Climate Scientist James Hansen Honored for Speaking Truth to Power

James Hansen, a federal government scientist who has spoken out about human influence on the global climate despite political pressure to alter his message, is the recipient of the 2007 Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility given by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS. The award was established in 1980 and is approved by the AAAS Board of Directors. The award, which carries a $5,000 prize, was presented Saturday, at the 2008 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. The AAAS award citation credits Hansen for “his outspoken advocacy on behalf of scientists’ responsibilities to communicate openly and honestly with the public on matters of importance to their health and welfare.”

In a memo supporting Hansen’s selection, the award committee wrote that he “has faced pressure, and sometimes outright opposition, from highly placed individuals in the past four administrations” who have urged him to alter his message in one direction or another. See this latest embarassment for the once great AAAS. 

Read here in this ludicrous interview by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now with Hansen how he claims he has been suppressed from voicing his opinion. See how much coverage Hansen has really received in recent years. 

See full size image here
Source is in the story Technocracy versus Democratic Control by Roger Pielke Jr.

Hansen has received $250,000 from the Heinz Foundation (Kerry’s wife), $500,000 from the David Foundation. These rewards go to the man who helped open the grant money spigots for the universities, environmental groups and now governments and some corporations.  Ironically his movement may send all the rest of us to the poor house. 

Update: And also note how he is spreading his evangelism to other continents encouraguing a moratorium on coal fired power plants in Australia in this letter to Prime Ministeer Rudd and in the UK in this letter to Prime Minister Brown.

As an e-mailer to Icecap so wisely said tonight “Science Minus Scrutiny = Dogma”.

Icecap Update: See three of the letters sent to ABC News admonishing them for their vicious attack on Dr. Fred Singer here. The network received well over 100 emails invariably attacking them for their shoddy journalism. They are following in the footsteps of Newsweek where their own CEO had to come out and apologize for his own staff’s stupidity.

At the end of 2006, climate scientist S. Fred Singer of the University of Virginia and the Science & Environmental Policy Project and Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute co-authored Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, a New York Times non-fiction bestseller. Yesterday, ABC’s World News Sunday anchor Dan Harris aired a harsh attack on Dr. Singer in a segment titled “Global Warming Denier: Fraud or ‘Realist’?”

Avery, Director of Hudson’s Center for Global Food Issues, declares, “It seems likely that ABC attacked Singer now because the earth has apparently stopped warming—in defiance of the man-made warming theory.” The earth’s surface temperatures have registered no warming trend since 1998, even though the levels of atmosphere CO2 have continued to increase strongly. In 2000, the sunspot numbers turned downward, which historically has predicted a decline in the earth’s temperatures roughly a decade later. The sunspot indices have continued to predict cooling ever since.

Last month, three of the world’s major monitoring sites announced that earth’s temperatures actually declined from January 2007 to January 2008—the first such global temperature drop in 30 years. The Hadley Centre in the UK, NASA, and the University of Alabama/Huntsville all reported the decline. Josh Willis, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently told National Public Radio that the oceans had stopped warming 4-5 years ago, based on key information from new high-tech ocean buoys.

The embarrassing truth is that the weak correlation between earth’s temperatures and human-emitted greenhouse gases is rapidly worsening. The CO2 correlation with earth’s thermometer record since 1860 is less than 22 percent. The correlation between earth temperatures and sunspots is 79 percent and strengthening. “It seems likely that if the earth’s temperatures continue to defy the ‘global warming consensus’ there will be more attacks on those who study the physical evidence of the earth’s previous warmings,” says Avery. Read more here

Computer models used by environmentalists predict imminent and disastrous climate change. But actual temperature measurements by high-tech equipment show something completely different. As Lorne Gunter reported Monday in Canada’s National Post, the first of 3,000 new automated ocean buoys were deployed in 2003. They amounted to a significant improvement over earlier buoys that took their measurements mostly at the ocean’s surface.

The new buoys, known as Argos, drift along the oceans at a depth of about 6,000 feet constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity and speed of ocean currents. Every 10 days or so a bladder inflates, bringing to the surface readings taken at various depths. Once on the surface, they transmit their readings to satellites that retransmit them to land-based computers. The Argos buoys have disappointed the global warm-mongers in that they have failed to detect any signs of imminent climate change. As Dr. Josh Willis, who works for NASA in its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, noted in an interview with National Public Radio, “there has been a very slight cooling” over the buoys’ five years of observation, but that drop was “not anything really significant.” Certainly not enough to shut down the Gulf Stream.

