Hansen’s Temperature Analysis: Today’s Normal is Yesterday’s Extreme–and Nobody Cares

Yesteryear’s climate extremes are today’s climate normals. Yet we are largely oblivious and better off. A hundred years from now the same will be true. Ho hum….

But not everyone thinks this way. Take NASA’s James Hansen for example.

Hansen has recently published a prominent paper (in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS) and placed a prominent op-ed (in the Washington Post) that are aimed at raising the public’s awareness of the impacts of climate change, both now and in the future. In a rather candid admission for a scientific paper (and one which in most cases would have resulted in an immediate rejection), Hansen (and co-authors) proclaim that “…we were motivated in this research by an objective to expose effects of human-made global warming as soon as possible…” To drive the point home further, Hansen’s op-ed was headlined “Climate change is here — and worse than we thought.”…

Rapid Sea Level Rise? To the Contrary, Nature Says

“The short-term rate of global sea level rise has decreased by about 25% since the release of the AR4—and a new paper shows that some 15% of the observed rise comes not from global warming, but instead from global dewatering…. [R]ather than raising its projections of sea level rise, perhaps the IPCC ought to consider lowering them once again.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is under pressure to revisit its projections of the expected amount of sea level rise by the year 2100. Many rather influential types are pushing for the IPCC to dramatically increase its central estimate by some 2-3 times above the value given in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

Not so fast!

Nature speaks with a contrary voice, political agendas aside. The short-term rate of global sea level rise has decreased by about 25% since the release of the AR4—and a new paper shows that some 15% of the observed rise comes not from global warming, but instead from global dewatering.…

Halloween Hangover: Ehrlich, Holdren, Hansen Unretracted

“If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

– Paul Ehrlich, quoted in Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 35.

“As University of California physicist John Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”

–  Paul Ehrlich, The Machinery of Nature, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986, p. 274.

In the name of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and James Hansen (et al.) have made doom-and-gloom predictions about business-as-usual in an attempt to shock humanity into immediate legislative action and lifestyle changes.

It did not work. The elapsed predictions have failed to come to pass. Little wonder that new installments of climate alarmism, such as Juliet Eilperin’s “25% of Wild Mammal Species Face Extinction: Global Assessment Paints ‘Bleak Picture,’ Scientists Say, and Figure of Those at Risk Could Be Higher” in the Washington Post (October 7), don’t register with voters.…