James E. Hansen wiped sweat from his brow. Outside it was a record-high 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, as the NASA scientist testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources during a prolonged heat wave, which he decided to cast as a climate event of cosmic significance.
He expressed to the senators his “high degree of confidence” in “a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.”
With that testimony and an accompanying paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Mr. Hansen lit the bonfire of the greenhouse vanities, igniting a world-wide debate that continues today about the energy structure of the entire planet.
President Obama’s environmental policies were predicated on similar models of rapid, high-cost warming.
But the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s predictions affords an opportunity to see how well his forecasts have done—and to reconsider environmental policy accordingly.
Mr. Hansen’s testimony described three possible scenarios for the future of carbon dioxide emissions. He called Scenario A “business as usual,” as it maintained the accelerating emissions growth typical of the 1970s and ’80s.
This scenario predicted the earth would warm 1 degree Celsius by 2018. Scenario B set emissions lower, rising at the same rate today as in 1988.
Mr. Hansen called this outcome the “most plausible,” and predicted it would lead to about 0.7 degree of warming by this year.
He added a final projection, Scenario C, which he deemed highly unlikely: constant emissions beginning in 2000. In that forecast, temperatures would rise a few tenths of a degree before flatlining after 2000.
Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios—enough to determine which was closest to reality.
And the winner is Scenario C. Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16.
Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect.
But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago.
What about Mr. Hansen’s other claims? Outside the warming models, his only explicit claim in the testimony was that the late ’80s and ’90s would see “greater than average warming in the southeast U.S. and the Midwest.” No such spike has been measured in these regions.
As observed temperatures diverged over the years from his predictions, Mr. Hansen doubled down.
In a 2007 case on auto emissions, he stated in his deposition that most of Greenland’s ice would soon melt, raising sea levels 23 feet over the course of 100 years.
Subsequent research published in Nature magazine on the history of Greenland’s ice cap demonstrated this to be impossible.
Much of Greenland’s surface melts every summer, meaning rapid melting might reasonably be expected to occur in a dramatically warming world.
But not in the one we live in. The Nature study found only modest ice loss after 6,000 years of much warmer temperatures than human activity could ever sustain.
Several more of Mr. Hansen’s predictions can now be judged by history. Have hurricanes gotten stronger, as Mr. Hansen predicted in a 2016 study?
No. Satellite data from 1970 onward shows no evidence of this in relation to global surface temperature.
Have storms caused increasing amounts of damage in the U.S.? Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show no such increase in damage, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product.
How about stronger tornadoes? The opposite may be true, as NOAA data offers some evidence of a decline. The list of what didn’t happen is long and tedious.
The problem with Mr. Hansen’s models—and the U.N.’s—is that they don’t consider more-precise measures of how aerosol emissions counter warming caused by greenhouse gases.
Several newer climate models account for this trend and routinely project about half the warming predicted by U.N. models, placing their numbers much closer to observed temperatures.
The most recent of these was published in April by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry in the Journal of Climate, a reliably mainstream journal.
These corrected climate predictions raise a crucial question: Why should people world-wide pay drastic costs to cut emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made?
On the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s galvanizing testimony, it’s time to acknowledge that the rapid warming he predicted isn’t happening.
Climate researchers and policy makers should adopt the more modest forecasts that are consistent with observed temperatures.
That would be a lukewarm policy, consistent with a lukewarming planet.
Mr. Michaels is director and Mr. Maue an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science.
Read more at WSJ
Wouldn’t it be fun to contact all the members of that Senate committee and ask them how they feel now about having been hoodwinked by Hansen and his co-conspirators?
(Those that are still alive, obviously).
The only “high degree of confidence” connected to James E. Hansen??? The older he gets the more he resembles Homer Simpson. Doh!
We have had a carbon tax in British Columbia for years. Add in Alberta and Ontario ans there is a massive amount of tax that has been paid by consumers. Nowhere can we find how much that money has reduced the air pollution in China or India or Uganda. Forest fires around the world are continuing, indicating that carbon taxes do not work, in spite of what the Canadian Minister of C02 claims. She is a liar. Trudeau is a liar.
Trudeau is offensive. Trudeau is dangerous. Trudeau hates Canadians.
