James Hansen on the Warmest Year Brouhaha

Jamie writes "In response to earlier reports, Dr. James Hansen, top climate scientist with NASA, has issued a statement on the recent global warming data correction. He points out 'the effect on global temperature was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable.' In a second email he shows maps of U.S. temperatures relative to the world in 1934 and 1998, explains why the error occurred (it was not, as reported, a 'Y2K bug') and, in response to errors by 'Fox, Washington Times, and their like,' attacks the 'deceit' of those who 'are not stupid [but] seek to create a brouhaha and muddy the waters in the climate change story.'"

Comments

The bigger issue

[MyLongNickName]

The bigger issue is the cloak of secrecy around the data and the algorithms used to generate the outputs. I do not understand why all data wouldn't be publicly available. Is there one place to go to see the data used to make the dire predictions I hear all over the place? I generally accept global warming as a fact, but when I see the amount of contortions one person had to go through to figure out there was a problem in the first place, I start to get suspicious.

Re:The bigger issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed - in paticular, let's see the algorithm. There could be other bugs. It's just as likely that global warming is WORSE than what is being claimed (imagine if the average temperature is actually 1 degree MORE than what is currently being calculated) as it is (in this case) that there was an error in the denier's favor.

Until the data and the algorithm are available to the public for scrutiny, it's difficult to trust the results, much less make the correct policy decisions (as noted above - if global warming is WORSE than we think, then maybe more drastic action is needed and vice versa).

Re:The bigger issue

[morgan_greywolf]

The bigger issue is the cloak of secrecy around the data and the algorithms used to generate the outputs. I do not understand why all data wouldn't be publicly available. Is there one place to go to see the data used to make the dire predictions I hear all over the place? I generally accept global warming as a fact, but when I see the amount of contortions one person had to go through to figure out there was a problem in the first place, I start to get suspicious. Yes. Check out the Publications section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Web site.

According to this article in Scientific American ($), they've come to the conclusion with 80% certainty that global climate change is not only real, but is caused by human activities. They're new 2007 assessment report isn't on the website yet, but it is discussed in SciAm, so it should be there shortly, I believe. Methodologies are discussed pretty well in the SciAm piece.

Re:The bigger issue

[Christianson]

No direct experience with the data in question, or indeed any climatological data at all, but this isn't really an uncommon case in science. People collect and store their own data. The full extent of raw data is often massive, it's often poorly indexed, and there is no such thing as a consistent storage format. Practically speaking, this means that whenever you want to get someone else's data, you have to get in touch with someone who would have collected it, ask them to filter out the part of the data you want, and then send it to you with an explanation of how to make sense of it. It might seem like secrecy, but it's mostly a product of best use of time. Scientists get grant money by analyzing data and publishing the results, not spending the effort to make the raw data publicly available.

Re:The bigger issue

[morgan_greywolf]

Oops.

Link to the SciAm piece.

Re:The bigger issue

[NickFortune]

Scientists get grant money by analyzing data and publishing the results, not spending the effort to make the raw data publicly available.

mmm... maybe that needs to change. Given the current tendency towards knee jerk FUD in some quarters, the only way we're ever going to be able to settle debates like this one is if the data can be subjected to widespread peer review.

Re:The bigger issue

[Coryoth]

The bigger issue is the cloak of secrecy around the data and the algorithms used to generate the outputs. I do not understand why all data wouldn't be publicly available. Well for startes the data is available. Full gridded data can be found here, along with appropriate fortran code to extract individual months of years. Gridded data for individual years can be found here. Original source data for individual stations can be accessed from here. Detailed accounts of the adjustments for urban heat island effects and compilation procedures used can be found in the papers listed in the references here. Most of those papers (i.e. those by GISS staff) are freely available in the GISS publications database. You did actually look to see if the data and detailed accounts of the methods were available, right?

Re:The bigger issue

[Evilest Doer]

Given the current tendency towards knee jerk FUD in some quarters, the only way we're ever going to be able to settle debates like this one is if the data can be subjected to widespread peer review.

I wish I could share your optimism, but widespread peer review won't change anything. The problem is due to people who know nothing or very little (which is often worse than nothing) about the sciences. If the raw data is publicly available, it will give the people who want to deny basic science more ammunition for their inane babblings. They won't in reality know the first thing they are talking about, but it will impress the people who want to believe the world is only 6000 years old, or we never went to the moon, or their is no global warming, and so on.

Re:The bigger issue

[Intron]

Did you look at the graph? The error wasn't in anybody's favor. It was negligable.

The overall shape of the graph is the same - a 0.8 degree rise in average temperature over the last century with increasing slope.

I was in the Bahamas last year measuring water temperature, beach erosion and doing population counts to provide data on why coral is dying off all over the world. Its a complex topic but one of the leading culprits is ocean warming. Coral is adapted to a narrow range. Once the coral reefs are gone, which will be soon, say goodbye to fish diversity and sandy beaches.

I live in New England, the recent scare is over West Nile virus. According to the CDC, over 15,000 people in the U.S. have tested positive for WNV infection since 1999 and over 500 have died.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that a small change in temperature won't have a significant effect.

Re:The bigger issue

[ajs]

they've come to the conclusion with 80% certainty that global climate change is not only real, but is caused by human activities. That's a bit of a mis-statement. The computer models used generate results that conform to that hypothesis with an 80% margin for error. The idea that we're 80% certain that the models are correct is not supported by anything I've read.

As some scientists have pointed out, there's substantial concern about these models and how accurate they can be in the first place. What we know is this: some of the Earth is undergoing substantial climate change (always true, but this is exceptional), and much of the change is in the direction of warming (the arctic and antarctic regions, especially). We also know that CO2 levels have risen. The problem is that correlating those two factors requires that we understand the climate on a macroscopic level, which, sadly, we do not. We have models that predict past activity, but they have so far failed to accurately predict future activity accurately. Dyson suggests a naive model ("no change") would be more accurate that the models we use. That's been hotly debated, and I'm willing to believe that he might have gone a bit overboard there.

Still, the fact of the matter is that we're uncertain about a great many things, and until we are certain, we should be careful about what we insist is "fact".

Re:The bigger issue

[Coryoth]

I think it is their duty to fully disclose the raw data and the methods used to arrive at the final result. The raw data, and the papers giving detailed descriptions of methods used to arrive at the final result. Have fun.

Re:The bigger issue

[kimvette]

if you re-read my post, I indicated that is not the case, and revealing ALL of the data will convince skeptics if the alarmists are right. Where Mars and other planets are warming there is a good chance that global warming is not due to us, or not largely due to us (I'm convinced we are at least a contributor but not that we are the cause). Having the raw data for mars, as far back as the data goes, can help to show us whether or not we are indeed the cause of global warming, because Mars can be used for control data. Is the temp here rising at the same rate as there? Is the trend here faster? How much faster? Then, we need to investigate why: is it due to plentiful water vapor here, or because of industry-emitted greenhouse gases? Having the full picture helps both sides attain their goals.

My problem is that the alarmists are chicken little, and the right wingers are like the people who listened to the boy who cried wolf so many times. There is a happy medium and that is called the scientific method. Alarmists with an agenda cannot be trusted, and neither can the other extreme with the ostrich syndrome.

