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Happy Birthday, Global Warming: Climate Change at 33 – Entered politics in June 1988 with James Hansen’s dire warnings & UN IPCC formation

  https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/06/24/happy_birthday_global_warming_climate_change_at_33_782909.html By Rupert Darwall June 24, 2021 This month, climate change celebrates its 33rd birthday. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified that the greenhouse effect had been detected. “Global Warming Has Begun,” The New York Times declared the next day. Indeed, it had. A year older than Alexander the Great when he died, climate change took less than one-third of a century to conquer the West. Four days earlier, the Toronto G7 had agreed that global climate change required “priority attention.” Before the month was out, the Toronto climate conference declared that humanity was conducting an uncontrolled experiment “whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.” In September, Margaret Thatcher gave her famous speech to the Royal Society, warning of a global heat trap. “We are told,” although she didn’t say by whom, “that a warming of one degree centigrade per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope,” an estimate that turned out to be a wild exaggeration. Observed warming since then has been closer to one-tenth of one degree centigrade per decade. Two months later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) held its inaugural meeting in Geneva. The tendency to catastrophism was present at the outset of global warming. The previous year, at a secretive meeting of scientists that included the IPCC’s first chair, it had been recognized that traditional cost-benefit analysis was inappropriate, on account of the “risk of major transformations of the world of future generations.” The logic of this argument requires that climate change be presented as potentially catastrophic—otherwise, the cure would appear worse than the putative disease. Although catastrophism gave climate change emotive power, the most consistent feature of climate change is the failure of predictions of catastrophe to materialize. In 1990, Martin Parry, a future cochair of an IPCC working group, produced a report claiming that the world could suffer mass starvation and soaring food prices within 40 years. Yet the prevalence of undernourishment in developing countries has been on a downward trend since the 1970s and was nearly halved, from 23.3% in 1991 to 12.9% in 2015. Although global warming conquered the West, it failed in the East. The model for international environmental cooperation was the 1987 Montreal Protocol on protecting the ozone layer. Its negotiation and ratification was led by the Reagan administration, which recognized that the U.S. would be the biggest beneficiary from having a strong treaty. Thanks to U.S. leadership, the negotiations were conducted quickly (in a matter of months) and the protocol has teeth, containing strong incentives for countries to join and the threat of trade sanctions for those that do not. This path was quickly blocked for climate change. At the end of 1988, the Maltese government sponsored a resolution of the UN General Assembly on the conservation of the climate as mankind’s common heritage, the subtext being that rich countries shouldn’t negotiate a climate change treaty and then impose it on the rest of the world. The advantage of going down the UN route was that it led to the creation of a permanent and growing bureaucratic infrastructure with annual meetings to keep global warming’s place in public discourse. The downside is that negotiating texts must be agreed by consensus, foreclosing the possibility of a Montreal-like negotiating process and outcome. In 1990, the General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change, which produced a final text in time for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The most important features of the 1992 climate convention are its ground plan, carving the world in two, with the developed North listed in Annex I, and the doctrine of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (the first principle listed in the convention and arguably its governing one). The bifurcation was made concrete in 1995 at the first conference of the parties in Berlin. Presided over by Angela Merkel as Germany’s environment minister, the Berlin Mandate stipulated that Annex I parties should strengthen their commitment to decarbonize on condition that non–Annex I parties did not, preparing the way for the Kyoto Protocol two years later. The Clinton administration hadn’t given much thought to the implications of the Berlin Mandate. The Senate did. In July 1997, by 95 votes (including those of then-senators Biden and Kerry) to zero, it adopted the Byrd-Hagel resolution: America should not sign any protocol that imposed limits on Annex I parties unless it also imposed specific, time-tabled commitments on non–Annex I countries. Although the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Protocol, the Senate had killed U.S. participation; it was left to the incoming president, George W. Bush, to garner the opprobrium for stating the obvious. Both he and Barack Obama pursued essentially the same post-Kyoto strategy of trying to get China and other major emerging economies to make treaty commitments to decarbonization, an attempt that failed at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, when China, India, South Africa, and Brazil vetoed a new climate treaty. In picking up the pieces, Todd Stern, President Obama’s climate negotiator, had the twin objectives of crafting something that China would accept but that didn’t require the Senate’s advice and consent. The outcome was the Paris climate agreement. It embodies the climate equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Sinatra Doctrine of allowing individual parties to the agreement to “do it their way.” Hailed as a game changer in the fight to save the planet, the reality of Paris was rather different. Just as Gorbachev’s Sinatra Doctrine was an admission that