The title of my diary is borrowed from a WSJ opinion piece,
www.wsj.com/…
To set the stage, I have copied the opening paragraphs. The section in bold is my highlight.
James E. Hansen wiped sweat from his brow. Outside it was a record-high 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, as the NASA scientist testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources during a prolonged heat wave, which he decided to cast as a climate event of cosmic significance. He expressed to the senators his “high degree of confidence” in “a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.”
With that testimony and an accompanying paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Mr. Hansen lit the bonfire of the greenhouse vanities, igniting a world-wide debate that continues today about the energy structure of the entire planet...
But the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s predictions affords an opportunity to see how well his forecasts have done—and to reconsider environmental policy accordingly.
Mr. Hansen’s testimony described three possible scenarios for the future of carbon dioxide emissions.
He called Scenario A “business as usual,” as it maintained the accelerating emissions growth typical of the 1970s and ’80s. This scenario predicted the earth would warm 1 degree Celsius by 2018.
Scenario B set emissions lower, rising at the same rate today as in 1988. Mr. Hansen called this outcome the “most plausible,” and predicted it would lead to about 0.7 degree of warming by this year.
He added a final projection, Scenario C, which he deemed highly unlikely: constant emissions beginning in 2000. In that forecast, temperatures would rise a few tenths of a degree before flatlining after 2000.
Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios—enough to determine which was closest to reality. And the winner is Scenario C.
Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16.
Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t.
And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago.
See what they did there. “If you ignore all the data points that could disprove my hypothesis, then my hypothesis is correct.” The authors of the article work for the Cato Institute, and have built quite a following on twitter, with various attempts of takedown of climate science. But this one is truly bizarre.
What really happened ?
What really happened is best understood by the chart above, which I have copied from RealClimate.org. James Hansens’ predictions are described by Scenario A and C (which were supposed to bound reality), and Scenario B (which was supposed to be close to reality). Reality is somewhere between Hansen’s Scenario’s B and C. Climate models are complicated, and reducing them to predictions for temperature rise requires several forcing functions. The 3 scenarios were supposed to bracket the realistic range of forcing functions, and describe the most likely ones.
Given that this is now a 30 year old prediction, that is a very impressive accomplishment. The RealClimate.org article also describes how Pat Michaels (the lead author of the WSJ opinion piece) had previously attempted to mislead Congress via a doctored version of Hansens’ prediction (he omitted Scenario’s B and C, and tried to suggest that Scenario A was the only prediction).
This is breathtaking example of intellectual dishonesty. You know what is worse ? People are lapping it up. For example, here is a diary at Redstate, , which ends thus
If Hansen were a religious leader his cult would be falling apart by now. He isn’t though, he is a hack scientist who created a political agenda. An agenda that allowed the politically connected to take money out of the public’s pocket and put it in theirs. While there is no hope that any of the people involved with this will see the insides of jails they so richly deserve we can hope that future generations look back on this scam and learn from our mistakes.
The stupidity is so mind boggling that the mind hurts contemplating it.