Re:The bigger issue

[Coryoth]

Hmm, the evidence is pretty strong that more CO2 leads to higher tempuratures. If C02 was a symptom, please explain what you think would release more C02 as the tempurature rises. The usual cause is ocean arming leading to outgassing of CO2 (warmer water can hold less CO2). Historically this has worked with Milankovitch cycles to provide a feeback to the small orbital variations with the released CO2 causing yet more warming, and providing the strong glacial/interglacial cycle we see over the lst million years or so. Of course the GPP is wrog in claiming that CO2 is a symptom of warmer temperatures. It is both a symptom and a cause, at least in theory. In practice, in this particular case we can do isotope analysis of atmospheric CO2 and determine the source of the current increase in CO2 (burned fossil fuels have different isotope ratios). The result is that the current dramatic rise in atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic -- it's us doing it. In the past CO2 increased and provided a powerful amplifier for changes that were initially spurred by orbital variation. Now we have CO2 increasing for other reasons, but continuing to provide the same warming effects it has historically.

Re:The bigger issue

[Tyler Durden]

The Mars thing is unlikely

Remember, in the distant past the Earth was MUCH warmer than it is right now. It's happened before naturally, and is likely to occur again naturally.

True, global temperature does tend to change naturally over time. But it doesn't usually happen so rapidly. And when it does, it tends to suck for all us organisms living here.

Re:The bigger issue

[Glock27]

The bigger issue is the cloak of secrecy around the data and the algorithms used to generate the outputs. I do not understand why all data wouldn't be publicly available. Is there one place to go to see the data used to make the dire predictions I hear all over the place? I generally accept global warming as a fact, but when I see the amount of contortions one person had to go through to figure out there was a problem in the first place, I start to get suspicious.

There are many 'big issues' with the Global Warming (aka Global Climate Change) crowd. Global Warming is still the best term, since the main thesis is clearly increasing global mean temperature. Of course this implies nothing about local climate variation.

First of all, there's the question of whether Global Warming is a real, long-term trend. It's at a minimum interesting that there were reports in the 1920s of widespread arctic ice melting, followed in the 1970s by a "Global Cooling" scare. This recent revision of which was the warmest year in US history casts even more doubt. Looking further back into history, there has been historical warming in Greenland that exceeds the current trend, well before human produced greenhouse gasses could have been a factor.

I think the global warming skeptics are correct in viewing the results of the various computer models with a wary eye. The models are only as good as the data and assumptions fed into them, as well as the actual algorithms used to model absorption, reflection and emission. Further, they are modeling inherently chaotic systems which we have trouble forecasting only a week into the future. Hubris, anyone?

I wonder what the stance of the environmentalists will be if it's scientifically determined that the current climate trends are a natural phenomenon? Surely we shouldn't mess with Mother Nature... ;-)

I personally think the United States, in particular, is doing quite a bit to address greenhouse gas emissions in particular, and pollution in general. If you really want to make a difference, lobby for more nuclear power going forward. What really needs scrutiny now is China (who just passed the US as a CO2 polluter) as well as the other developing nations with little money but a big hunger for energy. So, all you "anti-Western-industrialism" types, you have a new target.

Re:The bigger issue

[hador_nyc]

I was in the Bahamas last year measuring water temperature, beach erosion and doing population counts to provide data on why coral is dying off all over the world. Its a complex topic but one of the leading culprits is ocean warming. Coral is adapted to a narrow range. Once the coral reefs are gone, which will be soon, say goodbye to fish diversity and sandy beaches.

I've heard this before, and I'd like to ask you an honest question. Coral has been around for a long time; according to this link on wikipedia, over 500 million years. Average global climate temperature has been both significantly warmer and cooler in that time. My question is why would warming be the thing that's hurting them? I am not a biologist, nor an expert in this in any way; you are; that's why I'm asking you. To me, and again I'm a radar engineer, it seems more likely that the thing that's different now, and hurting them is us; runoff from our farms; the increased nitrogen and fertilizer in the water, or some other group of chemicals we're putting into the environment. Even CO2, as in the form of making the oceans more acidic, doesn't seem to me to be the problem; since again that too has been higher in coral's history.

Also, beach erosion; how is that bad at all; except for the idiots who build houses or hotels on beaches? Isn't that simply a natural process? I think beaches communities should reverse development, and build back the dunes between the towns and the water. Screw the beach front hotels; it's bad for the environment, and we can still enjoy the beach without having a house or hotel on it!

As for your comment about west nile virus, hell, we had malaria here too; but back before you or I were born, we defeated it. DDT being a big help there; amongst other things. West Nile is not a biggie. If we can stop malaria in Cuba and the South, we can stop it here when it gets warmer. People can adapt.

Re:The bigger issue

[yakmans_dad]

There isn't any cloak of secrecy. The data and algorithms are, in fact, all available, contrary to assertions. The corrections to the temp record were done with ad hoc scripts and one-off programs which are sometimes problematic to track down and replicate. (c.f. any sufficiently busy academic's desk). If one has a doubt about the accuracy, code it yourself and, if the results vary from the published ones, publish a note which describes the differences. That's countering science with science, not science with quibble. Calibration time. The famous anti "hockey stick" paper was bolstered by a graph which changed the scale of the y-axis by almost an order of magnitude. The "hockey sticks" produced would have shown up in the original graph as so much flutter. Which global warming skeptic publicly objected to that little finesse, eh?

Re:The bigger issue

[Anonymous Coward]

"If the raw data is publicly available, it will give the people who want to deny basic science more ammunition for their inane babblings."

I start to get REALLY NERVOUS and suspicious when I am told that the full release of all information on a given issue will be too complex or difficult for the general public to understand.

Labeling skeptical people as "global warming deniers" akin to wacko religious fundamentalists, while convenient, does not negate the fact that there are intelligent people out there that just want to be able to verify what is being said on their own, without having to take Al Gore's word for it.

While global warming is a danger to humans around the world, I would feel more comfortable if there was clear cut, 100% proof that humans have caused it all, and that it is something we have the ability to fix. As this issue has polarized people so much, it seems to me that taking say, 500,000 years of actual climate data would be a good start to win people over, should it actually prove we as a species are causing all this havoc weather wise.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

It's at a minimum interesting that there were reports in the 1920s of widespread arctic ice melting, It wouldn't be surprising if there were, since there was warming in the 1920s. What is your point?

followed in the 1970s by a "Global Cooling" scare. Which was mostly media driven hype (here). Of course, there was some cooling from 1940 to 1970, but again, what is your point? Neither that nor the above contradict the reality of the global warming trend.

This recent revision of which was the warmest year in US history casts even more doubt. "The warmest year in US history" is utterly irrelevant to any warming trend and the two top years were statistically tied both before and after the revision.

Looking further back into history, there has been historical warming in Greenland that exceeds the current trend, well before human produced greenhouse gasses could have been a factor. Yes, we know that climate change has occurred in the past, and there have been large, rapid changes in Greenland temperatures associated with, for instance, the shutdown/restart of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. However, that doesn't change the evidence that the current warming is not largely due to such natural events.

Further, they are modeling inherently chaotic systems which we have trouble forecasting only a week into the future. Hubris, anyone? Give me a break. Yes, it's impossible to forecast the weather more than a couple weeks in the future, due to chaos. But you can forecast the climate, which is a temporal and spatial average of all possible weather events, out much farther. The ability of climate models to do this has been demonstrated in hindcasting and out-of-sample validation experiments.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

A professional statistician (which is what McIntyre is) might not be able to check the underlying science but he might be better than the original climate scientist in applying cutting edge statistical analysis because that's *his* expertise.

