Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach [See Update At End]
Well, Dr. James Hansen, the man who invented the global warming scam and our favorite failed serial doomcaster, recently addressed the cratering of a 30-year prediction he made in 1988.
Back then, he said the globe would warm up by one full degree by 2018 under the “business as usual” rubric … not. Here’s the story as written up in “Spin” magazine in 1988.
Since then we’ve had a continued expansion of fossil fuel use, as in his most alarmist scenario. Given that amount of CO2 emissions, his prediction was that by now, temperatures would have gone up by 1°C (note that the Spin article, as pointed out by Mosh and Tamino among others, is in error).
Obviously, nothing like that has happened. Despite the fact that millions of folks believed his prediction in 1988 and continue to listen to him today, the UAH MSU satellite data says that since 1988 it’s warmed by … well … about a third of a degree. Not one degree. A third of a degree. He was wrong by a factor of 3. So obviously, he needs an excuse for this failure.
Here’s the back story to Hansen’s excuse, published last week under the headline “Climate Scientists Move Global Meltdown from 2018 to 2168” …
And just last week [Hansen] addressed the prospect of further temperature increases during an interview with New York magazine. Keep in mind that Hansen predicted in a greenhouse model that there would be “an increase of from two to five degrees Fahrenheit” in global temperatures by 2018, as quoted from December 1988 edition of Spin magazine.
“I don’t think we’re going to get four or five degrees this century, because we get a cooling effect from the melting ice,” he said last week. “But the biggest effect will be that melting ice. In my opinion that’s the big thing – sea-level rise – because we have such a large fraction of people on coastlines, more than half of the large cities in the world are on coastlines.” [Hansen]
Amazing. He’s kicked the old threat of global warming under the bus. Now, it’s morphed into “Global warming won’t cause increased temperature because it just melts the ice but then the sea levels will rise and WE’RE ALL STILL DOOMED!” Once an alarmist, always an alarmist, I guess.
Now, that claim about ice melting had my numeric legend detector ringing like a fire alarm in a cheap whorehouse. It didn’t make any sense that melting that amount of ice would cool us that much, the amount seemed far too small. So I decided to see if that made sense. Sea ice is basically unchanged, so how much land ice is melting? The analysis of GRACE satellite puts it at 500 billion (500e+9) tonnes of ice per year.
Let me go through the calculations, so y’all can identify any mistakes I’ve made. I’m working in the computer language “R”, don’t worry about that, it will all be explained. Things following a hashmark (#) are comments. Lines that start with [1] are the computer output from that instruction above it. A semicolon separates two different instructions on one line.
In the first line below, I’ve created a variable called “latent” and set it to the latent heat of melting for water at zero salinity and zero pressure:. As the comment notes, this is in units of “J/kg”, which is joules per kilogram. Note that the second instruction, the one after the semicolon, “latent” by itself, just prints out the value of the variable “latent”.
> latent = gsw_latentheat_melting(0,0) ; latent # J/kg
[1] 333427
Next, I also create a variable named “ice_mass” and set it to the 500 billion tonnes of ice melted per year.
> ice_mass = 500e9 ; ice_mass # tonnes/year
[1] 5e+11
Then I start the actual calculations. The variable “heat_required” is the calculated number of joules required to melt 500 billion tonnes of ice in one year. As the comment notes, a factor of 1000 is needed to go from J/kg in “latent” to J/tonne to match the ice_mass.
> heat_required = ice_mass * latent * 1e3 ; heat_required # J/yr. “1e3” is to convert kg to tonnes
[1] 1.67e+20
Then I calculate the total joules in one year from a constant flux of one watt per square metre. Since a watt is one joule per second, this is the same as the number of seconds in a year. I use this value a lot so I already have a variable set to this, called “secsperyear”. If I didn’t, it’s just 365.24 days * 24 hrs/day * 60 mins/hr * 60 secs/min
> onewattperm2=secsperyear ; onewattperm2 #joules/m2/year. “secsperyear” is seconds per year
[1] 31556952
Next, I’ve converted joules per square meter per year into total global joules per year by multiplying by 5.11e14, the number of square metres of the earth’s surface.
