Hansen’s admission – “skeptics are winning”
Posted on October 11, 2011 by Anthony Watts
Like what Judith Curry saw recently at NCAR’s seminar, he seems to think it is all about communication.
Part of the problem, he said, was that the climate sceptic lobby employed communications professionals, whereas “scientists are just barely competent at communicating with the public and don’t have the wherewithal to do it.”
Yet sceptics are the ones without any MSM support. So where do they get this idea? Full story here
Hansen is lying about the communications professional ... (Un)Realclimate, administered by his deputy Gavin Schmidt, is a product of Fenton Communications, a lefty PR firm.
A few things come to mind that he didn’t cover as other possible reasons skeptics are winning:
1. We don’t hide behind FOIA laws, then circumvent them when we lose. If you’d shared the data when asked, Climategate would never have happened.
2. We don’t rewrite history, either by deleting>morphing commentary like Skepicalscience does, or by creating questionable paleostatistical methods to enable pretending the trees tell us last 900 years were flat without any possible natural variance.
3. We don’t call people on the other side of the debate ugly denigrating names like deniers and flat earthers.
4. We don’t keep trying to link weather patterns/weather events to climate in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Burning issue: Hansen’s evidence that the world is hotting up
Moscow, August 2010
Russia experienced its hottest-ever summer last year – for weeks, a large portion of European Russia was more than 7 °C (12.6 °F) warmer than normal, and a new national record was set of 44 °C (111 °F). Raging forest fires filled Moscow with smoke, forcing the cancellation of air services and obliging people to don face masks.
Jim, get a clue, the Moscow heat wave had NOTHING TO DO with global warming. It was a blocking high weather pattern. NOAA’s own work concludes this:
NOAA finds”climate change” blameless in 2010 Russian heat wave
We mentioned this previously on WUWT, now it is officially peer reviewed and accepted.
NOAA: Natural Variability Main Culprit of Deadly Russian Heat Wave That Killed Thousands Source here
 Daily Moscow temperature record from November 1 2009 to October 31 2010. Red and blue shaded areas represent departures from the long-term average (smooth curve) in Moscow. Temperatures significantly above the long-term average scorched Moscow for much of July and August. NOAA credit. – click to enlarge
The deadly Russian heat wave of 2010 was due to a natural atmospheric phenomenon often associated with weather extremes, according to a new NOAA study. And while the scientists could not attribute the intensity of this particular heat wave to climate change, they found that extreme heat waves are likely to become increasingly frequent in the region in coming decades.
So Jim, when you try to tell us that the 2010 Russian heat wave was caused by global warming, people who know better have no choice but to call post normal science BS on you.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/11/hansens-admission-skeptics-are-winning/
Maurizio Morabito (omnologos) says:
October 11, 2011 at 3:12 am
What kind of sad joke is this? Is there not a soul at The Independent able to understand what started RealClimate? Yes, a PR agency. How about Desmogblog? Another PR effort.
Does anybody know of a single prominent skeptical site that has any PR professional involved with it?
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Ian W says:
October 11, 2011 at 4:07 am
The real problem is that Hansen started making his doom laden prophecies 3 decades ago. Initially in the 1980s saying how the world was going to come to an end in 2012 due to runaway warming, snow ceasing, sea levels rising and huge and repeated storms inundating all low lying countries…. worked as a threat to get the politicians and greens and then the general populace believing what was being said. This started the ‘Climate Change’ bandwagon.
But that was 3 decades ago – and now people are looking around and saying – just a moment – where is the runaway warming – I’m snowed in for the third winter in a row, the beach hasn’t come ten miles inland and there are not any more storms than there are normally…. So the people are now falsifying the AGW theory themselves. They are ably assisted by the poor behavior of climate ‘scientists’ who all appear to be profiting hugely from something that is looking less and less likely to happen while doing all they can to hide their claimed evidence and workings for the apocalyptic forecasts.
However, the politicians and the bureaucrats have eagerly built empires, international agencies and tax systems based on the false forecasts. The fact that the justification for a tax has been removed will not stop them trying to collect it. If your department only exists because wind farms are being built or to measure the carbon footprint of industries – you will defend that department’s empire building against all logic. Unwinding thirty years of bureaucracy, regulation and hugely successful taxation will NOT be easy. Nevertheless if a brave politician were to repeal the carbon tax schemes and regulations – the upsurge in the economy of their country would be amazing. That is the prize to offer the incoming politicians.
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jazznick (@jazznick1) says:
October 11, 2011 at 4:12 am
Message to planet Hansen.
If you have not got your message across by now, you never will.
You have had ALL the MSM in the palm of your hand, the BBC/ABC adore you along with all your Guardian reading left wing UN funded WWF/Greenpeace lobbying bedwetters.
All the left leaning governments of the world love you as you bring the prospect of easy taxation and power over their energy starved subjects. Even some rightish leaning ones see the benefit
of all that windfarm/solar panel business that you have helped create.
That your website is the only one still showing global warming should be a clue to you.
You were wrong, and whatever drove you to this endgame be it political, financial (as we know)
or just a gut feeling or that you had ‘heard the voices’, the fact remains the the ‘science’ of 1998
has moved on a long way and that to try to remain in that era and claim that you had
‘sussed out’ climate variation causes back then is patently absurd.
There is so much that you didn’t know then and to sweep all recent discoveries and data aside as an irrelevance is delusional.
When the time comes it will be unclear if you will be remembered as a misguided well meaning scientist who outstayed his usefulness or a dangerous nutter who helped destroy the modern world
by causing it to implode on it’s own pointless climate legislation.
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kim;) says:
October 11, 2011 at 4:29 am
Mr Hansen you said:
[ " Part of the problem, he said, was that the climate sceptic lobby employed communications professionals, whereas “scientists are just barely competent at communicating with the public and don’t have the wherewithal to do it.” ].
YET:
Realclimate .> Environmental Media Services > Fenton Communications > Tides > George Soros.org
Mr Soros also gave you $720,000,00 to “politicize Science”. in one year.[ page 123 and page 143 ]
http://www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/publications/annual_20070731/a_complete.pdf
????
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Jeff L says:
October 11, 2011 at 6:57 am
Skeptics have data on their side – as in, the significant divergence between CAGW models & the reality of the satellite temp data over the last 10-15 years and that is the main reason they are “winning”the debate. How can any one say the science is settled looking at the data – it simply doesn’t support that conclusion. It’s not a matter of “winning” or “losing” or proper communicating, it’s a matter of data.
Supporters of AGW say the science is settled yet any one who looks into the issue even briefly will see that science is far from settled & that there are many qualified scientists doing research which suggest that CAGW is still just a hypothesis that is not proven. Even citizen scientists routinely poke legitimate holes in the hypothesis , as we see on WUWT & other similar skeptical websites.
Anyone trained in science knows that skepticism is supposed to be a core value to moving science ahead – you must continually question. So, when a group says “you must not question”, this is a red flag to anyone with scientific training that the science is not settled. A strong hypothesis stands up to questioning, a weak one falls down. The “you must not question” approach tells anyone with scientific training the hypothesis is weak.
The bottom line is the reason CAGW is “losing” has nothing to do with communication – it has to do only with the fact that it is a weak hypothesis with poor data support. It also because the public is not as ignorant as Jim Hansen , Al Gore et al believes – we can think for ourselves & what we see tells us there is way more to climate than just the CAGW hypothesis.
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