the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War, the Paris agreement signaled that the West had given up on having a global decarbonization regime, with credible sanctions against free riding. Although the Obama administration played an essential role in its gestation, the U.S. is the biggest loser from the Paris agreement. America is to forfeit its recently won position as the world’s largest producer of hydrocarbon energy. For what? The story of carbon dioxide emissions is acceleration in the declining share of Western emissions. The year 1981 was the last one in which the West’s energy and cement manufacture carbon dioxide emissions were greater than the rest of the world’s (the latter includes Japan—culturally non-Western, ambivalent about climate change, and the only nation to have hosted a major climate conference presided over by a foreign national). By 1988, despite the economic expansion of the 1980s, the West’s emissions had grown by only 3.8%, while the rest of the world’s had grown by 27.0%. After 2002, non-Western emissions grew even faster. In the 12 years before 2002, non-Western emissions grew by 21.2%; and in the subsequent 12 years, by 76.8%. By 2014, with Western emissions broadly flat over the 24-year period, Western emissions had shrunk to 26% of the total, and the share of non-Western emissions had risen to 74%. In less than a decade and a half, the increase in non-Western emissions outstripped the combined total of U.S. and E.U. emissions. In terms of affecting the physics of global warming, it doesn’t really matter what the West does any more. William Nordhaus, the world’s preeminent climate economist, offers a brutal assessment of climate policy. “After 30 years, international policy is at a dead end,” he said in a little-noticed October 2020 presentation to the European Central Bank. “We have policies, but they have not been effective, and they’re getting us basically nowhere.” The culprit, in Nordhaus’s view? The free-rider problem. Nordhaus’s solution is to replace the current structure with a “club” whose members agree on a uniform price for carbon dioxide (he suggests $50 per ton of CO2) plus a straight 3% penalty tariff on imports from non-club members. What Nordhaus proposes, in essence, is the Montreal Protocol structure adapted for climate change. Joe Biden campaigned to restore U.S. climate leadership and rejoin the Paris agreement. The two are contradictory. Following the Europeans down the dead end of a three-decade-old UN process hardly constitutes leadership. Heeding Nordhaus’s advice and abandoning the UN process is something that only an American president can do. But that would be to assume that the purpose of the UN is to moderate global warming. Days before the Paris conference, Maurice Strong died. A committed environmentalist, no person did more to put environmentalism on the international agenda, leading the 1972 Stockholm UN conference on the environment and the Rio Earth summit 20 years later. A small gathering was held at the Paris conference to share reminiscences about Strong and his achievements. One of his aides at the Stockholm conference recalled asking him what the policy of the conference should be. “The process is the policy,” Strong replied. Strong’s genius was to understand that a self-perpetuating UN process would continuously accrete money, influence, and, above all, power. Environmentalism would not have become the dominant ideology in the West without the deployment of the UN’s climate apparatus: the annual cycle of climate conferences spliced periodically with ones that are going to save the planet (Kyoto in 1997; Bali in 2007; Copenhagen in 2009; Paris in 2015; and Glasgow in 2021). Then there’s the IPCC, set up by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, and its five—soon to be six—generations of assessment reports. “Embedded in the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C is the opportunity for intentional societal transformation,” the IPCC says in its scientific assessment of the 1.5°C target. All ideologies seek power. Seen in this light, global warming gave environmentalism the means for it to conquer the West and become the dominant ideology of our age. Environmentalism’s attitude toward nuclear power provides a test for this proposition. If the paramount concern of environmentalists had been to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and slow down climate change, they would campaign to keep existing nuclear power stations and build new ones. Yet viable nuclear power stations are being prematurely closed in California, New York, Germany, and Belgium. Why? Nuclear power is a Promethean crime of humanity stealing the deepest secrets of nature to release unlimited quantities of energy, in the eyes of environmentalists—a crime far worse than global warming. Instead, humanity must live within the rhythms and constraints decreed by nature; hence environmentalists’ belief that power stations should be replaced by inefficient, weather-dependent wind and solar farms. The growth of wind and solar generation is not a market-driven phenomenon of a superior technology displacing an obsolete one. It’s what happens when governments heavily subsidize zero-marginal cost output, flooding wholesale markets with unwanted electricity when there’s too much sun and wind and risking power failures when there’s too little. The ubiquity of wind and solar symbolizes environmentalism reversing the logic of the Industrial Revolution in transforming predominantly agrarian societies at the mercy of climate to weather-resistant ones and helps explain the contrasting fortunes of environmentalism and Marxism. Environmentalism succeeded in the West and has become part of the political mainstream, to the extent that it defines politically acceptable opinion. Marxism lost in the West but thrived in preindustrial societies, because the political priority remains economic development. In practical terms, this is synonymous with industrialization and carbonizing their economies. The outcome has been to shift the balance of climate power from the West to the rest of the world and the major emerging economies, in particular. Yet