> onewattglob=surfaream*onewattperm2 ; onewattglob #joules/yr/W. “surfaream” is global surface in square metres
[1] 1.61e+22
And finally, I am able to calculate the number of watts per square metre needed to melt 500 billion tonnes of ice per year … which turns out to be a flux of about one hundredth of a watt per square metre.
> watts_needed=heat_required/onewattglob ; watts_needed #W/m2
[1] 0.0103
Now, bear in mind that as a 24/7 global average, there is about half a kilowatt of total downwelling radiation at the surface (500 W/m2, made up of about 170 W/m2 of solar radiation plus about 330 W/m2 of longwave infrared radiation).
So the 0.01 W/m2 from the melting of the ice is equivalent to a 0.002% change in downwelling radiation. TWO THOUSANDTH OF ONE PERCENT CHANGE!
So what James Hansen is saying to excuse his laughable prediction is that reducing the 500 W/m2 of downwelling radiation to 499.99 W/m2 has reduced the earth’s temperature by two thirds of degrees in thirty years …
Say what? That’s so far off it’s not even wrong!
And even if the GRACE satellite ice-melt estimate is out by a factor of ten, the result is the same. The amount of cooling from even ten times that amount of ice per year would only give us a cooling of a tenth of a W/m2, so instead of 500 W/m2 at the surface, we’d have 499.9 W/m2 … be still, my beating heart …
So as my bad number detector indicated, Jame Hansen is just running his usual con job on the unscientific public. Make a bold prediction for thirty years out, wait twenty-nine years, wave your hands and prevaricate to explain the fact that the prediction has totally cratered … and then make a new prediction, that it’s still gonna happen … but not for a hundred and fifty years.
Hanson has learned something about making predictions, though … he won’t ever have to explain the probable cratering of his new prediction, no worries about that.
By the time that prediction is testable … he’ll be dead.
Maybe that’s some of the dying that Bill Nye the Skeevy Science Guy has been saying is needed to move climate science forwards …
Sometimes I think there will come a time when Jim Hansen runs out of excuses for his plethora of piss-poor predictions … but then I consider the distance from here to the nearest star, and the size of my gorgeous ex-fiancee’s heart, and the number of grains of sand on the beach, and I realize that there is no reason to think that the source of his excuses is any less limitless than those things …
Best of life to each of you,
w.
NOTE: As ever, I request that when you comment you QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS you are discussing, so we can all be clear on your subject.
[Update] As a number of folks pointed out, the Spin article was 100% wrong. Hansen’s model didn’t predict 3° warming by now … it predicted one degree warming. I’ve changed the post to reflect this.
And I was also 100% wrong, to believe a contemporary article rather than go back to the original paper. Mea maxima culpa, my thanks to Mosh, Tamino, and others who pointed it out.
However, this makes no difference to my point. His claims about melting ice are a wild exaggeration. The amount of cooling from the melting of ice is far, far too small to have the effect, whether by now or by the end of the century.
[Update II]
I note that Tamino has a post over at his website responding to my post here, entitled “Does Willis Eschenbach Have Any Honor”.
The answer from my perspective is obviously “Yes” … however, the oh-so-honorable Tamino banned me from his website about a decade ago, which means that he is mounting a cowardly attack on me in a place where I have no way to respond.
Here at WUWT, I made a mistake, which was picked up by Tamino. I corrected the mistake, and thanked him. And obviously, Tamino is free to comment on that here.
In response, Tammy has published a pusillanimous attack on me in a place where he has censored my voice entirely and I am unable to defend myself in even the slightest manner.
I leave it to the reader to determine which of us is honorable.
w.
CO2 heat is sneaky heat. Sometimes it warms the atmosphere, and other times it melts ice, cooling the atmosphere back down. It can even hide in the deep oceans, undetected, for years, lulling us into thinking it has “paused”. It causes both more powerful, and weaker storms, floods, droughts, and weird weather, giving weathermen fits.