An awful lot of science is multi-disciplinary that way, with data gathered for one field but bits and pieces of other fields being brought in to make sense of it. And those bits and pieces tend to be outdated. Economists, for example, regularly shake their heads at the economic analysis applied by political scientists. Mathematicians and evelotionary biologists have some similar friction.

So while the problem of analysis of data exists, there are plenty of cases where eyes from outside the specialty would do a lot of good. We should be very happy to see that sort of professional knowledge silo breakdown. Some people are less than happy.

Re:The bigger issue

[Intron]

1. fewer people dying of cold.

Worldwide, malaria is a leading cause of death. Freezing deaths are negligable.

2. easier/quicker ocean navigation due to new polar routes

You don't mention the accompanying sea level rise and coastal flooding which is a somewhat more serious effect.

3. less road/bridge corrosion due to less salt usage

and less need for roads and bridges with a lower population.

4. coral reefs can be planted in new areas that haven't had them before

Corals are highly adapted to conditions of nutrients, temperature and salinity so this may not work out real well.

5. New agricultural lands in Asia and N. America will open up that should be a net positive on food balance

Where? Agricultural land needs soil. Soil exists where plants have been growing for a long time. Sand and rock are not arable.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

As with most of that site's content, you're only telling part of the story.

1) Global plant biomass up 6% since the 1970s due to more CO2, and longer growing seasons. A big win on dozens of fronts, but two bear particular mention:

Plant biomass can go up as a whole, but the effect of CO2 fertilization is strongly limited by water and nutrient availability, which in many regions will go down. Longer growing seasons do not occur everywhere, but only in places that don't get too hot or too dry.

3) Increased crop yields, contributing to making the famines that used to regularly afflict India, China, etc. a thing of the past.

Increased crop yields have far more to do with agricultural practices than CO2 fertilization or climate change. Furthermore, even when crop yield goes up, nutritional content often goes down: the planets are bigger but not as good for you.

4) Decreased mortality. Deaths increase from a one degree drop in temperature at around four times the rate of a one degree rise in temperature.

That contradicts other studies I've read, but now I have to do some hunting for them.

5) Extra calamari! Squids get bigger and grow faster in warmer oceans.

Ocean acidification, ecosystem stress, forced migration ...

6) Fewer typhoons/hurricanes/etc., due to increase in wind shear making them less likely to form.

The studies I've read indicate that hurricane numbers stay constant or increase, not decrease, and that hurricane strength may increase.

7) Better beer! There's no water more pure than that from melting ice caps.

Strangely enough, the positive vastly outweighs the negative. Really? Then why do leading economists like Nordhaus find net economic damage from warming? Even Tol, who's in the "small warming is good" camp agrees that we need to mitigate our emissions to avoid large warming.

Your one sided story neglects all the other negative impacts of climate change (sea level rise, drought, flooding, heat waves, abrupt threshold responses in the climate system), etc., and also neglects the difference between the climate change which has occurred so far, and the much larger change which is predicted to occur in the future.

Re:The bigger issue

[sgholt]

ahhh...but when you add someones politics to the mix, that's where the error comes in. I too suspect that runoff and pollution to be a bigger factor than warming. Looking at graphs of global warming and cooling (yes it exists TOGETHER, has been going on for 100s of thousands of years!)the temperature range is about 2 degrees either way. So this is killing coral? I find that to be a little misleading. Granted temperature change could be part of the cause to this problem, but temperature change has been going on for 100s of thousands of years. It is in a cycle...look at graphs of CO2 vs Temp, it is pretty obvious.

I have seen reports of a disease called "white plague" that is responsible for the death of coral in the Caribbean. Other studies blame wastes that are pumped into the ocean without treatment.
Still other studies in the Pacific indicate that the earth is losing coral at the rate of 1% per year, and at this time Pacific coral is 50% of what it was before. OK, that means this started about 50 years ago?

I don't want to start a flame war here...but lumping everything as a product of Global Warming is
isn't productive when you don't also explore other causes and/or cures. It has become such a political movement that people are closing their minds to any other cause or solution.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

If more CO2 leads to higher temperatures; Venus could serve as pretty solid evidence In fact, it is. You can calculate Venus's maximum possible equilibrium temperature from its distance from the Sun and its reflectivity, and its actual temperature far exceeds that value.

For that matter, the Earth's actual temperature also exceeds its maximum possible temperature according to such energy balance considerations, and that too is because of the greenhouse effect, which adds about 30 degrees C to the global mean temperature.

But Mars can throw a wrench into the whole theory Mars is much further from the Sun than is Venus, and more importantly, has almost no atmosphere to speak of. It doesn't matter if it's pure CO2 if there just isn't much of it in the first place. The greenhouse effect depends on the amount of CO2, not just the fraction.

Earth's atmosphere contains the following gasses (by volume): nitrogen: 78%, oxygen: 20.95%, argon: 0.93% and finally - carbon dioxide: 0.038% - wow, that's a pretty high concentration - I think we're all going to die. We're not going to die, but that amount of CO2 does contribute to the greenhouse effect. 0.038% looks like a small number, but it's meaningless out of context. You can ingest a small amount of cyanide and still die. You have to multiply the amount of CO2 by its potency as a greenhouse gas.

And again, it's not the relative concentration that matters, but the actual amount. You could dilute the atmosphere with as much non-greenhouse gas as you want, making the GHG concentration arbitrarily small, but the greenhouse effect will be the same since you have the same actual amount of GHGs. (Not exactly true because eventually the atmosphere will turn opaque to visible light, but you get the idea.)

Note, too, that the direct greenhouse warming of CO2 so far only amounts to about a 0.1% increase in the planet's temperature. While that's not big as far as the planet's temperature is concerned, it's important as far as we are concerned. A 10% increase in the planet's temperature would wipe out most life on Earth. We may see an eventual increase of 1 or 2% or more.

Re:The bigger issue

[NickFortune]

Not to be elitist, but do you really think you could effectively review the data?

That, I think, depends on the assertion it's being used to support. I'm quite good at writing code to crunch large amounts of data and generate useful summaries. I wouldn't like to try and predict global temperature averages one hundred years hence. However, I think I could probably run up a quick sanity check as regards global average temperatures over the last century, for instance.

it may not be that urgent to make the raw data hyper-available to every guy on the street.

Forgive my saying so, but you sound like someone from 1807. I mean at one time, publishing this data would have involved significant effort. You'd have had to print up several telephone directory sized books to hold it all, and then distribute it using horse drawn carriages. And if someone asked me to marshall those sorts of resources, then I suppose that I too might enquire as the urgency of the situation.

The thing is though that this is the 21st Century, and a typical teenage girl probably uses up more resources in an evening's download of MP3s that it would take to publish this data. Hell, it's probably already on a networked computer; all it would probably need is a symbolic link and possibly a new entry in a routing table. I don't think "urgency" is a concept that really applies here.

As long as interested scientists - regardless of their previous conclusions or political leanings - can get the raw data when they want to review it, I think the process should work fine.

And do you think it is working fine? It doesn't seem to be; the intensity of the argument here on Slashdot stands as testimony to that, I feel.