the lopsided arithmetic of the West versus the rest’s emissions has not softened the effectiveness of global warming as an ideological weapon because it is not based on any rational calculus but derives from its threat of planetary catastrophe. The future, as it had been in Marxism, again becomes “the great category of blackmail,” as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes in “The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse.” Climate change does represent an existential threat to Western civilization, although not in the way environmentalists say. Net-zero climate policies threaten to undermine the internal cohesiveness of Western societies and drain them of economic vitality. Externally, they will accelerate the redistribution of power away from the West to those nations that decide not to decarbonize, especially to China. Decarbonization will see the progressive elimination of high-paying, high-productivity blue-collar employment such as coal mining, oil and gas, steelmaking, and energy-intensive manufacturing. The aristocracy of labor will become an extinct social class; instead, as social mobility stagnates and class stratifications solidify, social geographer Joel Kotkin foresees the coming of neo-feudalism. Accompanying these regressive social developments is the atrophying of democratic politics. Net-zero climate policies require reorganizing society around the principle of decarbonization—not through a couple of election cycles but over the next three decades. Net-zero must therefore be put beyond the reach of democratic politics so that voters cannot reverse a decision that was taken for them. This provides a better fit for a post-democratic polity such as the European Union. Britain has a statutory climate change committee to hold the government to account for meeting decarbonization targets. Although the Biden administration has adopted a target of net-zero by 2050 and of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, Congress has not passed—and is unlikely to pass—climate legislation mandating these targets. Nonetheless, American corporations in droves are pledging their own net-zero targets. Wall Street and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing and climate disclosures, which the SEC intends to mandate, have opened an alternative route on the basis of what gets measured gets managed. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, candidly admits that forcing companies to disclose their emissions isn’t transparency for transparency’s sake: “disclosure should be a means to achieving a more sustainable and inclusive capitalism.” This collusion between the administrative state and climate activists to bypass Congress has been condemned by Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee. “Activists with no fiduciary duty to the company or its shareholders are trying to impose their progressive political views on publicly traded companies, and the country at large, having failed to enact change via the elected government,” Senator Toomey and his colleagues wrote in a letter to SEC chair Gary Gensler earlier this month. In addition to this usurpation of the political prerogatives of democratic government, forcing business to take on governmental functions to address societal problems will see them, over time, acquire the modes and culture of government bureaucracies. This subtracts from the core economic function of the business corporation in a capitalist economy. “The capitalist economy,” in the words of the growth economist William Baumol, “can usefully be viewed as a machine whose primary product is economic growth.” What distinguishes it most sharply from all other economic systems are free-market pressures that force firms to engage in a continuous, competitive process of innovation. “This does not happen fortuitously,” writes Baumol, “but occurs when the structure of payoffs in an economy is such as to make unproductive activities such as rent-seeking (or worse) more profitable than activities that are productive.” If CEO remuneration is aligned with ESG objectives and decarbonization targets and if directors risk being voted off boards for not having them, businesses will increasingly focus their efforts on meeting these non-business objectives. As this incurs costs and impairs business performance, businesses will turn to politicians to seek protection from their antisocial competitors that refrain from doing the government’s work. Capitalism’s legitimacy rests on its record of raising living standards through its prodigious capacity to generate productive wealth. Should that slow down to a trickle, capitalism becomes hard to justify, even though the explanation is that the system is no longer a capitalistic, free-market one. Global warming flourished during a period when the world had taken a holiday from geopolitics. It had entered the world as geopolitical tensions were easing. Six months earlier, in December 1987, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF treaty, eliminating intermediate nuclear missiles. By the time of the Rio Earth Summit, the Soviet Union was gone. Geopolitics is now back. There is a broad consensus in Washington that President Xi’s China is a strategic rival to the U.S. Yet the new strategic realism ceases when it comes to climate change. According to the IPCC, net-zero requires “transformative systemic change” that involves “unprecedented policy and geopolitical challenges.” The International Energy Agency calls decarbonizing the energy sector “perhaps the greatest challenge humankind has faced.” The West embarking on this process when China does not is akin to signing a strategic arms-control treaty binding on only one side: it can only be to China’s strategic advantage. So far, the grip of environmentalism on Western policymakers lulls them into the belief that global warming operates in a strategic vacuum, insulated from the factors that constitute geopolitical weight and ambition. It is in that sense that climate change constitutes an existential threat to the West.   Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Capitalism, Socialism and ESG.