It is Ninja Heat.
Not only the data are adjusted, the ‘predictions’ are too. I wonder when my date of birth is changed into something making me a bit younger.
The big ‘Scam’ by Hansen was when he changed the baseline global temperature from 15C to 14C. Link here.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/fourteen_is_the_new_fifteen.html#ixzz2DtU2RoaG
Even NASA admit that no one knows what the ‘Global Temperature’ actually is.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html
If you add the Hansen 1C to the ‘Global Temperature’ it looks to be cooling.
So with nobody actually knowing ‘Global Temperature’ I wonder why so many people are alarmed at a mythical (tenths of a degree) rise or fall of an unknown quantity.
Hi Willis,
# J/yr. “1e3” is to convert kg to tonnes
Should that not be tonnes to kg?
Of course. But the answer is correct, regardless. The real question is, “Why write a computer program to do a simple back-of-envelope calculation?”
I have pal reviewed the calculations – seems right to me 🙂
Energy required to melt ice: J/kg 333427
Mass of ice to melt each year: Tonnes/year 5E+11
Mass of ice to melt each year: kg/year 5E+14
Energy required to melt the ice per year: J/year 1,67E+20
Seconds per year: s/year 31556736
Effect required to melt the ice (J/s=Watt): W 5,28E+12
Area of the earth: m2/earth 5,11E+14
Effect per square meter: W/m2 1,03E−02
Analysis of New Zealand’s tide gauges shows an average trend of 1.3 mm/yr
Range (over average of 54 yr period) is -3.2 mm to 4.0 mm
We are tectonic country
M
Correction need:
From “2018 to 2168” is hundredandfifty years
Fixed, thanks.
w.
Absolutely critical value, a climate prediction time scale must be beyond the scope of anyone reading it still being alive.
I’ll start to prepare in about, oh………….149 years.
So Hansen taxed on …er… tacked on another 150 yrs to his prediction because the energy to melt ice is not available to heat the planet?
Has anyone told him that the energy required to boil the oceans would also not be available to heat the planet?
Maybe he’ll tack on another 150 yrs?
“Say what? That’s so far off it’s not even wrong!”
Given that the boiling oceans “hypothesis” calculations could be 10 orders of magnitude or greater than this, what would that be – not even wronger than wrong ??
You probably covered it all though with the technical terminology – “plethora of piss-poor predictions”.
I’m sure the climate scientist and the MSM will give him a break if they mention it at all.
After all, he was wrong for the right reasons.
I’ve been hearing the world is going to end soon since I was a teenager. Now that I’ve pushed past 60, I no longer give them more than a passing thought. Wisdom…
Regarding “Sea ice is basically unchanged”: Arctic Sea ice is near record low for this time of the year, and Antarctic Sea ice set a record low earlier this year and is currently below average for the time of year. As for how much this affects the calculations, I will have an easier time figuring that out after I get home from work.
Sea ice is moot, it is just floating due to the peculiar nature of hydrogen hydroxide crystallization. Sea ice does little to inhibit glacier calving into icebergs as these are pushed, not pulled into seas/fjords or bays. Ice has little tensile strength.
Sure, sea warming will increase volume but warmer air increases evaporation which is the primary cooling mode of sea water. Primary heating mode is radiation which we assume is constant. Net effect of GHG increase is still a wash with respect to sea temperature.
IMO dihydrogen monoxide not only sounds scarier, but is the correct chemical nomenclature, unless it’s hydrogen oxide. However, to each his own.
Scariest of all is hydrohydroxic acid.
Don’t matter where the ice is when all you’re doing is calculating the energy necessary to melt it.
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Your “record low” statement is simply ridiculous and preposterous.
Arctic sea ice shows no trend since 2007.
I checked how much sea ice melted. I have yet to get a hard and fast figure for tons lost since 1979, but the rate seems nearly an order of magnitude less than the land ice loss rate mentioned in the article of 500 gigatonnes per year.
