| | | June 11, 1986, Dr. James Hansen of the Goddard Space Institute (NASA) in testimony to Congress (according to the Milwaukee Journal): “Hansen predicted global temperatures should be nearly 2 degrees higher in 20 years, ‘which is about the warmest the earth has been in the last 100,000 years.’”
Evidence: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1986/to:2006 (Hansen’s endpoints, not mine.)
Summary: Let’s be generous and assume that Hansen (a scientist) was using 2 F and not 2 C (which is what he should have meant, but this is Congress). The direct evidence is for 0.4 C of warming, which is 0.72 F. His prediction was too high by a factor of almost three. But this doesn’t begin to indicate the depth of the problem. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1986/to:2015 shows that temperatures have actually decreased since 2006, to where if we actually use the February endpoint against 1986, there has only been 0.2 C or 0.4 F rounding up over not a decade, but thirteen years.
Separately, we could consider plots of Holocene temperature reconstructions, general Pliestocene temperature reconstructions, adjust for the usual high frequency vs low frequency problem with the proxies, and conclude that it is probable that temperatures now are lower than they were in the Holocene optimum (since we’re still warming in recovery from the LIA, the coldest single stretch in the Holocene in 9000 years), or we could consider more recent non-hockey-stick evidence that suggests that the Medieval warm period was very likely just about as warm as today. Either way, Hansen’s assertion for highest in 100,000 years — spotting him the entire Wisconsin and Younger Dryas even though that is just silly — is probably false, it might be the warmest in 1000 years. Or it might not. Lots of thumbs on the HADCRUT scales and it is nearly impossible to precisely determine global average surface temperatures with thermometers.
Conclusion: This is sworn testimony to the US Congress? This is the man that headed NASA GISS for decades? Why not just put http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Hovind in charge of the National Science Foundation? How in the world could the United States put a man who so obviously lacked anything approximating scientific objectivity in charge of an organization which then unsurprisingly devoted all of its considerable and growing resources into proving him right by any means necessary? |
|