Analysis: Former NASA scientist James Hansen ‘Got Everything Wrong’ About Global Warming

https://realclimatescience.com/2021/03/hansen-wishes-he-wasnt-so-right-about-global-warming/ by Tony Heller I’ve spent thirteen years documenting how NASA’s James Hansen got everything wrong – and how he corrupted temperature data to cover it up. But he says he was correct about everything. James Hansen wishes he wasn’t so right about global warming I’m not going to detail his impressive list of failures here, but I am going to discuss the key failure which doomed all of his other predictions to failure as well. Central to his global warming theory is that a hot spot would appear in the lower troposphere near the equator. In 1985, he predicted 7C warming in the tropical troposphere hot spot. https://doi.org/10.2172/5885458 It didn’t happen, and tropical troposphere temperatures measured by satellites are not much different than they were 40 years ago. https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt What actually controls variation in tropical troposphere temperatures are El Nino (warm) and La Nina (cold) events in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño and La Niña Years and Intensities This graph overlays the ENSO graph above in pink, on top of the satellite temperatures.  The correlation with ENSO is quite good, and it shows little or no correlation with CO2. Hansen has no clue what he is talking about, but he also controlled the temperature data – so he was able to tamper with it to make it appear like he was correct. NASA 1999 NASA 2019 Here is an animation showing how the data has been altered over the past 20 years.

U.S. climate scientist James Hansen pushes for Canadian carbon tax

https://www.cfact.org/2020/05/26/u-s-climate-scientist-james-hansen-pushes-for-canadian-carbon-tax/ From Friends of Science (Calgary, Alberta) The Canadian Federation of Taxpayers (CTF) has issued a new report on global carbon taxes, showing most countries have frozen or rolled back carbon taxes, but US climate scientist James Hansen is pushing for a $210/t carbon tax in Canada by 2030. Hansen’s argument is that the tax has to be high enough that people will buy into the carbon dividend (rebate to lower income households) – effectively making Canadians into carbon serfs and a carbon welfare society. CTF reports: “About half of the emissions covered by carbon taxes are priced below US$10/tCO2e, according to the World Bank’s most recent State and Trends of Carbon Pricing (2019).”  Canada has more than 600 greenhouse gas reduction/incentive measures on the books, which have never been audited for effectiveness. This begs the question of “what is a climate scientist doing dabbling in Canada’s domestic affairs on carbon taxes, pushing a carbon tax that is 21 times that of the world,” says Friends of Science Society.  As revealed by Lawrence Solomon in the 2009 article “Enron’s Other Secret” “James Hansen, the scientist who more than any other is responsible for bringing the possibility of climate-change catastrophe to the public, was among the scientists Enron commissioned.” Enron had profited from cap and trade, but the company collapsed into a pile of ashes in 2001 due to off-book accounting and financial fraud. None-the-less, a group of green billionaires took up the global cap-and-trade challenge, apparently working from the Enron carbon/cap-and-trade scheme model, as reported by Nisbet in 2018.  Like Enron, they have funded local and global environmental groups to agitate for policies in countries around the world, favorable to their proposed global cap and trade plan. The plans require a price on carbon with the intention of funding their trillions in vested interests in renewables.  Many of these groups are associated with the Tar Sands Campaign that has falsely created “Fear and Loathing” of the Alberta oil sands and driven a downturn in the economy. Michael Moore’s recent movie “Planet of the Humans” revealed how this green crony capitalism is destroying the planet for no climate benefit. Canadians now face an onslaught of Carbonbaggers – the number one being Mark Carney, now UN Climate Czar and former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor.  