By Anthony Watts, WattsUpWithThat
I received this presentation of the “Bjerknes Lecture” that Dr. James Hansen gave at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on December 17th. There are the usual things one might expect in the presentation, such as this slide which shows 2008 on the left with the anomalously warm Siberia and the Antarctic peninsula.
Source: James Hansen, GISS. See larger image here
There is also some new information in Hansen’s presentation, including a claim about CO2 sensitivity and coal causing a “runaway greenhouse effect”. Hansen makes a bold statement that he has empirically derived CO2 sensitivity of our global climate system. I had to chuckle though, about the claim “Paleo yields precise result”. Apparently Jim hasn’t quite got the message yet that Michael Mann’s paleo results are, well, dubious, or that trees are better indicators of precipitation than temperature.
See larger image here
In fact in the later slide text he claims he’s “nailed” it:
See larger image here
Hansen is also talking about the “runaway” greenhouse effect, citing that old standby Venus in part of his presentation. He claims that coal and tar sands will be our undoing. Hansen writes: “In my opinion, if we burn all the coal, there is a good chance that we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale (a.k.a. oil shale), I think it is a dead certainty. That would be the ultimate Faustian bargain. Mephistopheles would carry off shrieking not only the robber barons, but, unfortunately and permanently, all life on the planet.”
I have to wonder though, if he really believes what he is saying. Perhaps he’s never seen this graph for CO2 from Bill Illis and the response it gives to IR radiation (and thus temperature) as it increases. It’s commonly known that CO2’s radiative return response is logarithmic with increasing concentration, so I don’t understand how Hansen thinks that it will be the cause of a runaway effect. The physics dictate that the temperature response curve of the atmosphere will be getting flatter as CO2 increases. Earth has also had much higher concentrations of CO2 in past history, and we didn’t go into runaway then. Here is the link to the presentation. Here is Anthony’s full post and comments.
By: Joseph L. Bast and James M. Taylor, Heartland Institiute
On November 28, the global warming alarmist Web site “RealClimate” posted a ridiculously lame attack by Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt against ”Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate,” the summary for policymakers of the 2008 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
The NIPCC report was written by S. Fred Singer, Ph.D. and an additional 23 contributors, including some of the most accomplished atmospheric scientists in the world. The paper references approximately 200 published papers and scientific reports in support of its conclusions. It provides strong evidence that human activity is not causing a global warming crisis.
Mann and Schmidt call the NIPCC report “dishonest” and “nonsense,” a document “served up” by “S. Fred Singer and his merry band of contrarian luminaries (financed by the notorious ‘Heartland Institute’.” But instead of critiquing the scientific arguments presented in the NIPCC report, Mann and Schmidt simply dismiss and belittle them and refer readers mostly to their own past blog comments. Time spent following those links reveals a hodgepodge of opinions and superficial comments, a boatload of rhetoric, and very little science--an entirely unsatisfactory way to support such serious charges.
The reference to financing seems intended to imply that the authors of the NIPCC report were paid by The Heartland Institute, which is not true. RealClimate has been informed of this, but hasn’t corrected its false claim. To go on implying it anyway tells you all you need to know about the integrity of the RealClimate authors.
And what about “the notorious ‘Heartland Institute’”? It’s a 24-year-old national nonprofit organization that gets 95 percent of its funding from non-energy-related donors and 84 percent of its funding from non-corporate sources (in 2007). It has a long history of publishing reliable scientific and economic analysis of global warming. Heartland’s credibility is certainly less questionable than that of RealClimate, a front group created specifically to attack global warming skeptics by Fenton Communications, a truly “notorious” PR agency.
Mann and Schmidt’s assault on Fred Singer reminds us of Canadian environmentalist Lawrence Solomon’s observation, in his book The Deniers, that the qualifications of most alarmists in the global warming debate fall short of those of the skeptics. Now consider Mann’s and Schmidt’s qualifications. Mann is the author of the “hockey stick” temperature graph that did so much to fuel global warming hysteria when it was featured in an IPCC report, but which a Congressionally appointed panel of experts found was not supported by scientific data. Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeler at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and in recent weeks has been frantically trying to explain why his organization falsely reported that October 2008 was the warmest October in recorded history. Many climate researchers believe Mann and Schmidt are deliberately falsifying temperature data to keep their global warming scare going a few more years. With no apparent sense of irony or shame, these two discredited authors call one of the world’s leading scientists “dishonest.”
