Activist James Hansen attempts to link global warming to extreme heat waves

Hansen has several times published a HEADLINE with faulty data.  He gets the big headline, usually in the nytimes, and then later corrects the data finding which is burried in the back pages.  A nasty guy.  He uses his title with NASA to gain credibility.

Hansen is employed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and in the past few years has been arrested for his activist actions to attenuate the theoretical effects of man-made climate change. Dr. Stott did caution Hansen not to link specific heat-wave events to man-made global warming. "…we cannot say that the chances of such heat waves were negligible before global warming set in…"

Take the time to read how Hansen distorted the numbers and the words with the numbers.

A new study led by climate-change activist James Hansen purports to show that recent heat waves and hot summers are "most probably" the result of global warming. The research will be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

By cherry-picking data from 1951-1980 during the months of June, July, and August with more recent records of the past several years, lead-author Hansen and fellow scientists concluded that today's extremely hot weather is unprecedented.

As Steven Goddard of the popular science blog Real Science notes, the researchers used a baseline of a few decades, and announced we are having the "most extreme weather in 10,000 years."

Calling Hansen a "brazen liar", Goddard points out that ten years ago, Hansen wrote the "exact opposite" in Science Briefs: Whither U.S. Climate?:

Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s “Dust Bowl” that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

By picking to start his data crunching in the 1950s, Hansen effectively stamped out the existence of nearly twice as many "daily all-time high temperature records set or tied during the 1930s as in the 2000s."

Dr. Peter Stott of the Met Office wasted no time jumping on the "extreme weather" bandwagon, and seemed to be one-upping Hansen's research by saying, "As far as how climate change is changing the statistics of extreme weather around the world, this new paper is broadly in line with previous work including work that we published in 2008…"

Dr. Stott did caution not to link specific heat-wave events to man-made global warming. "…we cannot say that the chances of such heat waves were negligible before global warming set in…"

"Further research is needed to understand how climate change could be affecting such aspects of climate variability as the position of the jet stream…It is the interplay of variability and climate change that counts." he said.

Hansen is employed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and in the past few years has been arrested for his activist actions to attenuate the theoretical effects of man-made climate change.

This latest study should come under the highest scrutiny of every journalist that a biased researcher, which is anathema to good science, was looking to find the very type of link he believed existed.

He picked the dataset that would give him the answers he needed, and announced to the world he found the missing link. The only thing more discouraging than being published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science is the lack of fact checking being done by the mainstream media.

Brophy Tuesday 07 August 2012 - 08:53 am | | Global Warming

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