While my flaming headline ("Dr. James Hansen of GISS is a Liar and Fraud") received a fair amount of attention, people a lot smarter than I are carefully documenting the facts that led to my unavoidable conclusion.
One such appears on the Telegraph today. Christopher Booker (corrected link) notes that Dr. Hansen’s GISS center is alone in seeing continued warming throughout the world.
Pointing out that laws supported by Hansen, Al Gore, and others will cost tens of trillions of dollars and severely limit freedoms throughout the world for the generations, Booker rightly contends that those proposing such a retreat from liberty be damn well sure they’re right.
On this point, the evidence against Hansen is compelling:
* Hansen's monthly temperature reports are wildly out of line with every other global temperature measure, and the delta increases each month
* Three of the four global temperature measures have shown world temps flat or cooling since 2001, with Hansen the exception
* Hansen's NASA rejects satellite temperatures, relying instead on ground-based mercury systems, while the other three would kill for the NASA satellite data
* Satellite data--of both temperature and ocean levels--increasingly disagree with Hansen's reports
* Hansen, unlike the leading scientists of the other three bodies, stands alone in calling for international dictatorship to combat global warming
* Hansen is the most politically active of the leading scientists in the field
* Hansen has a lifetime's reputation to lose if he's wrong
Booker points out the starkness of the contrast between GISS and everyone else who studies climate:
The other three all show a flattening out after 2001 and a marked downward plunge of 0.6 degrees Celsius in 2007/8, equivalent to almost all the net warming recorded in the 20th century. (For comparisons see “Is the Earth getting warmer, or colder?” by Steven Goddard on The Register website.)
The meat of Booker’s piece, though, is the outstanding work of two scientists who someday may be credited as humanity’s liberators from the despotism of global warming liars: Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre.
Watts runs the best climate and weather blog on the planet, Watts Up With That. McIntyre is the man who has exposed more fraud in the global warming community than any other human being:
It was McIntyre who last year forced Hansen to publish revised figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest years of the 20th century were not in the 1990s, as Hansen had claimed, but in the 1930s. He has now shown that Hansen had been adjusting almost all his pre-1970 global temperature figures downwards, by as much as 0.5 degrees, and his post-1970 figures upwards.
In so doing, McIntyre exposed Hansen as a fraud. No reasonable person could conclude that Hansen was simply wrong, that he overlooked something. As I said, Hansen has a lifetime of work depending on global warming’s worst case scenario. He wouldn’t overlook a thing.
But were he to find, deep in the crevasses of his data, that his apocalyptic conclusions are wrong, that CO2 does not force catastrophic climate change, that the earth’s warm spell of the last 100 years was mild compared to others, that a cool spell, not more heating, is upon us–if Hansen digested all of these things, then he would have to conclude that his 20 years of ranting make him a failure in what’s become his life’s work.
Given the choice of owning up to error or lying through data, it’s pretty clear that Hansen lied. He lied about temperatures in the 1930s, and he lies, every day, about temperatures today. He gives cred to radical politicians who crave your freedom the way a vampire craves your blood. He advocates a new, global theocracy built on the phony religion of environmental whackness. He advocates riots to change the laws before nature proves him wrong.
It is still too early to suggest that the recent drop in temperatures shown by everyone but him [Hansen] is proof that global warming has stopped. But the fact is that not one of those vaunted computer models predicted what has happened to temperatures in recent years. Yet it is on those models (and Hansen’s alarmist figures) that our politicians are basing all their proposals for irrevocably changing our lives.
For the sake of your freedom and your children’s freedoms, stop James Hansen. I called Hansen out big time, and I’m just a computer geek. Perhaps more scientists will take a chance and expose Hansen for the fraud he is.
Notes:
See this Denver Post article from 2006.
Many thanks to Tom Nelson for the kind link. I help my readers wander over to his site.