Carney threatens firms with bankruptcy if they do not comply with his demands to report on climate risk and abandon fossil fuel investments. As Robert Lyman’s new report shows: “Broken Promises: Why Renewables Offer No Resilient Recovery”, Carney is misleading the public and investors on global oil consumption and demand. Both oil production and consumption have risen by more than one million barrels per day per year since 2012. • Oil demand is at its highest level in history. • In absolute terms, oil demand is growing twice as fast as renewables. • Global oil reserves have risen throughout the period, from 1141 billion barrels in 1998 to 1730 billion barrels in 2018; peak oil is nowhere in sight. That is a 10 million barrel per day increase over the nine years. • In absolute terms, natural gas is experiencing the fastest rate of growth of all energy sources, almost three times as fast as renewables. • Natural gas demand is at its highest level in history.   Friends of Science Society says carbon dioxide from human industry is a nominal influence on climate change, known since the 2013 IPCC AR5 report.  The fact that financial ‘experts’ like Mark Carney are still pushing the climate-carbon dioxide catastrophe theme constitutes a violation of securities regulations related to ‘material change’.  Furthermore, as Roger Pielke, Jr. reports, climate catastrophe scenarios are the product of green billionaires pushing the ‘climate hysteria’ scenario, which is far from reality or business-as-usual. “Green” groups in Canada are demanding that the new Canadian Infrastructure Bank be used to finance their green crony capitalist schemes.  Friends of Science Society issued a request for ethics investigation into the development of the Canadian Infrastructure Bank in Nov. 2017.  The Conflict of Interest concerns expressed there are still valid in their opinion. Evidence from Norway to Zimbabwe shows that carbon taxes have no discernible impact on emissions reduction and are simply oppressive to taxpayers and industry.  Friends of Science Society says Carbonbaggers should not be using carbon taxes as a means of creating a Canadian climate welfare state, especially not driven by foreign influences, street theatre, and deception. See “The Roots of Global Warming”.

Former NASA scientist/activist James Hansen: ‘It’s time for Bernie Sanders to retire’ for opposing nuclear energy

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/09/23/climate-leader-james-hansen-slams-bernie-sanders-anti-nuclear-stance/ Guest essay by Eric Worrall h/t Dr. Willie Soon; Ex NASA GISS Director James Hansen, who kicked off the global warming scare with testimony before Congress in 1988, has attacked Democrat Presidential Wannabe Bernie Sanders for promoting a climate policy which will kill people. Top Climate Scientist to Bernie: You’re Killing People in India At Thursday night’s MSNBC climate forum, Sanders will lead the way in denouncing nuclear power. But the man who put the issue on the map thinks that’s irresponsible. Eleanor Clift Updated 09.20.19 5:00AM ET / Published 09.19.19 4:50AM ET … “It’s time for Bernie Sanders to retire,” Hansen responded in an email. “He truly doesn’t get it. India and China have no prayer of phasing out coal without the help of nuclear power. We burned much of their share of the global carbon budget, and yet we refused to help them with modern nuclear power. Thousands of people PER DAY are dying in India from the pollution…. Not only is he killing people in India, he is screwing my grandchildren,” Hansen wrote. Josh Orton, from the Sanders campaign, responded: “While Bernie’s plan would not renew licenses for existing nuclear plants in the U.S., it’s crucial to note that the plan doesn’t shut down domestic nuclear immediately, nor does it regulate or prohibit nuclear power abroad. In the United States, we know from scientists and other experts that fuels like nuclear are not only unnecessary for the U.S. to achieve our own climate goals, but carry significant waste problems and scale issues.” … Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-climate-scientist-to-bernie-sanders-youre-killing-people-in-india In a previous decade an attack from a leading climate scientist might have had a significant impact on Bernie’s shot at the Democrat Presidential nomination. But times have changed. In my opinion it is a long time since the likes of Bernie Sanders and his followers paid serious attention to what scientists have to say. For example, consider Bernie’s support for the Green New Deal. One of the architects of AOC’s Green New Deal recently admitted that the GND is not based on climate science and was never originally about climate change, the climate tie in was added later.