Because so many people lack the highly specialized knowledge to make sense of the raw data, there are two types of information that are far more important to make widely available: 1) Education on how to be a climate scientist and 2) The conclusions that qualified climate scientists have reached.

All right - now you sound elitist. It's a bit like saying there's no need to publish computer source code all you need to do is know where the universities are; and to have access to programs written by qualified programmers.

Re:The bigger issue

[piotrr]

Speed.

Corals are slow, human pollution is fast.

If climate change is slow enough, corals will die off at one end and expand at the other, essentially moving as the niche is displaced. If the change is very fast, say two degrees per 100 years or so, the coral won't be able to catch up with the displacement of its niche.

Re:The bigger issue

[jonniesmokes]

You say:
>If the papers reported on c02science.org are of sound methodology, transparent process, and apparent intellectual rigour,
>which they appear in general to be to me, why should the source of their funding matter?

Are you claiming to be a top climatologist? A lot of people can write a paper that
looks scientific. Only a good scientist can figure out whether the paper is worth
what its printed on.

I'll give you a personal example. I once worked for a small medical device company
owned by an ex surgeon. He was trying to sell patented technologies to very large
and rich pharmaceutical firms. He needed to show that the technologies were scientifically
tested to standards which the FDA accepts. He hired me (an MIT trained scientist) to
perform experiments and prove that these technologies were valid. This process is
called "validating" by the FDA.

I had a predecessor who had left on poor terms. So I had an inkling something
might be weird. I kept trying to replicate my predecessors results and couldn't.
My boss was becoming increasingly agitated that I wasn't successful making his
technology work. I was certainly trying. I was working my ass off. At one point
in a meeting, my boss told me to change the protocol of the experiment in a subtle
way. I instantly recognized that it would guarantee a positive result, but that
it wouldn't mean anything about the safety of the underlying technology. It
would be fraud. And in fact, it would be very hard for someone to detect that
it was fraud. Only someone who had been working on the technology for 60 hours
a week for 6 months would be able to understand what it meant.

I refused to make the change in protocol, and started looking for anotehr job that
day. The boss and I didn't speak after that. People's lives are at stake
with medical devices and I couldn't be a party to fraud. This was a big deal.

Global warming is somewhat similar and its even more complex. You might consider
putting your faith in trained scientists instead of paid hacks. Or don't and
become a scientist yourself!

Goalposts.

[Anonymous Coward]

"In a second email he shows maps of U.S. temperatures relative to the world in 1934 and 1998, explains why the error occurred"

Since pollution is suppose to be one of the climate changing factors. Did we pollute less in 1934 than we did in 1998? And did the nature of the pollution change?

Re:Goalposts.

[archen]

Yes the nature changed a lot. Look at the industrial revolution and the types of factories used. Most of them used to pour out black smoke unending. Coal was still used as a relatively common way to heat homes. Cars were scarce in comparison to today. It's been well documented that one of the biggest changes in the nature of pollution has been the fact that we've significantly reduced how visible pollution is. This means more sunlight hits the earth instead of something else. Instead we have non visible greenhouse gases accumulating.. We've also expanded the population by leaps and bounds, and cars used to be something a family MIGHT own - and is now something that each family member has. We're also a lot less efficient in many ways. Milk used to come in bottles that were given back and sanitized for reuse. How many people still use a clothes line to dry their clothes? etc.

Immediate action??

[Russ Nelson]

Whenever somebody tells me that I must take immediate action, I reach for my wallet.

Re:Immediate action??

[Hijacked Public]

I Tap, Rack, Bang.

Then will someone explain to me...

[bagboy]

If the corrected US data doesn't indicate such a large statistical anomaly on a global basis, why are we blaming the US, US government, US Citizens for creating the massive global warming effect being reported? Sounds like we might be less of the cause then?

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[marx]

The temperature in the US has little effect on the global mean value of the temperature (the US is only 2% of the area of the Earth). But the US is one of the top (or the top) polluter of greenhouse gases. That's why there's criticism, the US's share of the pollution is a lot larger than its share of land area or population.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[marx]

It seems you've misunderstood the original problem. The problem is that the Earth can only tolerate a fixed level of pollution (greenhouse gases). This means that the global pollution output of all activities on Earth needs to be bounded by that fixed level. If you allow the pollution output to be proportional to the size of the global economy then the pollution output will not be bounded by any value, since the size of the global economy can grow (and does grow a lot).

You need to penalize wasteful production and consumption and a simple (and democratic) way to do that is to restrict each person to a fixed amount of pollution. You seem to want to suggest to restrict persons to different amounts of pollution, proportional to their share of the global economy. This would reward wasteful production and consumption rather than penalize it, since the more you produce and consume, the more you would be allowed to pollute. I don't really see how you can motivate such a viewpoint.

Like I said, if you allow pollution to be proportional to economic size, then producing an unnecessary hamburger and consuming it (or just throwing it away) would give you the right to pollute more. With a system with a fixed allowed pollution per person, then you would be rewarded by not producing the (unnecessary) hamburger in the first place, and you could instead "spend" your pollution on something which is actually useful.

Business as usual

[arivanov]

Fox and Co think that the world consist only of USA, news at 10.

They have looked solely at the USA graphs and completely ignored the world ones which are the ones that look really scary. They have also declared the problem with the USA data analysis to be a flaw in the data for the whole world.

Is anyone surprised? I am not...

Re:Business as usual

[faloi]

I know it's hip to hate Fox News... But the actual article describes the people denying global warming is man made as a "fringe group" and includes quotes from British researchers pointing out that it really doesn't matter on a global scale.

Re:Business as usual

[ajs]

Fox and Co think that the world consist only of USA, news at 10. My problem with the debate (and this isn't new... it's at least 2 decades old) is that every time some conservative politician or news outlet waves some piece of information around (usually misunderstanding it badly), we immediately seek to use that to discredit the person or group who produced or publicized the information.

We desperately need to remember that scientists and politicians have an intersection, but the vast majority of them don't have anything to do with each other. A scientist who seeks to prove Einstein wrong isn't some Einstein-hating nutjob (typically). In fact, they're performing the most valuable task that the scientific method sets forth: seeking to disprove. By attempting and failing, we learn more about the value of a theory. By attempting and succeeding, we learn more about the theory's weaknesses, and often improve upon it.

Let's not start marching toward those scientists who seek flaws in global climate change research with pitchforks and torches (or rather, let's stop doing so), and instead seek to pressure the media and politicians into supporting them and their less skeptical peers without confusing the issue by politicizing results too early. We need even more funding than we have for those who seek to assail the consensus, not because we think it will fall, but because that's what the scientific method demands. Anything less is not science, it's just politics in a lab coat.

Whither the hype?

[dazedNconfuzed]

Ok, so 1998 was still the warmest - but not by more than a tiny fraction of a degree over 1934, and separated by a decrease to 1800s-era temps.

The bigger story I see in TFA's graphs is: we're looking at an increase of less than 1 degree C per century.
What's the fuss?

Re:Whither the hype?

[Ambitwistor]

The bigger story I see in TFA's graphs is: we're looking at an increase of less than 1 degree C per century.
What's the fuss? The "fuss" is:

1. The climate change so far is relatively small, but has already had noticeable impacts on ecosystems.
2. The amount of change is attributable largely (but not wholly) to human activity.
3. The amount of change is projected to accelerate in the future, based both on increases in human activity, the long atmospheric residence time of CO2, and the long term response being delayed by ocean heat uptake.
4. The damages (economic, ecological, and otherwise) are estimated to increase faster than linearly as a function of the climate change.
5. The damages are also rate-dependent, and the rate is projected to increase as in (3).

