James Hansen Is Leaving NASA
Climate Maverick to Quit NASA
“Dr. Hansen had already become an activist in recent years, taking vacation time from NASA to appear at climate protests and allowing himself to be arrested or cited a half-dozen times. But those activities, going well beyond the usual role of government scientists, had raised eyebrows at NASA headquarters in Washington. “It was becoming clear that there were people in NASA who would be much happier if the ‘sideshow’ would exit,” Dr. Hansen said in an e-mail.”
– Why Does NASA Treat James Hansen Differently Than Other Employees?, earlier post
– Jim Hansen Arrested For Yelling or Something (Again), earlier post
Earlier posts
It’s about time.
10 years ago would not have been soon enough
Roger that
Good.
Retiring at 72 – why the rush?
“We’re going to leave a situation for young people and future generations that they may have no way to deal with.”
Glad he is going. Not because of his position or his advocacy because “I find his lack of faith disturbing.” I expect NASA employees to feel that they can protect us from meteors, land on Pluto, send humans outside the solar system. If NASA does not stand for “with the right preparation there is noting the young people and future generations can’t deal with,” the the agency is not worth any of my tax dollars.
I wish him success in expressing his message and becoming part of the discourse. Just not on my dime.
“If NASA does not stand for “with the right preparation there is noting
the young people and future generations can’t deal with,” the the agency
is not worth any of my tax dollars.”
Why does “dealing with” problems not seem to include using our knowledge to help prevent or at least mitigate their impact before we create them?
This will be good both for NASA and for Hansen.
His activitism has been compromising his scientific credibility, and it will be good for him to leave.
I agree.
From the article, it does not look like the supreme propagandist for man-made global climate change is going to quietly fade into much-deserved obscurity. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the temperatures and the sea levels are not rising, the polar bears are not dying, and the other breathless predictions of the global warming set are not coming to pass. Within a few years, all of this alarmist claptrap will be a distant memory, and unfortunately NASA’s brand will have been left badly damaged by Hansen.
It looks as if anti-scence climate denialism is alive and well from some readers of NASA Watch. Sad.
How true. Most of NASA is quite proud of Hansen’s work.
http://www.skepticalscience…
Resolving confusion over the Met Office on Global Warming
“Additionally, global surface temperatures
are not an adequate measure of global warming. In fact, more than 90%
of the overall warming of the planet goes into heating the oceans”
“The confusion arises from the fact that the thick blue line in
Figure 1 (the central Met Office prediction) does not rise very far
above the previous highest global surface temperatures in 2010, 2005, and 1998. However, by no means does this indicate that global warming has “stalled”.”
“A false sense of security. Although many natural influences have acted to dampen global
surface warming over the past decade, and potentially for the next 5
years if the Met Office prediction is correct, allowing this coincidence
to lull us into a false sense of security would be a mistake. “
Oh, I think he’s done good work. I just think that, since that his main interest has moved from understanding the science to influencing the politics, he should do his advocacy outside of NASA.
I don’t think he will “fade into obscurity;” to the contrary, I expect that, once free of NASA restraints, Hansen is likely to become much more vocal than ever.
Are you an anti-science denialist for not believing in the ether theory of light?
No connection. Completely irrelevant.
Don’t you know skepticism over one theory amounts to be being anti-science even if the theory doesn’t fit reality or fails to make accurate predictions?
* citation needed
Citation? Do you mean like the UK Met Office announcing in January that there was no statistically significant increase in global temperatures over the last 15 years? You can look that up yourself. Has the “hockey stick” been replaced by a pool cue? I am not anti-science; I am anti pseudo-science hyperbole of which Hansen was a master.
How about the other things you said – rising sea levels and polar bears?
Try this and that
Hey, like your rabbit theme since I have a pet rabbit 🙂 Thanks for the links, some nice data and graphs in there.
I went to good ol wikipedia as well –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
nice sea level rise graphs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
the map has quite a lot of loss of polar bear habitat
“Do you mean like the UK Met Office announcing in January that there was no statistically significant increase in global temperatures over the last 15 years? You can look that up yourself.”
Yes, you can look it up yourself. And when you do, you find that the British Met office sent out a press release stating that they did NOT say that global warming had stopped– that news story was wrong.
http://earthsky.org/earth/u…
Or, check out the Met office page on climate change here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk…
e.g.
http://www.theaustralian.co…
Thanks for the article 🙂 I didn’t know about the 20 year pause but from the article it seems that’s not inconsistent with systematic warming and doesn’t help out northcross much.
