James Hansen And The N&O vs Reality

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Published: Thursday, October 9th, 2014 @ 10:25 am
By: John Locke Foundation ( More Entries )

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Dr. Roy Cordato, who is Vice President for Research and resident scholar for the John Locke Foundation.

    Over the last couple of days two articles have come across my desk, one dated September 30, 2014, and the other dated June 11, 1986. Together, these two articles tell an interesting story about just how incredibly wrong the radical global warming alarmists have been.

    The most recent article, published at CNSnews.com on September 30th, is a continuation of a story that we have been following in this newsletter for several years now. The headline is "Satellite Data: No Global Warming for 18 Years." This article contains a number of quotes from climatologist Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at the University of Alabama/Huntsville. Christy, along with UAH climatologist Roy Spencer, are the "keepers" of much of the global temperature data collected from orbiting satellites. When asked by CNS why all of the models that have been predicting massive amounts of global warming have missed this halt in warming Christy stated:

You're going back to a fundamental question of science that when you understand a system, you are able to predict its behavior. The fact that no one predicted what's happened in the past 18 years indicates we have a long way to go to understand the climate system... And that the way the predictions were wrong were all to one direction, which means the predictions or the science is biased in one direction, toward overcooking the atmosphere.

When asked about his predictions for the future Christy responded with the following:

I'm a climatologist, which means I'm driving the car and looking in the rearview mirror, not out the front windshield, so I don't try to forecast.

    This is a perspective that Dr. James Hansen, formerly of the Goddard Space Flight Center and science advisor to Al Gore, should have taken back in 1986. Back then the Raleigh News and Observer ran an article distributed by The New York Times which was boldly headlined "Greenhouse effect posing imminent global threat, scientists say" (not available online). The article quotes Hansen as predicting that that between 1990 and 2010 temperatures would rise by somewhere between 2.5 and 5 degrees Fahrenheit.

    Well, according to Hansen's own data set at NASA, between 1990 and 2010 temperatures have risen about 0.67 degrees F, and these data from ground based thermometers are probably an overstatement. More accurate satellite data shows it at about 0.54 degrees. Either way it is well under 1 degree let alone 2.5-5 degrees as Hansen predicted.

    I will skip over what all this says about James Hansen. As people have known for years his "science" is agenda driven. No news there. But more interesting is what this says about the News and Observer. Back in 1986 the newspaper was very anxious to shout from the roof tops that the "greenhouse effect" (the politicized expression "climate change" had not yet been promulgated) was posing an "imminent global threat," quoting predictions that the planet would be warming dramatically in the next 25 years -- in other words, by now.

    Well now is here, and the planet has not only not warmed dramatically, but warming apparently stopped almost 20 years ago. But the N&O has so far declined to even mention what CNSnews.com has reported, let alone gone back to examine what the paper was telling us in the past. This is agenda driven science walking hand in hand with agenda driven journalism: certainly a bad combination.

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