Hansen's Global Crusade

James Lewis at the American Thinker takes NASA climate science modeler and Global Warming Crusader James Hansen to task. Hansen has been crying about the Executive branch of government trying to politicize science - exactly what Hansen has been doing by claiming that the seas will inundate the coasts under as much as 80 feet of water by the end of the century and that we positively must destroy our economy in order to deal with this issue.

"Dr. Hansen is a math modeler in the climate change game. How does he get Planetary Doom from a math model? It's very simple. You build in "positive feedback loops." That is, you look in the vast toolbox of climate variables to find just two factors that might reinforce each other in a catastrophic loop. For instance, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might create a greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, which causes more water evaporation, which causes more greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, etc., etc. Keep looping that, and you raise world temps by just one degree Centigrade, so the polar ice caps melt and the oceans rise, up to 25 meters. See? It's easy.

The big problem with this scenario is that the climate system almost certainly has negative feedback loops, i.e., causal connections that work to bring temperatures back to a rough baseline. The climate is likely to have self-regulation mechanisms in much the way that our bodies have self-regulating loops to stabilize our temperature, blood sugar, and a hundred other variables. Why does that seem likely? Because the world hasn't burned up or drowned in quite a long time, even though temperature variations and greenhouse gases have existed for many millions of years. Such factors as clouds and air particulates are believed to lower temperatures. With a little imagination we could easily build math models for self-regulating loops that would tend to stabilize temperatures. (But it might be hard to swing the federal grant support for those models.)"

Hansen's temperature data has been "massaged" in a number of ways that he hasn't allowed anyone to review, but Canadian Steve MacIntyre has delved deeply into the published numbers to "correct" a couple of points over the years. MacIntyre first demolished the now infamous "hocky stick" graph showing temperature rising steadily in the 20th century with a recent accelerated rise over the last 20 years. The actual data show the real numbers to oscillate (warming in the early 20th century, cooling in the middle of the century, then warming again after 1970) although the general trend has been toward a slight (less than 1 degree Celsius) increase. Just recently Hansen was forced to reshuffle his list of the top 10 warmest years in the US by MacIntyre raising 1934 to the warmest year of all time and dropping the rankings of several recent years, including one year off the chart completely.

Hansen has now come up with a manifesto of sorts, asking Presidential candidates to sign a pledge to "save the planet", and he has all sorts of wacky ideas about how to do so, like completely halting the construction of any new energy generation plants that don't meet his specific criteria, taxing carbon emissions and changing the laws of supply and demand. And anyone who disagrees with Hansen is more or less a paid political flunky of special interests and anyone who doubts his "facts" can safely be ignored, because Hansen KNOWS the TRUTH.

This guy Hansen calls himself a scientist?