The oceans can be a huge heat sink after all as well.
Here’s what I was thinking of –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
And some graphs –
https://www.google.com/sear…
I’m not sure why they bothered to reference Pachauri after he so badly discredited himself over the Himalayan glacier mess (e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/e… ).
But then I can’t understand why he’s still head of IPCC after that either.
The sad thing about comments like yours is that the one thing that could really make this “alarmist claptrap” go away is evidence that mainstream climate science is wrong.
I keep asking for that evidence, and contrarians keep failing to produce it. But then, they can’t produce what doesn’t exist.
That is an interesting challenge. I always thought the burden of proof was on the person offering the hypothesis, not the other way around. Perhaps you can amuse us skeptics by playing back some of the predictions like, “By 2010, snow will be a thing of the past in Great Britain”.
But I am not offering a scientific hypothesis. I merely note that those who continually claim climate science is bogus have never managed to back up that claim with actual evidence.
Anyone can cite failed predictions by this or that scientist. Unfortunately, this does not ipso facto demonstrate that their entire body of work is wrong. Still less does it discredit the work of other scientists. Only facts can do that. And what I am saying is that those facts which can disprove global warming do not exist.
Despite what you might think, I would be very glad if they did. So would James Hansen.
Perhaps we could start with Hansen’s own predictions from the 1980s that have clearly not come to pass:http://hauntingthelibrary.w…
And as I say, this is only the start. Have you bothered to look at how Hansen’s Scenarios A and B have not come to pass all while we continue to dump more CO2 into the atmosphere? In fact, we are even about to bust the lower limit of his Scenario C, which was predicated on freezing CO2 at the levels of the year 2000.
The falsifying facts are out there, as data. Data does not lie, nor does data need a trumped-up “consensus.”
By “evidence,” I mean actual observations that will stand up to scrutiny by the scientific community. An example would be finding that Arctic ice was expanding year after year.
Merely stating once again that “falsifying facts are out there” does not cut any ice, or stop any of it from melting.
And if that actual evidence really was out there, telling me about it would be a waste of time. I can’t provide any grant money, nor do I have any pull with the Nobel Prize committee. As I frequently point out, anyone who could disprove global warming would be a hero. A Nobel Prize would be the least of the rewards he or she would gather.
“Perhaps we could start with Hansen’s own predictions from the 1980s that have clearly not come to pass”:
Well, except that the predictions have been, so far, pretty good, and definitely well within the quoted margins of error. http://www.guardian.co.uk/e…
The predictions only look bad if you crop the data set.
For what it’s worth, I compared the prediction from the 1979 National Academy of Sciences report (the climate sensitivity from this report was then used in IPCC value), and graphed it to actual temperatures. Here is the comparison, spanning thirty-five years of data.
And now for Hansen’s own Scenarios A, B, and C and how they stack up to the reality of data.
http://www.kaltesonne.de/?p…
A massive sigh of relief at NASA, Only Hansen could have caused letters of protest to come from NASA’s great and good. he was every bit as reckless, in my view, with his scientific pronouncements as he was at protest meetings.
Science can do without people who make ludicrous claims like coal fired power stations are factories of death.
JIm is a fine scientist. He will be missed. But he has built up an excellent team at GISS that should continue NASA’s leading role in climate science.
Folks
I think Dr. Jim finally realized that NASA was holding him back. No, not the last we will hear of him for sure!
tinker
Hansen’s science was good. His public advocacy, however, should have been clearly and completely separated from his official position.
Society needs scientists, and society needs people to argue for the government policies they believe in. But those should not be the same people.
Scientists shouldn’t have an emotional investment in the results of their research, so they can be open to whatever their experiments tell them, no matter whether it’s expected or unexpected. And scientists should be very careful to stick to reporting the objective facts that their evidence points to, not mingling that with the subjective judgements about what political actions should be taken based on those facts.
