Thursday
Jan062011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Hansen's predictions
Jan 6, 2011 Climate: other A wonderful roundup of some of James Hansen's predictions and how they turned out. No guesses who has put this must-read post together...
Reader Comments (28)
I wonder of James Hansen's daughter is ZDB? There is a similarity.
The article at
http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/
- the addendum to the Skeptics dictionary
I have spent time pointing out to AGW adherents on one or two blogs that Hansen has rarely been right - waste of typing. They still see him as a visionary. I could never decide whether intelligent people (as most of them are) were just blind to his faults or just denied them. It must be a mixture of both I suppose. Often now people just deny he ever said these things (because someone on a warmist website told them that it was just nasty sceptics telling lies about him).
After one AGWer said that nobody had said that there would be warmer winters - I pointed to Hansen's Feb 2008 quote in the UK saying "that recent warm UK winters were a sure sign of Climate Change". I was told that we only had the reporters word that he had said it. He stood on a platform and told everybody. The denial runs deep.
Actually this post linked to above from Omni shone a light on these behaviours - for me at any rate.
His 'forecasts' (in quotes, since they are more properly described as 'fearful imaginings') have contributed to a shocking waste of time, money, and other resources over the past 30 years. But worst of all, they have contributed to a negative, destructive, and deeply damaging foreboding about the future as pushed on to children all over the world. What a legacy. We may laugh at his 'forecasts', and his histrionics, but we cannot laugh at their impact.
Here is another, from 1989.
Source: http://dir.salon.com/books/int/2001/10/23/weather/index.html
Credit: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/the-end-of-line-for-the-scam/#comment-28345
Well, Hansen is an activist scientist. This is what they do.
From active scientists to active volcanos (sez I, hoping to escape the sin of offtopicness).
Eyjafjallajokull seems to be awaking. A day ago a handful of tremors appeared on this site: http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/myrdalsjokull/
At this moment there are three dozen tremors showing around Eyja and its big brother Myrdals. Scaaaary! If the mighty Hekla joins in we may need Rogets Thesaurus to describe the mess.
Brent: "we may need Rogets Thesaurus to describe the mess." and you think this off topic!
But his a true prophet of the AGW and therefore never wrong, when reality fails to match his ‘claims ‘ its reality that is at fault. Understanding that is the key to understand just why Hansen is treated like a god amongst men by AGW supporters.
"Understanding that is the key to understand just why Hansen is treated like a god amongst men by AGW supporters."
Because, he's on the game!
Re Brent Hargreaves
May just be a change of instrumentation according to my favorite volcano blog
http://bigthink.com/ideas/26425
"The IMO now installed the new seismometers around Katla and Eyjafjallajökull, so there is more and much more sensitive monitoring equipment there. So you will definitely measure more quakes."
and
"The other problem with that area is that its freezing cold in Iceland, so frost might also generate false quakes."
Frost quakes? Well I never. Learn something new every day, unless you're a climate scientist I suppose
There are several Real Climate blog posts that discuss whether James Hansen's early model predictions in the late 80s proved correct. Two of them are here and here.
To my untrained eye, the graph shows the temperature rise in the last two decades is below Hansen's best case scenario, C. Yet, reading Gavin Schmidt's explanation, it is the middle of the road prediction, Scenario B, that turns out Hansen nailed right... well, almost. As for Scenario A, it is better if we don't speak of it anymore.
There is a change in the quality of Gavin's spin between those two assessments in 2007 and 2009, because additional observations do show real temps are still below Scenario C, yet Gavin says, "it seems that the Hansen et al ‘B’ projection [of the old GISS model] is likely running a little warm compared to the real world". However, he correctly predicted that there is warming! His next paragraph begins with, "The sharp-eyed among you might notice a couple of differences between the variance in... yada, yada, yada." He is the one to highlight what sharp eyes might wanna focus on, you see?
On another note, James Hansen is a god among men... Or rather, certain men and women, who have fetishistic attraction to 'real' apocalyptic prophecies. Our religions have whole chapters in their sacred texts devoted to accommodate this lot. Now our sciences have it, too.
Paul Ehrlich were proven wrong in everything he predicted, yet he lived a life more celebrated than those who proved him wrong. So did Nostradamus, and so will James Hansen. We better get used to it.
Frost quakes? The seismometers are shivering in the global warming.
sHx
Lucia has much to say about this over at the Blackboard. She also links to a number of other analyses of Hansen’s 1988 predictions so well worth a look for those interested in the detail (wherein lurks the devil):
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/temperature-anomaly-compared-to-hansen-a-b-c-giss-seems-to-overpredict-warming/
And this:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/ordinary-eyeball-how-did-hansens-predictions-do/
BBD,
thanks for those links. I didn't know Lucia had examined the issue. I read only one of the articles and skimmed through the other. This comment attracted my attention:
This was 2.5 years ago. As of now the divergence between Scenarios B and C is huge, and it seems the temps still run parallel to, if not under, Scenario C, which assumed zero CO2 growth after 2000.
I'll leave a note to Lucia on her blog. Maybe she'll consider re-visiting it.
