in the end, and if it isn’t alright, it isn’t the end.”
(Written on a cool, rainy morning in the house thinking about going out to rebuild a saddle after lunch, a great time for philosophying about climate – and pastures that were drought stressed a week ago; and green and lush today.)
Have a good day.
And who knew that Velociraptors may have been feathered? Won’t see that in Jurassic Park, but you will see it in “The Croods”. Odd. Oh, and science has been re-invigorating dormant genes in chickens and bringing back dinosaur characteristics.
http://www.wired.com/2011/09/ff_chickensaurus/
http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/typesofdinosaurs/ss/10-Facts-About-Velociraptor.htm
Many earlier papers from Hansen and his team were reasonably objective science?
Hansen et 2002 stated quite clearly that models can be made to produce a wide range of sensitivities. by changing these parameters:
http://apollo.eas.gatech.edu/yhw/publications/hansen_etal_2002.pdf
That paper also explains in detail that volcanic forcing is largely determined by assumptions about the of aerosol size distribution. It is a detailed and thorough paper that I’ve found informative.
So sensitivity is an emergent property but the value that emerges is determined to a significant degree by the speculative parameter values that are fed in. Those familiar with the models could then choose to do runs that result in higher or lower sensitivities within the same model and different models also produce different sensitivities. This was examined in some detail in Forster and Gregory 2013
The graph below: fig 3b from Marotzke & Forster 2015 shows results from their 62y trend analysis. There is a clear bifurcation into two groups at the end of the graph. This pertains to the most recent 62y periods.
This bifurcation does indeed relate to groups of high and low sensitivity models, as determined by F&G2013
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=1315
Also Lacis et al 1993 calculates a much higher volcanic forcing directly from basic phyiscs and observations. Higher forcing implies lower climate sentivitity. They later reduced the volcanic forcing in an attempt to reconcile model output ( based on high sensitivity to CO2 ).
You need high volcanic sensitivity to counter high CO2 sensitivity. The values they found by proper science did not fit the this high sensitivity to CO2 that they were not prepared to reconsider.
This worked OK until around 2000 AD. Since there have been not major eruptions since Mt Pinatubo in 1991, this little game of numbers falls apart. The high sensitivity hypothesis does not fit the data.
Conclusion we must now CHANGE THE DATA. Entre Karl et al. …..
Thanks for the link to the paper:
Climate forcings in Goddard Institute for Space Studies SI2000 simulations J. Hansen et all
http://apollo.eas.gatech.edu/yhw/publications/hansen_etal_2002.pdf
I find the following section immensely telling about climate modeling:
“The bottom line is that, although there has been some narrowing of the range of climate sensitivities that emerge from realistic models [Del Genio and Wolf, 2000], models still can be made to yield a wide range of sensitivities by altering model parameterizations. We suggest that the best constraint on actual climate sensitivity is provided by pale- oclimate data that imply a sensitivity 3 ± 1°C for 2 CO2 [Hansen et al., 1984, 1993, 1997b; Hoffert and Covey, 1992]. It is satisfying that the a priori sensitivity of the SI2000 model comes out near the middle of the empirical range of 2 – 4°C for 2 CO2. However, for the sake of interpreting observed climate change and predicting future change it is appropriate to consider climate sensitivity as an uncertain parameter that may, in fact, be anywhere within that range.
[78] Therefore we include the possibility of altering the model’s climate sensitivity. We do this by adjusting an arbitrary cloud feedback as defined in the appendix of Hansen et al. [1997a]. Specifically, the cloud cover is multiplied by the factor 1 + cT, where T, computed every time step, is the deviation of the global mean surface air temperature from the long-term mean in the model control run at the same point in the seasonal cycle and c is an empirical constant. For the SI2000 second-order model we take c = 0.04 and 0.01 to obtain climate sensitivities of 2°C and 4°C for 2 CO2.”
Which also illustrates the point made by Roy Spencer in his book The great warming blunder:
“The insistence of the IPCC and the scientific “consensus” that clouds cannot cause climate variations continues to astound me. All atmospheric scientists know that clouds are controlled by a multitude of factors; my position is that causation between clouds and temperature flows in bot directions. In contrast, the IPCC´s position is that clouds can only change in response to temperature change (temperature cause clouds). But neglecting causation in the opposite direction (clouds cause temperature) can lead to large errors in our understanding of how and why the climate system changes, as well as in our diagnosis of how sensitive the climate system is to human influences.”