A true polymath you are, Willis. Numerate wordsmiths are quite rare. Polar opposites of innumerate con artists aka politicians and grant swilling climatologists.
I agree that Hansen is feebly trying to cover up his lie with another lie, but I am not sure I agree with the calculation. Was this the energy needed to convert ice at 0C to water at 0C? If so what about the energy needed to bring that large mass of ice up to 0C for the much colder temperatures that much of it is at presently?
Willis is looking at sea ice which is assumed to be at sea water temperature. Or at least the boundary condition since thermal conductivity is nil. Plus specific heat of water is tiny compared to enthalpy of crystallization.
OK, Makes sense then.
And specific heat of ice is half that of water
Andrew, despite Keith’s claim, I’m looking at land ice. Here’s the thing.
The process of melting ice actually consumes energy, and as a result that energy isn’t available for warming the world. That’s why Hansen can use it for an excuse for the world not warming.
But when you warm up anything else, from ice blocks to tropical beaches, that will be counted when we measure how much the world has warmed. So that’s NOT the energy that Hansen is discussing.
Regards,
w.
Willis’ calculations for ice-melt are correct.
Beyond ice-melt, there is another 0.01 W/m2/year going into land warming and atmosphere warming.
And the big one is ocean warming which is still only 0.5 W/m2/year.
But that is very far off the GHG/Anthro forcing of 2.4 W/m2/year which is supposed to be there in 2017.
And there is supposed to another 0.8C X 2.0 W/m2 of feedbacks like water vapor and cloud reductions showing up.
4.0 W/m2/year should be traceable but only 0.523 W/m2/year is actually showing up.
So, what does Hansen say about how much extra the out-going IR radiation should be now. Did he say that OLR will increase by 3.47 W/m2/year as at 2017???
Well you cannot tell what the climate models predicted for this because they never told anyone what it should have been. If 75% of the forcings just end going back to space without doing anything, then we should have been told that from the very beginning.
Bill, is not the large 0.8C X 2.0 W/m2 of feedbacks like water vapor and cloud reductions admittedly (by the IPCC) of low confidence. (IMV they may even have the sign wrong with regard to W/V cloud feedbacks.)
I didn’t know that fire alarms in cheap whorehouses sounded differently from those in expensive whorehouses or any other structure, but am glad to know that whorehouses have fire alarms. I suppose that in Nevada, they’re required. But are there any cheap whorehouses in Nevada? That would be a surprise.
It’s loud ’cause the walls are so thin, I gotta assume … never paid a professional for it myself, I’m a fan of amateur sports …
w.
Me, either, but my Army buddies who contracted the clap in Mexican border cribs said that there weren’t even floor to ceiling walls, thick or thin, just cubicles. But maybe that’s too cheap of a whorehouse. No doubt you’re right that slightly less cheap ones do indeed have walls, however thin.
It’s nice Hansen has lived long enough to answer for the joke his forecasts turned out to be .
The scary global warming industry has at least learned that lesson so they rebranded to
“climate change ” and personal intimidation tactics and bullying . Deniers .. Slave trade , Tobacco ,
Settled science . Too late though , the public only sees aging chicken little promoters who’s ice free Arctic
pronouncements are proven lies . Too bad so many energy users have died from fuel poverty and financial hardship based on a con job .
Another factor (albeit minor) w/r/t sea level rise: As the oceans ‘rise’, the ocean surface area increases…meaning a constant net ‘inflow’ of meltwater/runoff/etc. will have a decreasing impact on the rate of rise over time. To maintain a steady rate of rise, the inflow would have to grow (to cover the additional surface area). I’m assuming the models account for this, but I have not examined them for this factor.
Theyouk, thanks. While this might have been an issue during the 20-fathom (30 m) sea level rise since the last glacial, it’s nowhere near large enough to affect the modern changes, which are on the order of 8″ (200 mm) per century.
Thanks,
w.
…. per Century ??
Yep. Thanks.
w.
