Is AGW Melting Down?

In 1988, James Hansen testified before Congress concerning the rate of global warming. Hansen spoke as a NASA climatology expert. The projections of disaster were exacerbated by claims of human causation, and were correlated to the infamous “hockey stick” curve showing a dramatic increase in temperature over the last century.

Hansen’s hockey stick graph has been refuted but will not go away. The rise in temperature shown on Hansen’s graph was added by Hansen himself, and did not show up in the actual data. In other words, the rise in global temperature was an “adjustment” which Hansen added to the data.

And the cause has become politicized at an international level. The U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) got on board, but not until purging itself of scientists with dissenting opinions. The cause became radicalized at the Kyoto conference where a treaty was brandished that would create a global taxing and punishment power to force individual nations into compliance with more stringent emission controls.

Dissenters have been treated harshly for the past 20 years. Hansen himself has called for jailing industrial leaders that disagree with his data. And he has also attacked members of Congress who are skeptical of his increasingly hysterical warnings. He has claimed that NASA tried to muzzle him.

Now there is a message from Hansen’s supervisor at NASA (now retired). The letter, which is posted at the U.S. Senate Minority web page, is from

“Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fears soothsayer, [who] has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” [1400 on-the-job interviews attest to that].

“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” Theon wrote.

Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” he added.

“As Chief of several of NASA Headquarters’ programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research,” Theon wrote of his career. “This required a thorough understanding of the state of the science.

[emphasis added]

Regarding Hansen’s statement that denial of AGW is tantamount to denying the landing on the moon, astronaut Cunningham responded:

“Award-winning NASA Astronaut and Physicist Walter Cunningham of NASA’s Apollo 7 also recently chastised Hansen. “Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him,” Cunningham wrote in an essay in the July/August 2008 issue of Launch Magazine. “NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science,” Cunningham wrote. “

One individual has actually looked at the temperature measuring stations.

"Anthony Watts, former meteorologist for KHSL-TV, a CBS-TV affiliate in Redding, California, has examined 460 of the 1221 official climatic weather stations in the 48 lower states, and discovered multiple irregularities that are causing temperature data to skew higher than it should."

"I believe we will be able to demonstrate that some of the global warming increase is not from CO2 but from localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment," Watts told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on June 17, 2007. Watts examined temperature stations that the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) uses as part of its National Climatic Data Center. The NCDC has about 1,221 mostly rural weather observation stations around the country. Watts, who founded the web site surfacestations.org, has made it his mission to quality check weather stations to see if the data is being accurately captured. Watts noted one such weather station in California was "surrounded by asphalt and concrete, its also within 10 feet of buildings, and within 8 feet of a large metal cell tower that could be felt reflecting sunlight/heat. And worst of all, air conditioning units on the cell tower electronics buildings vent warm air within 10 feet of the sensor." Watts concluded, "I can tell you with certainty, the temperature data from this station is useless."

Watt's extensive data research was noted by Meteorologist Joseph Conklin on August 10, 2007: "The (U.S.) National Climate Data Center (NCDC) is in the middle of a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul of surface weather measurement, is a disaster. Urbanization has placed many sites in unsuitable locations - on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills! The data and approach taken by many global warming alarmists is seriously flawed. If the global data were properly adjusted for urbanization and station siting, and land use change issues were addressed, what would emerge is a cyclical pattern of rises and falls with much less of any background trend."

With bad starting data, unchecked modifications to the data, obvious activist hysteria demonstrated by the originating scientist, there is no telling what the actual story concerning warming might be. With the interference of ameliorating factors such as magnetic pole shifting, solar flare cycles and so on, anything can happen, it would appear.

One thing should definitely happen. Hansen should be removed from a position of influence, and solid transparent science should take over at NASA. There is no reason that this should have become the huge issue that it has. It is even more embarrassing that NASA has not squelched Hansen after 20 years of data abuse and political hysteria.