Climate-change promoters also are perplexed by the observations of NASA’s eight weather satellites. In contrast to some 7,000 land-based stations, they take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily over the surface of the Earth. In 30 years of operation, the satellites have recorded a warming trend of just 0.14C - well within the range of normal variations. If the Argos buoys and satellites had confirmed the greenie computer models and Gore hype instead of natural temperature variations, it would have been big news. The silence speaks volumes.

Climate alarmism reached a new low Sunday as ABC’s “World News” featured a hit piece on Dr. S. Fred Singer, the esteemed Professor Emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia. In a segment disgracefully entitled “Welcome to ‘The Denial Machine,’” anchor Dan Harris disparaged Singer at every turn. With a picture of Singer behind his right shoulder, under which was displayed the words “THE SKEPTIC,” Harris began Kert Davies, an environmental activist, says Singer is connected to a whole web of organizations, many funded by oil and coal companies that have spent millions trying to convince the public there’s a real scientific debate about global warming slowing down government action on a phenomenon that could lead to storms, droughts, famines, massive refugee movements, and even wars. KERT DAVIES, GREENPEACE: That will be how people remember Fred Singer, as someone who tried to slow down the reaction to global warming and in fact, in the end, that is going to cost lives, and cause us lost species, and cost major economic damage around the world. How nice. On Easter Sunday, ABC News implied that an 84-year-old Ph.D. is thwarting science in a fashion that will cost lives.

Astounding, wouldn’t you agree? Sadly, there was more:In this new report, he argues global warming is just part of a natural cycle, and that our carbon emissions are not dangerous. We ran Singer’s data by climate scientists from Stanford, Princeton, and NASA who dismissed it with words like “fraudulent nonsense.” This is not, by the way, the first time Singer has set himself against mainstream scientific opinion. He also argued against the dangers of second-hand smoke, toxic waste, and nuclear winter. We asked Dr. Singer if he ever took money from energy companies. At first he denied it, and then he said yes he had received one unsolicited check from Exxon for $10,000. Wow. A whole $10,000? 

Note: See the story posted on ABC News entitled “Global Warming Denier: Fraud or ‘Realist’?” It disgracefully began, “His fellow scientists call him a fraud, a charlatan and a showman, but Fred Singer calls himself “a realist.” This is despicable!!!

I saw the piece and it was a disgraceful piece of journalism. It was almost as if scripted by Greenpeace themselves. The alarmists and their cohorts in the media may be feeling pressure after the Morano 500, the very successful ICCC conference with over 500 in attendance, the considerable new peer-review research knocking the legs out from under the so-called consensus science models and data, and the polls showing the public beginning to show fatigue or doubt about the issue. Why didn’t Harris ask Greenpeace how much they make off their alarmism ($2-3B/year) and why that wouldn’t affect their objectivity. Also why not name the scientists who called the NIPCC report fraudulent nonsense at Stanford, Princeton and NASA. We can guess who they are and if so they would be indeed be expert on fraudulent nonsense (as practicioners). It is ironic that ABC used Greenpeace and Princeton (Michael Oppenheimer no doubt, formerly with the Environmental Defense Fund) to attack Fred.  Greenpeace and the Environmental Defense Fund led the charge in the banning of DDT causing the death of tens of millions. Please if so inclined, comment back to ABC here.

John Coleman posted a story here on Icecap in November about the global warming SCAM that got the media’s attention. I was fortunate to be on the panel at the Heartland Institute’s ICCC with John Coleman and Art Horn, another TV meteorologist.  For me it was a trip back in time. I worked with John Coleman on Good Morning America and as the First Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and Art was one of my early students when I was a professor of Meteorolpgy at Lyndon State College back when the world thought the ice age was coming. I gave my talk on the role of the sun and oceans in climate change. Art talked about the media’s motivation for their alarmist viewpoint and John talked about why he spoke out and will continue to do so. 