And no doubt that Roy Spencer is right about his claim about IPCC´s position.
I was looking for H2O, water vapor and clouds under natural forcing in Assessment Report 5, but could not find it. The only factors under natural forcing was solar irradiance, volcanic aerosols. And a conclusion; “There is very high confidence that industrial era natural forcing is a small fraction of the anthropogenic forcing except for brief periods following large volcanic eruptions.”
(The IPCC report is voluminous but it is searchable).
There are so many old statements and claims made by the team.
Their countless assertions are everywhere and well chronicled for history to mock.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=181
Hurricanes and Global Warming – Is There a Connection?
“……..It has been asserted (for example, by the NOAA National Hurricane Center) that the recent upturn in hurricane activity is due to a natural cycle, e.g. the so-called Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (“AMO”). The new results by Emanuel (Fig. 2) argue against this hypothesis being the sole explanation: the recent increase in SST (at least for September as shown in the Figure) is well outside the range of any past oscillations. Emanuel therefore concludes in his paper that “the large upswing in the last decade is unprecedented, and probably reflects the effect of global warming.” However, caution is always warranted with very new scientific results until they have been thoroughly discussed by the community and either supported or challenged by further analyses. Previous analysis of the AMO and natural oscillation modes in the Atlantic (Delworth and Mann, 2000; Kerr, 2000) suggest that the amplitude of natural SST variations averaged over the tropics is about 0.1-0.2 ºC, so a swing from the coldest to warmest phase could explain up to ~0.4 ºC warming.
What about the alternative hypothesis: the contribution of anthropogenic greenhouse gases to tropical SST warming? How strong do we expect this to be? One way to estimate this is to use climate models.”
And on and on it goes. The AGW theory has been simply irresistible for the environmentalists who have found it so useful and lucrative.
But CO2 is higher now and temperatures aren’t so he was wrong then but he’s right now…uh…perhaps, maybe? 😎
Actually, quite a bit has changed on the AGW front since 1982. While Hansen and his ilk used to hedge their wild speculations back then, the temperature rise to the 1998 peak and the discovery that (in the words of the contemporary TV philosopher Andre Agassi) “image is everything” has emboldened them to manipulate data grossly, devise ad hoc analysis methods and blithely continue to sell the alarmist AGW narrative. Total miscomprehensions, such that the “marine ice sheet” in West Antarctica has an effect upon global sea levels, don’t trouble them in the slightest.
I suppose for “flukes” like such inconvenient long-ago statements, in Europe they want to force the “Right to be Forgotten” on the rest of the world, so people can lie whatever they want today, even if they contradict themselves 20 years ago, or viceversa, and very few would nottice TODAY. No wonder that travesty is viewed as an assault on the right to public information.
What Hansen did or did not say will soon be irrelevant. Significant unequivocal scary global cooling will fundamentally change the climate wars. What we are currently observing has happened again and again and again and again and so on. The cycles of abrupt climate change in the paleo record occurred due to a physical reason, there are no magic wands. The earth’s climate change cyclically in the past in response to a massive forcing change.
High latitude regions of the planet have started to cool. The Atlantic ocean has cooled. There is observational evidence that what was inhibiting the cooling in the Pacific ocean is ending. The warming high latitude Pacific ocean warming and the current El Niño will anomalously end.
http://beta.dmi.dk/uploads/tx_dmidatastore/webservice/e/n/i/b/m/Melt_combine.png
The discovery of cyclic rapid climate change events that correlate with solar cycle changes.
‘The Ice Chronicles The Quest to Understand Global Climate’ Change by Paul Mayewski and Frank White
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003GL017115.shtml
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2015/anomnight.6.11.2015.gif
I am not sure what the article is complaining about. The global average temperature 5,000 years ago may have been 1C greater than today. Hansen is proposing a counter-argument to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsing now.
Going into the future, who know? The situation may be different after a 2C global average temperature increase for example.
“Against Stupidity, The Gods Themselves and Contend In Vain” Isaac Asimov