No Flooding in Manhattan, but Hansen Jumps the Shark Anyway.

Posted on by Geoff ChambersIn Uncategorized2 Minutes Read

There’s a new article at Earth System Dynamics entitled “Young people’s burden: requirement of negative CO2 emissions” by Hansen, Marcott et al. (“al” being a number of unfamiliar names from Britain, the USA, France and China.)

As the title hints, it’s more about how to control the world’s energy policy for the next hundred years or so (a thousand year Reich was always an unrealistic goal) than about the science of climate, but what article on climate science isn’t?

I leave it to others to explore the arcane details of the “science,” and I simply note the article’s open control freakery. The abstract begins with an opinion on the ideal sea level, and the article goes on to praise a judge for supporting an action against the USA by a dishy young defender of the planet from Oregon by the name of Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana. I’m all for citizens taking action against the powers that be, but what’s this to do with Earth System Dynamics?

There’s an article by James Dyke, an editor of Earth System Dynamics, who admits in his Disclosure Statement to having handled the Hansen article (and washing his hands afterwards) at the Conversation.

Comments have already taken an interesting turn, thanks to my good friend Ming Fangjian and a certain Robin Guenier, who comments widely on everything pertaining to the Paris Agreement.

I bring this to the attention of Cliscep readers because this seems to me to be one of those occasions where sceptics can make a difference. I’m thinking of the time, for instance, when Adam Corner of the Guardian reblogged his link to Lewandowsky’s Moon Hoax paper at his obscure blog, and Barry Woods, Foxgoose and others piled in and provoked Lew into shooting himself in the bottom, provoking hilarity throughout the sceptical world.

Dr Dyke, ex lecturer in Complex Systems, now lecturer in Sustainability Science, and Handler of Hansen for Earth Systems Dynamics, is an old hand at Climate Onanism. To his credit, he has shown on previous Conversation threads that he is capable of participating in two handed discussions, and even of providing mutual satisfaction. He is not cut from the Lewandowsky / Cook cloth.

Do read his article, and the Hansen paper, and think thereon. And I hope our many intelligent, thoughtful and fair-minded readers will add their thoughts to his article. A comment here at Cliscep is always welcome, but in the grand order of things it is a comment wasted, since we’re just a bunch of unsupported unimportant layabouts. But Dyke at the Con is supported by forty British Universities and a half a dozen government agencies. Go there and do your bit for science.

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11 Comments

  1. Hansen is as big a kook as is Hawking since they are both screeching owl crazy enough to claim in public that Earth could turn out like Venus thanks to white Republican males.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Thanks for the link Geoff, I’ve put a comment at the Con, mentioning the flooding in New York thing.
    Hansen’s latest alarmist nonsense is already at the Indy and no doubt will soon be promoted at the Graun as well.

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  4. I’ve left a comment along the lines of what Ron said above. No response. They’re apparently happy to repeat Hansen’s negative emissions/geo-engineering nonsense based on his nonsense about present warming compared to the last interglacial, and just go from there. Climate doom and gloom at the Conversation need not be science-based; in fact, it seems almost obligatory that it isn’t.

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  5. I just put another comment at the Conv, in response to someone claiming ‘undeniable truth’:

    It is certainly not an “undeniable truth” that “AGW will end up costing trillions of dollars per year well before mid-century.”

    Economic models are notoriously unreliable. And these economic models are built on top of climate model projections which have also been shown to be wrong, especially those by James Hansen, as I pointed out above.
    Here is another example     of Hansen’s failed predictions: he said in 2008 that the summer Arctic ice would disappear in 5-10 years.

    Meanwhile, in the real world natural disasters are down, not up as claimed by climate alarmists.

    When AGW was first proposed, it was regarded as a benefit to mankind. This was generally agreed until the current politically motivated hysteria took over in the 1980s.

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  6. The only way to have a “negative carbon footprint” is to either die or never be born. Hansen is simply pushing the xenocidal madness at the heart of climate extremism.
    As to the $500+ trillion US he is “estimating” that is a figure even Dr. Evil would be embarrassed to quote.
    Hansen is actually much worse and anti science than Hawking on this.

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  7. To get an idea of how bad the Hansen article is, take this, from p.589, discussing a graph of simulated global temperatures up to 2200 for different forcings, assuming either a 2%/year increase, or reductions of CO2 emissions of 3 or 6%.

    The most important conclusion from Fig. 12a is the proximity of results for the cases with emission reductions of 6 and 3 %/yr. Although Hansen et al. (2013a) called for emission reduction of 6%/yr to restore CO2 to 350ppm by 2100, that rate of reduction may have been regarded as implausibly steep by a federal court in 2012, when it declined to decide whether the US was violating the public trust by causing or contributing to dangerous climate change (Alec L v. Jackson, 2012). Such a concern is less pressing for emission reductions of 3%/year. Note that reducing global emissons at a rate of 3 %/yr (or more steeply) maintains global warming at less than 1.5°C above preindustrial temperature.