Honestly...

[Otter]

This had seemed like pretty much a non-issue all along. If anything it's Hansen's "second, more impassioned email" that diminishes his credibility as a sober, objective scientist just reporting his data. At least in my field, scientists don't issue corrections like:

Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water.

Re:Honestly...

[hal2814]

"At least in my field, scientists don't issue corrections like"

Well, maybe not in your field. In my field, I could've seen Dijkstra making such a statement concerning the continued use of GOTO. I don't think it would've made it into a proper EWD and I doubt it would be sent via email since Dijkstra wasn't that fond of personal computers, but I could see him making such a statement.

Re:Honestly...

[TubeSteak]

If someone makes a deceitful argument, I would hope they would be exposed as a liar, not simply contradicted. He also makes a cogent political and religious argument in the same section of his letter.

I am puzzled by views expressed by some conservatives, views usually expressed in vehement unpleasant ways in e-mails that I have been bombarded by in the past several days. ... It is puzzling, because it seems to me that conservatives should be the first ones standing up for preserving Creation, and for the rights of the young and the unborn. That is the basic intergenerational issue in global warming and the headlong use of fossil fuels: the present generation is, in effect, ripping off future generations.

Is it possible that conservatives have been too quick to support the captains of industry? The basic problem is that national religious conservative leadership has focused exclusively on issues like "the rights of the young and the unborn" and the gay 'agenda'.

Those (in leadership positions) who desire to shift away from political gay/abortion/Jesus activism and towards things like helping the poor and conserving the environment are mostly told to STFU & get back on message. "They" don't want to split the consideral political capital that's built up behind the religious conservative bloc.

Religion has always influenced politics, but IMO, in the last 30 years, politics has been corrupting religion.

Hansen muddied the waters himself

[Kohath]

I thought it muddied the waters plenty when he

- published incorrect data leading to incorect conclusions,
- refused to release his algorithm so it had to be reverse-engineered,
- and deliberately exaggerated the global warming threat to push his personal agenda (which he later admitted).

Re:Hansen muddied the waters himself

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

I don't pick sides in the global warming "debate" because I don't judge myself knowledgeable enough on the subject to do so since it's not my area of research (unlike legions of bloggers who presumably are qualified to do so). If the climatologists tell me they think it's gonna get warmer, well they are in a better position to judge than me.

What I do see (and find incredibly frustrating as a scientist) is the following:

1) He refused to show what his analysis was. There is no way I'd get away with publishing a paper doing that. You can't simply take some input data, perform a magical transform on it and publish the results without saying what you did. That's not a meaningful result. The error may be small, but if he *had* published his method, then it would have been found sooner and this whole debacle could have been avoided.

2) When someone reverse-engineered his analysis (from the input and output) and it was found to be wrong the attack wing of the "pro"-climate change campaign proactively launched into a hysterical (and unjustified) assault on the person who found the flaw, despite NASA agreeing that the flaw was there and changing the published results, which is a complete own-goal given that this is how their opponents accuse them of behaving.

3) Now he's sent off a bunch of e-mails where he comes over as a petulant child. You can't politicise your research and then whinge because when it's wrong you get into a political slapfight.

None of these things promote rational debate.

It's not a religion folks: If it's wrong, you've not lost anything, if it's right we're in trouble, and either way the oil is finite.

A solution to all of this FUD...

[_14k4]

Release the data, all of it, openly. NOAA data is available, for a fee to download I think, and so should all of the other data. I don't mean "should" as in "legislated", I mean "should" as in "should" or, "it would be nice."

If all of the data were released in this fashion, in one central "trusted" place, one could assume that as more and more analysts take a gander - themes will appear and more and more of the graphs could be trusted.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[Coryoth]

I don't want a category on del.icio.us that lists 50 to 100 links of where to get the data... I would like a "community" (ie: scientific types) built repository for it. Think of arxiv.org, for instance. You mean kind of like this or perhaps this. These things do exist. Your inability to actually go and look for them would seem to be the problem.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[Coryoth]

Why filter your result set to only one *source* of data? (I mean, incoming data, not source of data to report on, as if I was contradicting my first statement.)
How could someone like me, familiar with instrumentation, go out and gather data and submit it to the community for inclusion in reporting? You didn't actually look at the NCDC material on the NOAA website did you? It is a collection of a wide variety of climate related data, not simply NOAA data or work. Let's have a little tour. In the ice core section we have Vostok, and Dome C ice core data from Antarctica, GRIP data from Greenland, ice cores from Kilmanjaro, and a glacier in Kenya, and even Peru among many others. How about tree ring data? Why yes, we have tree ring data from innumerable studies from all over the world. Coral data? Got it! Pollen data? Got it! All from many different studies by a wide variety of different people, all providing their data for the archive. There's also cave data, borehole data, and lake data. And that's just the paleo-data. Lord forbid that you should actually have to spend a little while looking for things.

Cerial

[dlhm]

This article does not sound like it was written by a scientist, it sounds like a poor little man who is outraged and upset that anyone would question his admitidly flawed data. I think he needs to take a pill. If Global Warming has increased the earths tempature from .3-.6 C then a .15C IS a big deal.

Re:Cerial

[vidarh]

And you're illustrating exactly why he is outraged: The errors affected the US. The effect on the data for the global temperatures was so small as to be dwarfed by the overall margin of error for the data, but the media completely ignored that, and ignored that it changes nothing with respects to long term trends and overall global warming.

Re:Cerial

[Zelos]

Of course questioning the appetite of a scientist is going to get modded down, isn't it a bit irrelevant?

Re:Cerial

[Ambitwistor]

If Global Warming has increased the earths tempature from .3-.6 C then a .15C IS a big deal. You're comparing apples to oranges (global temperature to U.S. temperatures). 0.15 C in the U.S. is not a big deal to the global picture, since the affect on global temperatures is about 50 times smaller.

It actually isn't that big of a deal to U.S. temperatures, either (here is a before-after graph of the change), although it is noticeable. It's really only a big deal for trends in specific regions of the U.S.

Not global warming. Global climate change.

[MMC Monster]

Why do we still call it global warming? It's global climate change. Some areas will get warmer. Some areas will get cooler. Some areas will be under water.

The nice thing about it is that the majority of us will live to see the changes. We are in for some interesting times over the next 30-50 years. :-)

Carbon Credits stirred it up

[dbIII]

It went all weird once the economists got involved. Now both sides are talking about things based on little data as if they are certainties and the strongest opponents are grasping at tiny straws and saying that makes the entire thing worthless. What's more the most rabid opponents are saying that people in Antarctica are faking ice core results - a pretty stupid assertion really since they could fake the stuff at home where it is warm instead.

At least most people have given up on saying it isn't happening at all - a lot of opponents have moved to saying it's a purely solar effect. Watching the oil industry they are fairly split too so they can't be blamed - it's governments stirring up the mess and whether they are right or wrong Lysenkoism is taking over in US science and wreaking havoc. I would hate to be a climate scientist caught in the middle having the choice of either potentially career ending ridicule or government funding.

Re:"Global" Warming

[djmurdoch]

would he be so kind as to show us "Global" maps?