Totally agree, Willis, and it’s certainly a non-factor when basing calculations/predictions on observed reality. The alarmists, on the other hand, ignore this consideration (well, they ignore nearly everything) when they publish predictions of 120 foot sea level rise by 2100. Really enjoy reading your pieces, btw!
Totally agree, Willis, and it’s certainly a non-factor when basing calculations/predictions on observed reality. The alarmists, on the other hand, ignore this consideration (well, they ignore nearly everything) when they publish predictions of 120 foot sea level rise by 2100. Really enjoy reading your pieces, btw!
I can’t help but notice that Hansen’s predictions are taken from a picture of a writeup from Spin magazine referring to a specific paper in the August 20, 1988 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research. It’s not clear how the predictions were made. Were they made from graphs of his scenarios? Did Hansen specifically say “two to five degrees Fahrenheit in the next thirty years”? Is it “unfair use” to quote paywalled journals?
Willis
Thanks for another interesting and thought provoking article. However, I think Hansen might perhaps have been thinking not of the heat required to melt ice but of an indirect effect of ice melting in high northern latitudes,.That is, a freshening in the North Atlantic and, in particular, the Laurentian Sea. Such a freshening would reduce the density of cold surface waters, cutting convective deep water formation and hence weakening the Atlantic meridional overturning circualtion (AMOC). A weakening of the AMOC would lead, at least in some climate models, to substantial cooling Northern Hemisphere cooling, with relatively little effect on SH temperatures. The GISS-E2-R model is particularly susceptible to this effect. Whether or not there is any prospect of it occurring in reality is another matter. I think not this century, at least. IPCC AR5 concluded with high confidence that in the 21st century it is “Very unlikely that the AMOC will undergo a rapid transition”.
The Polar ice melting? Not so fast! A Limerick.
The Icecaps we see at the poles
are growing again, who controls?
With less cold it snows more
makes more ice than before.
Just one of the clouds many roles.
With charts and explanation: https://lenbilen.com/2017/07/22/the-polar-ice-melting-not-so-fast-a-limerick/
You mean to say the “Settled Science” of climate doesn’t even include the latent heat of all the ice that melts?
Willis,
The Abstract for Hansen et. al 2011 in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics says: “Improving observations of ocean heat content show that Earth is absorbing more energy from the Sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar minimum. The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.58±0.15Wm−2 during the 6-yr period 2005–2010, confirms the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change.” So, even if we use that number your 0.01 W/m2 from the melting of the ice he is saying that reducing the planetary energy imbalance from 0.58Wm−2 to 0.57Wm−2 has reduced the potential warming of the earth’s temperature by over two and a half degrees in thirty years. YSM, He actually has a degree in physics?
Yeah, Joe, that’s his claim. It’s based on ocean heat data that (to my examination) is nowhere near accurate or complete enough to support that claim. Especially to two decimal places.
w.
Um, Mr Eschenbach, why don’t you actually look at the original paper, its graphs, and then at actual data before you blather away criticizing it. Your criticism is rather like a thirteen-year-old marking up a poster with crayons.
I think a retraction is in order, as do others. Of course Anthony Watts doesn’t ever retract either, apparently.
hypergeometric July 22, 2017 at 5:03 pm
What, did someone take a dump in your oatmeal this morning? You stupidly assume I haven’t read the original paper, and then based on that asinine assumption, you get all huffy about what you foolishly imagine are my failings.
If you’d done a decent google search (say my name and the name of the paper in question) you would have found my analysis of that very paper here.
I did it 11 years ago, I’d do it differently now, but there it is …
As for your request for a retraction, you can fold that until it’s all corners and place it gently up your fundamental orifice.
However, you’d do well to retract and apologize for your baseless nastiness, your pathetic lack of research, and your puerile assumptions … or not. Your reputation, your choice. Sadly, however, I often find that those hiding behind an alias are happy to attack but rarely apologize … they just pick another alias and move on to their next nastiness.
w.
niclewis July 22, 2017 at 2:15 pm
Nic, good to hear from you. However, that seems quite doubtful, makes the same bad number alarm go off.