Del, are tobacco taxes dedicated to health care? No.
Are fuel taxes dedicated to roads and bridges? No.
Will the carbon tax be spent exclusively on the environment? No. They want it to service the government debt.
Apparently, its – the IPCC’s – hypothesis on climate change and sea-level rise has so far failed to hold up to scrutiny!
The United Nations’ IPCC first constructed its climate computer models to forecast global warming and subsequently to predict climate change. Virtually every accredited practitioner of one of the natural sciences holds it to be true that climate change has been ongoing since the Earth was formed. Consequently, there really is no need on part of the IPCC to predict climate change; it is, in one word, a “given.”
When the climate models failed to provide the evidence, i.e., the data, it sought, the IPCC had the data manipulated, i.e., fudged, to fit its predictions. The evidence if its complicity to manipulate, i.e., fudge, the data is widespread and well documented.
The IPCC has never ever substantiated that CO2 emissions resulting from mankind’s industrial, transportation, agricultural, electric power-generation, mining & oil/gas extraction, building & construction, changes in land-use, and other activities is the sole, or even the principal, cause of climate change and sea-level rise. There are numerous astronomical, geological, and anthropomorphic causes that contribute to climate change, that have not been included in the IPCC’s computer climate models. Furthermore, climate comprises weather, and any accredited meteorologist will tell you, that it is virtually impossible to predict the weather in any area for more than about two weeks in advance, let alone for months, years, decades, or centuries in advance! Most importantly, even if the IPCC’s hypothesis that climate change and sea-level rise are the result by-and-large of anthropomorphic CO2 emissions, its hypothesis must stand up to scrutiny on part of the entire scientific community, including the doubters or skeptics. Apparently, its hypothesis has so far failed to stand
From the article, “Climate researchers and policy makers should adopt the more modest forecasts that are consistent with observed temperatures.” This would be more consistent with true science and avoid the extreme impact that actions to reduce emissions are having in some areas. However, making forecasts and policies consistent with observed temperatures isn’t feasible. There must be forced reduction in the use of fossil fuels without nuclear filling the gap. This is essential for the agenda items of forcing de-industrialization, expanding the size and power of government, especially the UN, providing an excuse for new taxes, transferring the wealth of the industrial nations to the developing nations, degrading our life style, providing funding for climate researchers, and the very survival of the green energy industry.
In one way the article was wrong. It said, “aerosol emissions counter warming caused by greenhouse gases.” It is more accurate to say that the main green house, carbon dioxide, has no impact on warming. As I say often, of the warming blamed on mankind forty percent was between 1910 and 1941 when carbon dioxide was much lower and not raising rapidly. When we did have a rapid raise in carbon dioxide we were in a warming pause.
Aerosols encourage cloud formation, therefore cooling. Aerosol emissions like sulfur dioxide and NOx were much higher in the 90’s than now. Temperature data from that decade would have been higher if aerosol ppm then equalled today’s. Why ,then, have they adjusted 90’s temperature data downwards, not upwards?
They won’t confess.
In other words we don’t need to adapt to climate change we need to adapt to climate model change . The models are full of holes and have consistently grossly over forecast
the rise in temperature . In addition , the notion we have the ability to state with any
certainty what the earths temperature is based on manipulated (biased ) human generated data is a farce .
$Trillions wasted , absurd increases in taxes , energy costs , and premature deaths from fuel poverty are legacy of the biggest unscientific fraud in history .
A 30 year history of failed climate doom and gloom predictions to facilitate the UN ‘s globalist (communist ) agenda , the pan handlers of corporate opportunists , and the insatiable appetite of governments who would rather tax the middle class into oblivion instead of dealing with their spending addiction .
It is time the worlds largest con-game was shut down .
Well said
Standing ovation
Ruffles and Flourishes
Well ssaid Amber,but that shot-down will only happen once the well-known so-called pseudo-skeptics declare that the “greenhouse effect” does not exist. As long as those luke-warmers deny that truth, climate alarm will continue unabated. They call themselves “skeptics” but are in fact the alarmists’ facilitators.
Two essays to mull over:
http://tech-know-group.com/essays/Stupidity.pdf and
http://tech-know-group.com/essays/UN_IPCC_Trusted_or_Questioned.pdf