Where would he show these, if putting them in the FA isn't the right place?

Usufruct

[necro81]

Ok, I admit, I had to look this one up:

Usufruct is the legal right to derive profit or benefit from the property of others. It comes from the latin roots for "use" and "fruits," in the sense that you are using the fruits of someone else's labor.

Wikipedia
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary
a legal Dictionary

In the case of Hansen's second email, he is, I think, using it to describe how captains of industry are benefitting from the global warming nay-sayers' spin on this correction. He also uses it in the sense that successive generations have a right and claim to the enjoy the Earth, so we'd better take care of it, even as we benefit from it.

Re:Usufruct

[djmurdoch]

Usufruct is the legal right to derive profit or benefit from the property of others.

You left out the most important part: "as long as the property is not damaged." He's saying we have a right to use the Earth, but we don't have a right to damage it.

Re:Yes, credibility is the issue

[jamie]

In fact, Media Matters has never received funding from progressive philanthropist George Soros.

See how easy that was?

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[Russ Nelson]

I'm sure that the next hundred years will be much less "interesting" than the previous hundred years, which saw the violent deaths of 250,000,000 people.

Isn't this the expected response

[lightsaber777]

He's a scientist with an ego... which most scientists have and is a danger and possibly a barrier to objectivity. Being corrected and somewhat mocked for his mistake is, I'm sure, embarrassing and a shot to his ego. Of course, if he had simply released his findings instead of using them as a platform to promote his theories of climate change, I'm quite sure the response to the mistake would not have been so negative. The fact that they trumpeted the first findings and quietly released the second makes one wonder about the real reason for releasing them in the first place. Do real scientists keep things to themselves if their experiments don't fit with their original hypothesis? Do they tweak experiments until they come up with the intended outcome? That's not science... that's politics.

Re:Isn't this the expected response

[Ambitwistor]

The fact that they trumpeted the first findings and quietly released the second makes one wonder about the real reason for releasing them in the first place. Actually, Hansen is on record back in 1998 as stating that 1934 was the warmest year. Since then, 1998 and 1934 have ping-ponged back and forth in the NASA data as "warmest year" as various minor adjustments have been made, and NASA hasn't made much of it. As far as I can tell, it was NOAA, not NASA, which played up 1998 (or 2005, or whatever the record of the moment is) as the "warmest year".

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[Chris Pimlott]

because the total heat content of the of the earth, or "globe" if you will, and its atmosphere is expected to rise. likewise, you can talk about the increase in global longevity, even if not every country has a rising life expectancy.

The scientist doth protest too much

[joeyblades]

Hansen makes a huge leap in his second email. He goes from

"the evidence still indicates that global warming is real"

to

"it's all the fault of our leaders"

in a single bound. That kind of superhuman logic belongs in comic books, not in scientific writing.

Wise words

[LentoMan]

He who controls the Global Warming data, controls the universe!

Re:"Global" Warming

[jamie]

The maps he shows are global. You didn't RTFA.

typical mud-slinging

[br00tus]

I have not paid much attention to the story, the reporting I heard kept mentioning the warmest year was 1934 and what we've been hearing from the people with the "global warming agenda" (whatever that is, everyone has to wear Birkenstocks?) was false. Of course they somehow neglected to mention that only the figures for the US were off, and only for the past seven years.

More understandably, they neglected to mention that May 1934 was some of the worst weather to hit the US for a long time, and it wiped out the agriculture of many states, it was called the "Dust Bowl". And it was caused by agriculture concerns that had no concern whatsoever for the environment. So they are pointing back to an earlier environmental disaster.

Re:typical mud-slinging

[ElrondHubbard]

What Hansen considers the really significant distortion in the 1934-vs.-1998 comparison is this: while the absolute temperature difference between the two years (for the U.S.) was negligible, the U.S. was much warmer than the rest of the world in 1934, whereas in 1998 it was close to the global average. You can see this if you go back and read the PDF http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/realdeal.16aug20074. pdf of Hansen's second e-mail, and especially take a look at Figure 2 on page three. In 1934, the U.S. is a red spot surrounded by cooler areas, whereas in 1998 it's glowing red all over. Of course, the colour codes for a difference against baseline, not absolute temperature, but the difference is clear: 1934 temperatures in the U.S. were anomalously warm vs. the rest of the world, whereas in 1998 they were much more typical.

Re:.001 degree?

[squiretalen]

Of course he is trying to save face, but what he said was accurate. The hottest year in the US changed to 1934, from 1998, and the Global Temperature changed only 0.001 (C).

Poisoning the well, alive and well.

[bareman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well

I Worship before the Altar of Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the high priest Nasa Al-Nasa of the Church Global Warming.

I will suffer no infidels. We will wage Jihad against non-Believers. We are the sole holders of the Truth. Dissenters beware!

I hope that was sarcasm

[postermmxvicom]

Honestly, if that wasn't sarcasm, then you are part of the problem. "Climate change" is the new buzz word. It, in my opinion, exposes, at the very least, the mindset of the people behind this. Those people are "buzzword hacks" and not "responsible scientist"

Science in the media:

::insert common thing:: will kill you (or "the children")

next news cycle:

lack of ::insert same common thing:: will kill you (or "the children")


It is only about the ratings.

Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[benhocking]

Although I love your Church references, the scientists did admit their mistake. They're not blaming the news organizations for reporting their error, they're blaming them for distorting their error. Understand the difference? Some news outlets pretended like this changed the whole "the 9 hottest years on record happened in the last decade" fact, when it did not. Prior to the change 1934 was the second hottest year in the US on record, and after the change it was the hottest year. Prior to the change several of the hottest years in the US on record were during the dust bowl, and after the change this is still true. The changes had no impact on which years were the hottest on a global scale, so the "9 hottest years" fact is still true. Do you understand how the right-wing media that you evidently get your talking points from distorted the truth now?

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[rronda]

The issue of educating the press about how to communicate science works both ways. I wonder if people complain that much about the press coverage when 1998 was presented as the hottest year on record in the US, I wonder if the argument of the small area of the continental US was used in that case to explain the little significance that the US record has for the global temperature. That means that the "9 hottest years"-record that you are referring to is negligibly important for global temperature when the temperatures considered are only the US ones! I believe that a reasonable scientific stance is one of skepticism. No scientist is able to predict what the climate will be under climate change conditions. That would require for someone to know all inner workings of climate, and the magnitude and direction of all the feedbacks that models attempt to simulate. Of course the error in the data processing does not change the science of climate change. But that means that it leaves the state of the science of climate change exactly as it was before, that is one of uncertainty. And this is not what James Hansen is being teaching us for the last few years.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[dbrutus]

The real problem is that this error had to be found out by reverse engineering because climate scientists have a bad habit of not releasing their code and data. We're told that they use a list of high quality temperature sensing stations and discouraged from actually checking. Then when somebody actually does go out and check, we find a significant fraction of them are just awful, hopelessly compromised by local heat island effects. Fixing those problems will only increase the accuracy of predictions and data quality but instead of welcoming it, we had an abortive attempt to take the station list locations private for "privacy reasons" after being public for decades.

Data quality is a major issue with global warming. If the numbers aren't right, we don't really know what's going on. This is just one more case of obfuscation hiding error and the AGW proponents falling back to the nearest trench line and adopting the same shoddy tactics of delay, deny, and obfuscate on data quality issues.