Climate movement grandpa James Hansen declares the Green New Deal is ‘nonsense’ – ‘We need a real deal which understands how economics works’

https://grist.org/article/climate-movement-grandpa-james-hansen-says-the-green-new-deal-is-nonsense/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=beacon By Zoya Teirstein In the 1980s, NASA scientist James Hansen brought climate change to the attention of Congress, and shortly thereafter the public. Humans, he testified in 1988, were responsible for rising global temperatures. But the man who put his reputation on the line to alert the world to the dangers of global warming doesn’t appear to agree with the most recent crop of climate advocates. In April 20 debate with Sunrise Movement’s Varshini Prakash and Christian Aid’s Amanda Mukwashi, Hansen called the Green New Deal “nonsense.” Hosted by Al Jazeera, the 12-minute debate highlights a growing fault line between two theories of climate action. Among progressives and environmental justice advocates, the Green New Deal represents a last-ditch, economy-wide overhaul. Hansen, on the other hand, seems to argue for a more economically incremental approach that is centered on a carbon tax. That tension came to a head when Hansen appeared visibly aggravated by the progressive proposal and Prakash, realizing that one of the most prominent climate scientists in the world was scoffing at her organization’s central focus, could only laugh in disbelief. Although Hansen is a proponent of using technology to bring down emissions, a carbon tax, he said, “is the underlying policy required. People need energy, we need to make the price of fossil fuels include their cost to society.” The green new dealers, on the other hand, think their predecessors are offering too little too late. Prakash referenced a “point of no return” during the debate, a threshold past which temperatures rise so much that they trigger a series of unstoppable and catastrophic feedback loops. That kind of outcome can only be stopped by drastic action, she argued. When I spoke to Sunrise’s Evan Weber late last year, he indicated that the organization wasn’t actively pursuing a carbon tax. What was most striking about Hansen’s argument was his measured tone, a stark difference from the way even the typically staid scientists behind the U.N’s IPCC report are beginning to discuss the issue. “We should be phasing down emissions now,” he said, which seems like a bit of an understatement considering he’s been advocating for decreased emissions for the last, oh, four decades. “If we do that, we will get a little bit warmer than we are now, and then temperature(s) can begin to decline,” he said, adding that we will have to phase out fossil fuels over the “next several decades” in order to accomplish this goal.

‘Future Generations’ Sue the USA over Global Warming – ‘Acting as the guardian for the minor plaintiffs is James Hansen’

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/10/future_generations_sue_the_usa_over_global_warming.html By T.R. Clancy Chief Justice John Roberts ordered a stay recently of a “landmark” trial in the federal lawsuit against the United States and various executive agencies, filed on behalf of 21 children “and future generations.” Juliana v. United States alleges violations of the children’s fundamental right to “a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” Acting as the guardian for the minor plaintiffs is James Hansen, the climate change equivalent of Patient Zero in the pandemic of terror over global warming. The organization that initiated this particular example of lawfare is Our Children’s Trust. OCT claims to provide a voice for youth in its mission to “protect earth’s atmosphere,” preferably through “legally binding, science-based” climate recovery policies. Juliana illustrates OCT’s idea of legally binding controls over American energy policy: the plaintiffs are requesting a court order directing the U.S. government to “cease [its] permitting, authorizing, and subsidizing of fossil fuels and, instead, move to swiftly phase out CO2 emissions.” Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/10/future_generations_sue_the_usa_over_global_warming.html#ixzz5VQHrdX1C Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Ross McKitrick and John Christy: The Hansen forecasts 30 years later – ‘Had Hansen included the El Nino spike in his scenarios, he would have overestimated 2017 temperatures by a wide margin’

