The Chief Climate Alarmist by Gråulf

I woke up to 4 inches of snow on the ground this morning so it was fitting that I opened the morning newspaper to an article praising James Hansen. Hansen is the chief climate scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and is the man who originally raised the alarm on global warming in 1988 in an appearance before congress. He is also the keeper of the most often cited climate data, and he is the author of the infamous “Hockey Stick” graph All Gore used in his movie. Then, back in January, Hansen wrote an open letter to Obama, warning him that human activity is causing greenhouse gas levels to rise so rapidly that his models suggests a runaway greenhouse effect, ultimately resulting in the loss of all life on the planet, unless Obama can stop the use of coal during the next 8 years.

There are problems with Hansen’s hockey stick graph. To demonstrate his assertion, that current global temperatures are hotter and more sudden than temperature fluctuations in the past, he minimizes the Medieval Warm period and the subsequent Little Ice Age. No one knows for sure where Hansen got his data, since he has refused to reveal his methodology, but speculation is that he used tree ring data. That is problematic, since the size of tree rings can vary due to many factors, such as precipitation, temperature, and forest density, and therefore needs to be compared to other factors to be of any use. The very fact that Hansen has not revealed his methodology should invalidate his hockey stick graph, because that makes it impossible to duplicate his research. Then a team of Canadian mathematicians discovered that Hansen made mistakes when he entered his date into his climate model, so that the outcome would always result in a “hockey stick” no matter what data was entered. Despite the problems with the hockey stick, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continues to use it.

One of the key tenets of the global warming alarmists is that nine of the ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1995, and the warmest year on record was 1998. A scientist by the name of Stephen McIntyre recently notified NASA that there were errors in their temperature records, and NASA quietly corrected their date to show that actually four of the hottest years on record occurred in the 1930’s, and the hottest year on record was in 1934. No one knows if the temperature records were deliberately tampered with, but the correction to the data has not changed the claim by global warming alarmists that this decade is the warmest on record. An interesting aside to the discussion about temperature records is some research done by retired TV meteorologist Anthony Watts. The U.S. Weather Service specified in 1889 that the shelters for weather instruments had to be whitewashed. Then, in the late 1970s the Weather Service changed that specification to white latex paint. Mr. Watts built three instrument shelters. One was white washed, one painted with white latex paint, and the third was left unpainted. He measured temperatures for several months, but typical among his results was one day in August when he found that the instruments in the unpainted shelter registered a maximum daytime temperature of 98.47 degrees, the instruments in the latex painted shelter showed 97.74 degrees, and the whitewashed shelter measured 96.94 degrees. In short, the change from white wash to latex paint caused almost a one-degree increase in the average temperature of the U.S.

James Hansen was one of the main authors of the IPCC’s report on global warming, but he disagrees with the reports estimate that the sea level rise will be about 0.7 meter by 2100. This, Hansen thinks, was a serious error. He argues there is a major risk that sea levels will raise by several meters this century, and that sea levels have been raising rapidly during the last 20 years. That should be easily checked against recorded data, but it is not that simple. Most oceanographers believe that sea levels are rising at about seven inches per century, and continue to do so. However, tide gauges in the US show considerable variation because some land areas are rising and some are sinking. For example, over the past 100 years, the rate of sea level rise varies from about an increase of 0.36 inches (9.1 mm) per year along the Louisiana Coast (due to land sinking), to a drop of a few inches per decade in parts of Alaska, where the land is rising. Further adding to the confusion is the fact that sea levels are not level. There are steady currents in the ocean, driven by winds and atmospheric heating and cooling, which give rise to differences in sea level around the world. For example, the Atlantic Ocean north of the Gulf Stream is about 1 meter lower than further south, and the Atlantic as a whole is about 40 cm lower than the Pacific. There is even a sea level difference of about 20 cm across the Panama Canal.

What I really dislike about James Hansen is his relentless and vicious attacks on anyone who disagree with his climate models. Hansen has helped build global warming into a trillion dollar industry, and he is quite willing to do whatever it takes to destroy those he consider enemies. That includes personal attacks, pressuring publishers to reject research papers that disagree with his conclusions, and even getting people fired when they disagree with him. One of those who felt his wrath was Syun-Ichi Akasofu, of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska. Akasofu points out that the connection between CO2 and global warming has not been proven, and suggests that a raise in global temperature of one degree Fahrenheit in the past 100 years is not alarming, and that most of that raise in temperature is due to the Earth recovering from the “Little Ice Age.” Other scientists vilified by Hansen include Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas from the Harvard-Smithsonian center for Astrophysics. When their paper, proving that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were climatic anomalies felt worldwide was published, Hansen got the editor of Climate Science fired. Finally, Hansen’s relentless attacks on William Gray, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, lost the professor his grant for predicting the number and severity of hurricanes in the Atlantic. William Gray had the temerity to point out that there were more named hurricanes during the first half of the 20th century than in the second half.

Gråulf.