This is not how real science is done and that's why so many people who know and love the scientific method and its fruits have a growing unease about the whole AGW enterprise. Can you blame them?

The US is reputed to have one of the best temp sensor networks in the world and I believe has the only organized effort to go to original sources and check stations. Yet instead of calling for a review of all the data and figuring out, for real, how bad the problem is, what we get is a political effort to firewall the contamination and an implied "let's not bother" checking the rest. Real science is "trust but verify". Climate science seems to have a strain of something else going on.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Stormcrow309]

Actually, the real problem here is why isn't Slashdot up in arms about closed sourced climate modeling and data correction algorithms? Sorry, couldn't resist.

In the process for setting myself up for an observance error arguement, why is the three NOAA monitoring stations I know about are in the three hottest sections of my city? All three of them are well within 100 feet of buildings, with one over red brick walkway, one over a concrete pad next to one of our airports and the last one is attached to the tower of the other.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[dbrutus]

Sorry but according to the published standards, you are simply not supposed to have burn barrels next to your temp station. You are simply not supposed to put one of these things in the middle of pavement. These and other problems have been photographically demonstrated by the surfacestations.org effort. That's not a potential siting problem, that's a siting problem, period because the published standard that everybody agreed on many years ago says so.

If those are not actual problems, you should take out the language stating that such things are problems from your site standards. If they are problems, you should take out the stations that have those problems from your "high quality" list of sites.

Inconsistently applying data quality standards means your data is quite likely crap.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Stormcrow309]

Actually, it does. Let me explain. To model something, you need quality data. To have quality data, you need to have good data correction algorithms to adjust for variation. When the scientists will not produce the source code, then the data correction algorithm is closed-sourced, which has material effect on the climate model.

Without the source code or the algorithms used, we don't see the methodology, just a pat on the head explanation. We cannot verify or repeat the process. Since we are feeding this data into climate models and building 'better' models based off of this data, then the climate models should come into question. By close-sourcing a data correction algorithm, I am obfuscating how 'good' is my data, feeding possibly bad data into climate models and screwing over every other scientist working with my data. How many climate models were built on the bad data because of this error? How many years of work has to be reworked? In one fell swoop, NASA has set back climatology by several years, assuming the current produced data has any validity.

Personally, if I was working with this data with my climate models and 'improving' the models with it, I would be upset. Anything I had written would come into question. If it didn't, I would worry about the academic community. People should be tar and feathering Hansen.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[rhakka]

Aren't you cute. The population has grown and at some point resources simply won't stretch far enough for all of us.

What exactly do you think is going to happen then? We'll all sit down, sing Kumbaya, and work out a peaceable solution, with the rich folk voluntarily slashing their standard of living so we can all subsist?

I think it would be pretty hard to say that unless we make some serious changes in the way we do things, 250m violent deaths will be the "good old days". Assuming we don't completely destroy ourselves while fighting over water, energy, and food.

I hope you're right, but I don't see the basis for your optimism.

Warming on other planets

[benhocking]

Compare two hypotheses: (1) Global warming is primarily caused by the sun, cosmic rays, or some other external factor. (2) Global warming is primarily caused by humans. (Yes, there are other possible hypotheses.)

If hypothesis 1 is right, you would expect most of the planets to be showing warming over any small period of time. If hypothesis 2 is right, you would expect approximately half of the other planets to be showing warming (and the other half to be showing cooling). Unfortunately, with 7 other planets, it's hard to rely on the law of large numbers to distinguish between these two hypotheses. (If you got 5 heads out of 7 coin flips, would you assume the coin was biased? The only thing you could say for certain was that heads weren't on both sides of the coin.) Of course, we don't even have data from all 7 of the other planets for a small period of time.

Global warming theories aren't based merely on the correlation between increased CO2 and increased temperature. They're based on fundamental science and complicated models. The fundamental science has been known for over 100 years - complicated models weren't necessary for that. The complicated models are necessary to determine the scope of the greenhouse gas phenomenon (feedback cycles, etc., are non-linear and hence can be very difficult to predict with detail). These models have actually done a pretty good job, and they're getting better. Some people are actually saying now, "In 20 years, this warming will be over, and then the scientists will see how wrong they are." Some people were saying that 20 years ago, too.

Re:Warming on other planets

[Ambitwistor]

No, the AGW theory is based entirely on the tenuous idea that increased CO2 increases temperatures. Tenuous my ass. It's been established for over 100 years and even the skeptics don't argue against the existence of the greenhouse effect; they only argue that the feedback effects which amplify CO2 warming aren't as strong as the mainstream claims, and therefore CO2 is responsible for less of the warming than is thought. (More than half of the warming in climate models is not attributable directly to the greenhouse effect of CO2, but to other warming factors which are caused by the initial CO2 warming.)

(At it is challenging, to say the least, to explain the ice core data while holding to that idea.) Of course it isn't, but I'm sure you're going to wave around the CO2 lag as if it disproves the greenhouse effect.

So wait...

[SIIHP]

You're advocating "security through obscurity" for scientific data?

Really?

Because you think the downside of allowing the data to be easily available is worse that making sure it's accurate through peer review?

And that makes sense to you?

What kind of reasoning must one engage in to believe the idea that widespread peer review is not desirable because some nutters will misuse the data? THEY DO THAT ANYWAY.

Meanwhile, situations like this occur because the data is not easily available for review.

I simply don't understand how anything you said makes sense, or is in any way insightful.

why should I believe Hansen anymore?

[peter303]

Seems like a sloppy guy. Time to move on to more careful scientists, even if they are coming up with similar results. Thats what happens when you become too political.

Facts are hard to ignore... for most people

[sherriw]

Dr. Hansen gets it right on. His 2nd email: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/realdeal.16aug20074. pdf is full of facts but most climate change deniers are highly skilled at ignoring those pesky facts.

I think that how humanity handles this issue will be one of the greatest measures of our species in our entire civilization's existence so far. I just hope we don't embarrass ourselves by bickering about this until it's too late.

Educating the press

[benhocking]

The issue of educating the press about how to communicate science works both ways.

No doubt. Many scientists are appalled when the press tries to blame a single hot day/hot summer/hurricane/tornado on global warming. However, it should be noted that although the US temperatures are not major contributing factors to global warming, global temperatures are major contributing factors to US temperatures.

That means that the "9 hottest years"-record that you are referring to is negligibly important for global temperature when the temperatures considered are only the US ones!

I'm not sure what you're saying here. The "9 hottest years" record I'm referring to is referring to global temperatures, so it can't be negligibly important for global temperatures...

I believe that a reasonable scientific stance is one of skepticism.

Absolutely. I am as skeptical about global warming as I am about quantum physics. I know they both have flaws.

That would require for someone to know all inner workings of climate, and the magnitude and direction of all the feedbacks that models attempt to simulate.

Only if you're trying to get a perfect simulation. I run simulations on mammalian hippocampal structures, and I can guarantee you there's a lot I don't know about all the inner workings of it. Nevertheless, I'm able to not only recreate much of its functionality, but I'm also able to make testable predictions about what will happen in certain novel situations. Going back to the quantum physics comparison, there's a lot we don't know about the non-linearities inherent in quantum physics, yet we can still accomplish quite a bit with it.

But that means that it leaves the state of the science of climate change exactly as it was before, that is one of uncertainty. And this is not what James Hansen is being teaching us for the last few years.