John’s talk started: “It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; it is a SCAM. With those words, posted on the weather page of the website of the San Diego Television station where I am chief meteorologist, I came out of the closet and into the spotlight in the movement to debunk the wildly out of control, hysterical frenzy about the supposed imminent climatic catastrophe of Global Warming. And, how does it feel to be in the ring dueling it out with the global warming doomsayers? In the words of James Brown, “WOW. I feel Good.” You can read his full comments here.

He has 4 videos from KUSI on youtube. The founder of The Weather Channel speaks out against global warming Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.

When I was in sixth grade, I specifically remember reading in my science book about global cooling and the coming Ice Age. Some things change and some others never do. One thing that changes on a regular basis is science. When I started medical school, I was told that more than half of what I was taught during medical school would be proved incorrect by the end of my career. This is not an anomaly for just medicine. You see it throughout all fields of study when you are dealing with inexact sciences. The study of weather is certainly not exempt from this. If you think the people that study weather really have a firm grasp on what is going on, just watch the weather report on the local news for a few weeks and you’ll change your mind.

One thing that never changes is the desire by some to control the masses through environmental nonsense. In our current day and age, one of the ways this is manifested in the hysteria of man-made global warming. We are told that we must cut down on greenhouse gas emissions by cutting energy consumption presumptively by eliminating fossil fuel use. We are told that we must embrace “green technology” and buy hybrid cars to save the earth. This global warming hysteria continues to reach magnitude proportions in our government and has already manifested itself in a bill that permanently bans the incandescent light bulb a few years from now (sorry Edison!). Congress is pondering passing a law mandating fuel emissions to reach somewhere around 50 miles per gallon on all cars manufactured in this country. If that isn’t the quickest way to destroy the auto industry in this country, I don’t know what is.

Global warming, or global “climate change” as some like to call it is actually far from a scientific consensus. Scientists that do not prescribe to global warming are ridiculed, ostracized, and silenced. The Weather Channel founder, John Coleman, called man-made global warming the greatest scam in history. Proponents of this global warming hysteria have a specific goal of politicizing the weather, because if you can politicize the weather, you can control everyone. There’s a tornado-it must be OUR fault for global warming. There’s a tsunami-global warming. There are wildfires across California-global warming. Hurricane-global warming. Read more here.

Although the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in carbon dioxide levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy. In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors having to do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the influence of solar flares. There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the Medieval Warming Period, when the warming levels were considerably higher than they are now. Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as man-made, and many have made this opinion the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle.

This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political program. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice. This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact, play into the hands of the sinister-as-always corporate interests.

One way critics are silenced is by accusing them of ignoring “peer-reviewed science.” Yet oftentimes, peer reviews are nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable, and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers nodded through by experts and others given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Read more here.

As an attendee and speaker at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York City, I found it to be a profound experience and the best scientific meeting I had ever attended. From the President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus to John Stossel for luncheon speaker, to hundreds of scientists, economists, and world class statisticians in between, it was an intellectual feast. It was a meeting of realists.

The conference was organized by the Heartland Institute along with some 50 co-sponsors. According to Heartland’s president Joe Bast, Al Gore had been invited, and even offered his usual speaker fee of $200,000. Others from the Gore camp were also invited, yet did not show. Scientific accountability is not among their strong suits, when deceptions are so much more lucrative. Dozens of media did not take notice.

Dr. Fred Singer continued to contribute solid analyses of the global warming issues which he presented. He and 23 co-authors have written an excellent new summary. Singer introduced the recent findings of global warming complexities entitled Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate. This was the Summary for Policymakers from Singer’s new group the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change or NIPCC. The report is the perfect foil for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summary for Policy Makers.

What many people do not appreciate is that the UN’s IPCC has been an activist program from the very beginning. It has not been devoted to better understanding of the climate, but to develop documentation “proving” only a human link (read capitalist) to climate change. Considering natural forces on climate such as the influence of the Sun were off limits. Those IPCC documents have been historically drafted by international bureaucrats to better fit the UN and the IPCC political agendas. They have been known to re-write scientific conclusions without knowledge or approval of the originating authors. This is not science, nor a scientific process, but is hubristic (and destructive) politics, unbecoming of “world class” scientists.

In sharp contrast was Singer’s NIPCC Summary document written by 23 solid, identified scientists, a number of whom were quite available for discussion and questions at the meeting. This was quite a refreshing difference in candor and openness than what we’ve seen from the IPCC. Read more here.