Mann and Schmidt pretend to be engaged in a scientific debate over global warming, but they are not. They have banned global warming “skeptics” from posting on their blog, resort to ad hominem attacks against anyone who dissents, and have repeatedly declined invitations to appear in public forums to debate their critics. They are what the history of their organization says they are: A PR shop for discredited global warming alarmism.
Persons interested in understanding the real science of global warming can find it at Heartland’s Global Warming Facts Web site or at any of the many other sites linked on that site, or by attending the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, taking place in New York on March 8-10, 2009. Read more here.
By Chris Horner, Planet Gore
Well, on the heels of creating a new position for the unconfirmable Carol Browner to lord over Senate-confirmed cabinet officials in pursuit of the global-warming agenda, it now seems that “Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is reporting on its blog that John Holdren, the past president of that group and a prominent voice pressing for action to curb greenhouse gases and boost energy research, appears to be President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for science adviser.” At least this will require Senate confirmation.
I direct you to a little tome called Red Hot Lies, in which Holdren makes several appearances. First up is the back door of a “temporary nominating group” for global-warming activists established in the National Academy of Sciences, enabling otherwise unlikely members to be elected, who then forming blocking minorities keeping inconvenient scholars out. As I write in RHL (all citations for the below have been omitted):
Vocal alarmists Stephen Schneider and John Holdren, a professor at Harvard who is primarily employed by the Woods Hole Research Center (an environmental advocacy group, not to be confused with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution which is a research organization - both discussed [later in the book]) were also elected from the temporary nominating group, so we see the cadre of global warming alarmists elected to the NAS actually came in through other than the regular channels. And the process self-perpetuates.
Note the latter practice, which Holdren also embodies, of alarmists using credentials from an academic perch where they may not be all that active to push an activist agenda through other, pressure group perches where they are in fact quite busy.
[T] he vocal Holdren, who predicted in the mid-1980s that climate-related catastrophes might kill as many as one billion people before the year 2020 but now brushes away such failed catastrophism with: “That the impacts of global climate disruption may not become the dominant sources of environmental harm to humans for yet a few more decades cannot be a great consolation.” Despite his outside affiliations and activism he typically instead carries the Harvard tag, lending the institution’s academic prestige to his environmentalist advocacy. He also happens to be a longtime collaborator with none other than failed prognosticator of doom Paul Ehrlich. Typical of their doomsaying they collaborated to hold a “Cassandra Conference” in 1988 (Cassandra is the lass from Greek mythology whose prophecies were always true and always ignored).
It is no surprise that it was at the urging of the Sierra Club that Ehrlich produced his seminal work of alarmism, The Population Bomb - in which, as with today’s alarmism, the enemy was “Western society” engaging in “the rape and murder of the planet for economic gain” (recall how Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope cut his teeth at Zero Population Growth). Holdren’s name also pops up in various, largely successful efforts to elevate taxpayer funding of the global warming industry.
Holdren was also enlisted by Scientific American in its effort to smear and otherwise discredit Bjorn Lomborg (a sorry event also chronicled in the same chapter, “The Establishment Attacks"). With a Holdren nomination, the President-Elect will have made his intentions unmistakably clear. This will unleash a policy battle royale and, fortunately, likely the ultimate defeat of the alarmist agenda. See post here.
See also excerpts from this post Back Doors, Weird Science : Just as I predicted in a book out just in the nick of time, the “back door” entrance to the National Academy of Sciences is bearing very sour fruit, affirming that the whistle should have been blown on this degradation of standards before it got out of hand and - as it is apparently about to - resulted in serious policy consequences after its beneficiaries entered positions of governmental responsibility riding their scientific laurels of questionable heritage. In addition to the back-door man John Holdren, Greenwire reports that Barack Obama is expected to name a professor of marine ecology tomorrow as the next head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to sources close to the nominee. The NOAA pick, Jane Lubchenco, is a conservationist who has focused much of her research on climate change, ecosystems and marine reserves. The announcement is expected at a press conference tomorrow in Chicago, where Obama will introduce other key advisers on his “science team.”