    However, end-of-century temperature still rises 0.5°C or more above the prior Holocene maximum with consequences for slow feedbacks that are difficult to foresee. Desire to minimize sea level rise spurs the need to get global temperature back into the Holocene range. That goal preferably should be achieved on the timescale of a century or less, because paleoclimate evidence indicates that the response time of sea level to climate change is 1–4 centuries (Grant et al., 2012, 2014) for natural climate change, and if any- thing the response should be faster to a stronger, more rapid human-made climate forcing. The scenarios that reduce CO2 to 350 ppm succeed in getting temperature back close to the Holocene maximum by 2100 (Fig. 12b), but they require extractions of atmospheric CO2 that range from 153 PgC in the scenario with 6 %/yr emission reductions to 1630 PgC in the scenario with +2 %/yr emission growth

    This barbarous little piece of prose, chosen more or less at random, is essentially just reading off the results from a graph representing model output of predictions (yes, they’re predictions, whatever Trenberth says) of global temperature two centuries into the future. As such, it’s no more intellectually challenging than a task set in a first year science exam. But embedded in it we find:

    – a reminder of an exhortation made by the author in a previous paper as to what the world should do, at his bidding.

    – a speculation as to what a judge may have thought of this exhortation in making his judgement, and what he might have thought of a different exhortation, based on this current model output.

    – an observation that we don’t know what the model output means for actual future temperatures and sea level rise. (“…consequences for slow feedbacks that are difficult to foresee.”)

    – an exhortation to do more than the measures contained in the model input in order to obtain a more radical lowering of temperature, and to do it faster (“a century or less”) because of “palaeoclimate evidence.”

    – the reading off of how many PgC (petagrams of carbon?) would be required to get to where we want to be in 2200.

    In a comment under the article at the Conversation Jaime Jessop says:

    This is not science. I shall refrain from venturing an opinion on what it is.

    Identifying what it is is a thankless task, but I think we should try.

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  10. Hansen has been funded by Big Beanz:

    “Hansen publicly endorsed Democrat John Kerry for president in 2004 and received a $250,000 donation from the charitable foundation headed by Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. Hansen also has acted as a consultant to Gore’s slide-show presentations on “global warming,” on which the movie is based.”

    http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/02/22/why-was-media-silent-flashback-nasa-james-hansen-received-250000-from-partisan-heinz-foundation-endorsed-dem-john-kerry-for-pres-in-2004/

    The $250K was the Heinz Environmental Award: http://www.heinzawards.net/recipients/james-hansen
    He has won several other Rewards, (sorry, Awards):

    http://www.heinzawards.net/news/james_hansen_internationallyknown_climate_scientist_received_a_29th_annual_common_wealth_award_of_distinguished_service

    “James Hansen, internationally-known climate scientist, received a 29th Annual Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service. This prestigious award recognizes individuals who advance and enrich society through their life’s work.”

    He also recieved the Asahi Glass Foundation Blue Planet Award, which is 50M Yen, around $550,000
    http://www.af-info.or.jp/en/blueplanet/list.html

    The year before it was the UK’s very own Bob Watson, IPCC chairman before Pachauri. The list is extremely interesting, some very famous names on there, selfless scientists all, (well most). In 2009 Lord Stern got the cheque. Further back there was Maurice Strong, and Gro Harlem Brundtland, who put her name to the Brundtland Report which became Agenda 21. Lots of IPCC names.

    John Reid has it about right here: http://blackjay.net/?page_id=356

    THE SUBVERSION OF SCIENCE BY GREEN-LEFT POLITICS
    “Nowadays most scientists are paid by the government. What passes for science has largely become taxpayer-funded Environmentalism. Environmentalism has taken over much of science.

    Scientists discover, understand and inform.

    Environmentalists preach.

    It works like this: activists use science to push for international action on a science-related issue in an area such as health or environment. Then, an international agreement is established, and the science on which it is has been based becomes institutionalized and funded by government. Time and again, when this happens, “the science” stops being science. This is because the scientists working on the relevant topic start being advocates and stop being researchers. After all, they are now being paid by the bureaucracy to support a particular doctrine, not to discover new stuff.

    Real science, which requires a sceptical and innovative frame of mind, then withers on the vine.”

    Liked by 1 person

  11. Wow, a quick lurking at the misnamed “Conversation”, and the only thing to do is to quietly leave and let the climate loons chatter on.

    Like

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