The more a person is involved in fighting for a political cause related to his or her scientific work, the more bias is likely to unconsciously work its way into that scientist’s work. Also, it makes the scientific results less credible when the come from someone who strongly advocates for a political position. In this way, a scientist publicly pushing a political cause can actually do more harm for that cause than good. Scientists who don’t advocate a political position are more likely to have their scientific results carry more weight with all sides in a political debate. Those who strongly fight for a particular position are unlikely to have their work taken seriously by anyone who doesn’t already share that opinion, even if the scientific results are valid.
So, I think it’s very good that Hansen is leaving NASA. He hasn’t belonged there for a long time.
chriswilson’s argument is confused. Any scientist has an obligation to inform other scientists and the public about her findings. This obligation applies to NASA scientists, and it is defined in the enabling legislation for NASA. It is not “politics” to note that we are doing something very dangerous to our atmosphere and that the only known antidote is to reduce dramatically our pollution of the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. It would have been irresponsible and unethical for Hansen, as a leading atmospheric scientist, not to explain what is causing climate change and what avenues are available to combat it. Do you really think that a scientist should limit herself to publishing in technical journals and leave the interpretation to politicians?
James Hansen did what any conscientious planetary scientist would do, he noticed a problem with the planet we all live on, and he didn’t sit down and shut up when pressure was applied from the people who make money from selling stuff which alters our atmosphere.
Climate change is not a one or a zero. If a few volcanoes erupt, like the one in Iceland that shut down air traffic in Europe, then it is not so bad. If someone’s prediction is off, that does not change the basic fact that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation from the earth that would otherwise be lost to space. CO2 increases, radiation decreases, the earth warms up. If we have a few volcanoes it doesn’t warm up so much. How come when the planetary scientists tell us that they can see an earth-like planet 13 light years away, we believe them, but when they say putting millions of years worth of carbon deposits into our atmosphere will change our climate and we need to make changes that might reduce the stock price of BP, we don’t believe a word.
“How come when the planetary scientists tell us that they can see an
earth-like planet 13 light years away, we believe them, but when they
say putting millions of years worth of carbon deposits into our
atmosphere…”
It’s an apples to oranges comparison.
When you look at the variations in the red-shift of a star over time, or variations in the intensity of light from a star, you can see patterns that have no other plausible explanation than a planet.
The Earth’s climate is an enormously complex system with a huge number of variables involved. Human-generated carbon is one of those. We have some hard data on a recent correlation between human-generated atmospheric CO2 and warming of the planet. But there are so many other variables involved. The Earth’s climate has varied drastically in the past, and we don’t fully understand those variations. Why did the last major ice age start? Why did it end? Even such basic questions have no consensus answer among scientists.
So, what we are left with is plausible theories about the effects of human-generated CO2, but a lack of conclusive evidence. It’s a totally different situation from the exoplanet discovery situation.
When the evidence is difficult to judge, there will be a range of opinions about it. People tend to believe the interpretations that mesh best with their pre-existing world views, or that agree with the beliefs of those in their own social circles. And people tend to think that those who disagree have ulterior motives. It’s less threatening to our own world views to believe that those who disagree are either idiots or liars, not people who have reasonable judgement but come to different conclusions.
I think everyone should have a bit more respect for people who disagree with them on the subject of climate change. None of us really know as much as we think we do, and we’re much more biased in our interpretations of data than any of us would like to believe.
“The Earth’s climate is an enormously complex system with a huge number of variables involved” What a cop out, if you don’t understand it, then no-one can The facts remain, CO2 absorbs heat, it is increasing, the amount roughly correlates with 1/2 of global emissions, (the rest acidifying the seas) no amount of attacks on the messenger change the facts.
Looks like Dr. Hansen and other co-authors are now going to advocate nuclear power in the place of fossil fuels. James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia movement says the same thing.
http://cen.acs.org/articles…
It will be interesting to watch this develop as it is a major schism in the environmental movement that says that we can run a civilization of 9 billion plus souls on solar panels and wind turbines…
Interesting and welcome news. First responsible proposal from Hansen I’ve heard of. Regardless of whether or not global warming is real, it’s painfully clear that with available or attainable technology we have no alternative but to go nuclear in a big way or ride an inexorable path to massive economic decline that will destroy modern civilization. Windmills and solar panels (other than space based, maybe) are delusional and destructive dead ends as anything more than niche players. If the enviro-nuts are willing to give up on them and other nonsense like the carbon credit con game and go nuke, we can quit worrying about whether global warming is real or not and move on with the one solution that we all really need anyway.