First off, if we concentrate the cooling effect by assuming that the ice melts and flows into the Atlantic, the total volume is too small to cool much. Let me get some numbers … OK, here we go, NOAA data.
Area of the North Atlantic = 4.8e+12 square metres
Volume of ice: 500e+6 m3
Sea level rise: 500e+6 m3 / 4.8e+12 m2 * 1000 mm/m = 0.1 mm of additional water on the surface …
So even if it were to be concentrated by a factor of ten from that level, it’s still only 1 mm of additional water on the surface. I’m simply not believing that that will weaken the AMOC.
Finally, what he actually said was that “we get a cooling effect from the melting ice”. Maybe that’s code for the AMOC, but I’m not seeing it.
w.
“Volume of ice: 500e+6 m3”
In your head post it was “500 billion (500e+9) tonnes of ice per year”.
Thanks, Nick. My bad. In fact, I blew the other number as well. The area of the North Atlantic is ten times larger than the value I gave. Combining those new figures (if I haven’t made another mistake) says that if every ice cube that melted anywhere on the planet ended in the North Atlantic it would give us about a 1 cm layer of water … however, that’s not gonna happen.
A more reasonable assumption would be that perhaps the NA gets twice the ice you’d expect given its size. If that’s the case, the layer of water would be about 3 mm thick or so.
I’d still hold that a few mm of fresh water on top of the ocean isn’t going to change a damn thing. Remember that rain falls all across the North Atlantic, on the order of a meter a year or so depending on location.
I simply don’t see how adding another couple of mm of ice melt to that metre of rain is gonna slow the AMOC … what am I missing here?
w.
Nice post, WE. Had not caught Hansen’s blown prediction excuse. Obviously stupid. The other way to show how stupid is to simply observe there has been no acceleration in SLR since 1988 as his excuse would require.
There is a funny backstory to this Hansen saga. As late as 2012, Mann was defending Hansen 1988 in a presentation at Rutgers. Just two problems. 1. Mann overlaid land only when Hansen plainly referred to GisTemp ( land plus ocean). Land only is warmer, removing some of the discrepancy. 2. His comparison chart stopped in 2005, conveniently erasing 7 years of pause. Not even dodgy, just overtly doubly dishonest.
NASA global temp records did not include sea surface temps until 1995.
Hansen used observed land only temps in his 1988 paper – the reference to data therein is Hansen and Lebedef 1987. So, ‘GISTEMP’ at the time was land-only.
The current global data sets combine SSTs with land station data. Hansen’s model was of surface air temps land and ocean (not sea surface). He commented on this, referring to the 1988 model, in a 2006 paper.
“Temperature change from climate models, including that reported in 1988 (12), usually refers to temperature of surface air over both land and ocean. Surface air temperature change in a warming climate is slightly larger than the SST change (4), especially in regions of sea ice. Therefore, the best temperature observation for comparison with climate models probably falls between the meteorological station surface air analysis and the land–ocean temperature index.”
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2006/2006_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
The entire story about the atmosphere being a giant heater is fake anyway. The atmosphere is a cold bath conduction chilling the earth. It’s not a heater and adding more and more light blocking medium into a bath conduction chilling something doesn’t warm it anyway. Anybody who believe that can be made to happen is free to submit their evidence.
Is it your opinion that if all GHGs (including water vapour) were removed from the atmosphere, there would be no change in surface temperature?
As late as 2012, Mann was defending Hansen 1988 in a presentation at Rutgers… Mann overlaid land only when Hansen plainly referred to GisTemp ( land plus ocean). Land only is warmer, removing some of the discrepancy
Gavin Schmidt used GISTEMP land/ocean for his realclimate comparison in the same year. ‘GisTemp’ in 1988 was land-only (it didn’t yet have SST data), but the ’88 model was of air temperatures for the whole globe.
Willis, do you have a link to the article in “Spin” magazine in 1988?
It’s in the article just below the “Climate Scientists Move Global Meltdown from 2018 to 2168” … in the head post.
w.