How do you figure? Has James Hansen been teaching us that the science of climate change is perfect? If so, I'd appreciate a reference. Everyone acknowledges the uncertainty in climate change. You see those lines above and below the main line on the IPCC projections? Those are uncertainties.

About as tenuous as gravitation

[benhocking]

No, the AGW theory is based entirely on the tenuous idea that increased CO2 increases temperatures.

Good grief! Tenuous? Can you find a single scientific skeptic who denies that fundamental fact!?! (By scientific I mean holding a Ph.D. in a scientific, or even an engineering, field. Gene Ray, Doctor of Cubicism, doesn't count.)

Re:In other news...

[Jeremy Erwin]

It's a legal concept which (very) roughly corresponds to we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children

To wit:

civil law. The right of enjoying a thing, the property
of which is vested in another, and to draw from the same all the profit,
utility and advantage which it may produce, provided it be without altering the
substance of the thing.

Or to put it another way,

"Sure you can stay at my house for the summer. Just don't trash the place."

Re:.001 degree?

[illumin8]

Well, at least he's not emotionally invested or anything.

Don't you think it's appropriate to be at least somewhat emotionally invested when it's the goddamn future of our children that is at stake? You and all the other global warming deniers can take a flying fuck.

Re:This man's career

[Ambitwistor]

is staked on perpetrating the "Global Warming" hoax. Oh give me a break. If you want to point out an error in his published research, go right ahead and try. Otherwise, drop with the insinuations and innuendo.

We were worried about the melting Greenland glacier, and dissapearing Arctic ice in the 1920's, too. So? It was warming in the 1920s too, just not as much or as fast as now.

Re:This man's career

[jevvim]

If you want to point out an error in his published research, go right ahead and try. Otherwise, drop with the insinuations and innuendo.

When they open up that published reserach so that it can be fully reviewed, we could actually argue points instead of insinuating. Until then, though, we should consider why such disclosure wouldn't be made and, from that, assume there to be an agenda at play, be it his own, his supervisor's, or the administration's.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[rcs1000]

"Aren't you cute. The population has grown and at some point resources simply won't stretch far enough for all of us."

There is this shocking, general belief that populations are exploding.

The truth is different: in countries as diverse as China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Iran (yes, Iran), and Mexico plus all of Europe, birth rates are below replacement levels. In Russia, there were four deaths for every birth last year. Even in India, the birth rate has collapsed, even if it is still well above replacement.

Sure, populations are still expanding globally: but this is a function of life expectancies rising fast in
developing nations. But where birth rates have fallen below replacement levels we are now seeing DECLINING populations. Japan's total population has fallen, and it's working age population is shrinking at an alarming rate. In China, the result of the one child policy in 1979 has also led to an enormous drop off in births. (And one that is compounding now: there are fewer women of child bearing age, having fewer babies.)

Look up the UN population data - they have been consistently revising down "peak" population for 15 years. Read Fewer by Ben Wattenberg. It is amazing to discover that there will probably be fewer humans - by choice - in a 100 years than there are now.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[rhakka]

I know.. I'm not making a hockey stick arguement. But the fact is there is already dissapearing potable water in heavily populated areas of china as well as the US. We are, right now, operating beyond currently sustainable levels in energy and water usage, and that in turn is and will be placing pressure on food.

And, more people are demanding more as "all boats rise". Consumption is skyrocketing even though population is merely growing. What do people do who don't have kids? They consume...

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[The One and Only]

Actually, if we made everyone fabulously wealthy (i.e. as wealthy as the US, Western Europe, Japan), population growth would stall entirely, since that's what happened when the US, Western Europe, and Japan all became fabulously wealthy. The problem is, making everyone fabulously wealthy (i.e. "economic development" or "globalization") will...lead to a shortage of resources. It's not population growth that's the issue.

Population growth these days is simply self-perpetuating poverty, and poverty doesn't put up much of a fight for resources. (Okay, maybe that means all the poor countries starve to death, but at least the rest of us don't have to go to war. Even if it is North Korea--sure, they have nuclear bombs, but if they actually use them instead of just making vague threats about it, they're not getting any more food aid.) It's development that's the issue. Poor countries don't want to stay poor, but rich people somehow want to pay the same price for gasoline even when poor countries are getting rich enough to afford some and increase demand.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:This SHOULD be about SCIENCE, but...

[Ambitwistor]

The goal posts are always moving. We can NEVER get a fixed set of predictions to hit or miss to prove or disprove the warming and/or human cause.

You're complaining because predictions improve? Sheesh. There's no pleasing you.

The central predictions for temperature change have remained largely the same, within the error bars, for 10-20 years. The predictions Hansen made back in 1988 have been borne out, if you pick the most accurate emissions scenario. A lot of the long term uncertainty is not in the climatology at all, but in forecasts of world economic growth. The climate predictions ARE testable and have been tested. And the evidence in favor of anthropogenic global warming has only increased.

The most-recent version of this is that we are NOW told there will not be any real heating until 2009 (AFTER the next US presidential election...so democrats can wave headlines around with doomsday predictions and not worry about being proven wrong before the election. hmmmmmmm)

That's not a different "version"; until now, nobody has tried to do a short term forecast with global climate models at all! Before now, the answer for the next two or three years would be "hard to say; we can only predict on decadal scales".

And spare me the conspiracy theories. This new prediction has nothing to do with long term climate policy, and wasn't even made by U.S. researchers.

2. "Warmest year ever", "Coldest year ever", "Warmest year on record", etc. Since modern weather measuring equipment has only existed for a brief flicker of time in the geologic scale, these phrases are just plain silly.

Scientists don't speak of "warmest" or "coldest" year ever. "Warmest year on record" is, however, meaningful. Geologic scale is not terribly relevant; whether it was hotter 100 million years ago has little to do with the current warming.

Even the thermometers used a few hundred years ago may not have been calibrated to todays standards,

That's right, and thermometers a few hundred years ago are not even used; the direct instrumental record only goes back about 150 years.

and while indirect things like sediments and tree rings may give clues they are even less-well calibrated.

They're less informative, but they're not useless, either. And even if we knew nothing at all about the pre-instrumental climate, that still wouldn't change the evidence that the modern warming is due to anthropogenic causes. Today is when we can most accurately measure the natural and human inputs into the climate system, after all.

If you cannot explain the past, your predictions for the future are just well-funded guesses. Until supporters can tell us what EXACTLY caused all previous warming and cooling patterns, they cannot honestly claim to understand the mechanisms well enough to properly predict the future.

That is an absurd requirement. As noted above, you don't have to have a perfect understanding of the past in order to have a good idea of what is happening now. No one will EVER tell you EXACTLY what happened at all times in the past, nor do they need to. The mechanisms operating on geologic time scales are only tangentially relevant to the present climate on centennial scales. Understanding paleoclimate events helps, but it's not a necessary requirement.

Supporters of the global warming claims want to force entire societies to change in dramatic ways. They want political changes and societal changes that will have sweeping effects. Many average citizens will lose jobs, and homes, and marriages. Industries will be halted/moved and allocation of resources will be shifted.

You are grossly exaggerating the impacts/costs of mitigation (and ignoring the impacts/costs of climate change).

We are told the US is the biggest contributor (the BIG SINNER) but as soon as problems are found with the US data, we are told that the US numbers have lit