BTW, since the topic is James Hansen and predictions, I predict that James Hansen will retire from his NASA post this year. Why, I don't know. Just a hunch. Thirty years in the same spot is too long. And the future temps don't look good for him. Or maybe he'll be pushed out by NASA concerned for its own dwindling institutional credibility.
sHx
re 'dwindling institutional credibility'.
I am no NASA insider, but I am not under the impression that it regards Hansen as a problem, despite his various extra-curricular activities and dodgy predictions. As noted above, the man is a hero to many and NASA may even regard him as a net asset, PR-wise. This is pure speculation, of course.
I do not know exactly how old Hansen is, which hampers my ability to predict when he will (finally) go. Let's hope it is fairly soon.
Lucia's posts are interesting, aren't they? Like you, I hope she re-visits the topic soon.
James Hansen is 69 and turns 70 on March 29, 2011.
Will NASA force him out? I doubt it, no matter how poor his predictions are. Too many true believers in the choir for the pastor to be forced out. Still, if he continues the loony public pronouncements and keeps getting himself arrested, anything could happen; and a month of jail time would probably be all that it would take.
The good news is that when he and a few other "leaders" in the field finally do go, the best estimates of climate sensitivity can start moving toward reality. Einstein went to the grave believing quantum mechanics was wrong. As Kuhn noted, famous old scientists never accept a new paradigm, but they do eventually become irrelevant. Hansen is well on his way to irrelevancy of course, but I think it will be another ~10 years before sanity begins to take a firmer hold in climate science.
There's strange twists to NASA and somebody high up may have had reasons for keeping him.
Oh come on folks? We all know the mantra that everything improves with age. Hansen is living proof! His latest predictions are actually very believable.
The GWPF say that Hansen predicts that "within 15 years temps will be hotter than last 100,000 years"
You have to admit that this prediction shows signs of intelligence (if not integrity).
The last 14,000 years has been interglacial warm period, before that we had about 100,000 years of Ice Age.
Even if global temperatures actually go down over the next 15 years they will struggle to get below temperatures in the Ice Age :)
One prediction we don't hear much about is that in 1981 Hansen predicted the opening of the Northwest Passage would occur in the 21st century as a result of warming. That's already happened, so on that prediction he was correct. But you could argue there he was incorrect because it happened far sooner.
So what, his predictions are mistimed slightly. At current course we will indeed surpass the Eemian interglacial and temperatures of the past 100,000 years this century.
Consider how closer he is to what's happened than someone who just predicted the climate would stay the same.
One prediction we don't hear much about is that in 1981 Hansen predicted the opening of the Northwest Passage would occur in the 21st century as a result of warming. That's already happened, so on that prediction he was correct. But you could argue there he was incorrect because it happened far sooner.
But the prediction was in the context of its never happened before, which of course it has happened before eg in the 1930's and many times before, strangely in the history of climate its always changing naturally so if you are in the middle of one of the many 30 year warming periods its easy to say its going to get hotter, whats wrong is to say it will continue getting hotter for all time and its not due to natural recovery from the LIA.
"But the prediction was in the context of its never happened before"
He never mentioned whether it had happened before, only predicted that it would happen during the 21st century.
The Northwest Passage was successfully navigated in 1940, 1941, 1942, 1944, 1957, 1969, 1977, 1984, 1988, and 2000.
So a prediction it was going to happen in the 21st Century was telling exactly what?
Cthulhu
More weirdly misplaced over-confidence. You should read your own boy on Arctic warming:
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/2/423.long
Soot climate forcing via snow and ice albedos [PNAS]
November 4, 2003
[Emphasis added.]And Hansen in PNAS is just one of many papers to show the impact of black carbon on Arctic temperature forcing and ice melt.
AGW yes; CO2 no.
Is the mistaken attribution of BC forcing as CO2 forcing frequently factored into over-estimates of climate sensitivity – yes.
Is this a serious problem – yes, both with black carbon as a forcing and with (deliberate?) misattribution of its effects as those of CO2 forcing.
Cthulhu says:
You seem to be missing the problem with Hansen's predictions. It is that they are blatantly alarmist as well as wrong.
He repeatedly and egregiously over-predicts warming and claims catastrophe is upon us. This is politics prior to the science. This is agenda-driven rhetoric.
This is what people here really, really, don't like.
"The Northwest Passage was successfully navigated in 1940, 1941, 1942, 1944, 1957, 1969, 1977, 1984, 1988, and 2000."
Traversing it is not the same as it opening. 2007 was the first time in satellite records that the passage became open in summer.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6995999.stm
"And Hansen in PNAS is just one of many papers to show the impact of black carbon on Arctic temperature forcing and ice melt.
AGW yes; CO2 no."
That's not what the paper says.
The paper says AGW yes. CO2 yes. BC yes.
Cthulhu
You are carefully avoiding the point here. Which is that BC forcing and CO2 forcing in the Arctic have not been properly quantified and separated. Mis-attribution of the effects of BC to CO2 is an endemic problem with estimates of climate sensitivity and with the gridded temperature data. Especially GISTEMP.