The Hansen forecasts 30 years later https://judithcurry.com/2018/07/03/the-hansen-forecasts-30-years-later/ Climate Etc. The Hansen forecasts 30 years later / Today, 11:10 by Ross McKitrick and John Christy How accurate were James Hansen’s 1988 testimony and subsequent JGR article forecasts of global warming? According to a laudatory article by AP’s Seth Borenstein, they “pretty much” came true, with other scientists claiming their accuracy was “astounding” and “incredible.” Pat Michaels and Ryan Maue in the Wall Street Journal, and Calvin Beisner in the Daily Caller, disputed this. The whole debate has focused on comparisons of the 1988 and 2017 endpoints. Skeptical Science waived away the differences by arguing that if one adjusts for an overestimation in the rise of greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing, Hansen’s 2017 Scenario B prediction was not far off reality. There are two problems with the debate as it has played out. First using 2017 as the comparison date is misleading because of mismatches between observed and assumed El Nino and volcanic events that artificially pinched the observations and scenarios together at the end of the sample. What really matters is the trend over the forecast interval, and this is where the problems become visible. Second, applying a post-hoc bias correction to the forcing ignores the fact that converting GHG increases into forcing is an essential part of the modeling. If a correction were needed for the CO2 concentration forecast that would be fair, but this aspect of the forecast turned out to be quite close to observations. Let’s go through it all carefully, beginning with the CO2 forecasts. Hansen didn’t graph his CO2 concentration projections, but he described the algorithm behind them in his Appendix B. He followed observed CO2 levels from 1958 to 1981 and extrapolated from there. That means his forecast interval begins in 1982, not 1988, although he included observed stratospheric aerosols up to 1985. From his extrapolation formulas, we can compute that his projected 2017 CO2 concentrations were: Scenario A 410 ppm; Scenario B 403 ppm; and Scenario C 368 ppm. (The latter value is confirmed in the text of Appendix B). The Mauna Loa record for 2017 was 407 ppm, halfway between Scenarios A and B. Note that Scenarios A and B also represent upper and lower bounds for non-CO2 forcing as well, since Scenario A contains all trace gas effects and Scenario B contains none. So, we can treat these two scenarios as representing upper and lower bounds on a warming forecast range that contains within it the observed post-1980 increases in greenhouse gases. Consequently, there is no justification for a post-hoc dialling down of the greenhouse gas levels; nor should we dial down the associated forcing, since that is part of the model computation. Now note that Hansen did not include any effects due to El Nino events. In 2015 and 2016 there was a very strong El Nino that pushed global average temperatures up by about half a degree C, a change that is now receding as the oceans cool. Had Hansen included this El Nino spike in his scenarios, he would have overestimated 2017 temperatures by a wide margin in Scenarios A and B. Hansen added in an Agung-strength volcanic event in Scenarios B and C in 2015, which caused the temperatures to drop well below trend, with the effect persisting into 2017. This was not a forecast, it was just an arbitrary guess, and no such volcano occurred. Thus, to make an apples-to-apples comparison, we should remove the 2015 volcanic cooling from Scenarios B and C, and add the 2015/16 El Nino warming to all three Scenarios. If we do that, there would be a large mismatch as of 2017 in both A and B. The main forecast in Hansen’s paper was a trend, not a particular temperature level. To assess his forecasts properly we need to compare his predicted trends against subsequent observations. To do this we digitized the annual data from his Figure 3. We focus on the period from 1982 to 2017 which covers the entire CO2 forecast interval. The 1982 to 2017 warming trends in Hansen’s forecasts, in degrees C per decade, were: Scenario A: 0.34 +/- 0.08, Scenario B: 0.29 +/- 0.06, and Scenario C: 0.18 +/- 0.11. Compare these trends against NASA’s GISTEMP series (referred to as the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, or GISS, record), and the UAH/RSS mean MSU series from weather satellites for the lower troposphere. GISTEMP: 0.19 +/- 0.04 C/decade MSU: 0.17 +/- 0.05 C/decade. (The confidence intervals are autocorrelation-robust using the Vogelsang-Franses method.) So, the scenario that matches the observations most closely over the post-1980 interval is C. Hypothesis testing (using the VF method) shows that Scenarios A and B significantly over-predict the warming trend (even ignoring the El Nino and volcano effects). Emphasising the point here: Scenario A overstates CO2 and other greenhouse gas growth and rejects against the observations; but Scenario B understates CO2 growth and zeroes-out non-CO2 greenhouse gas growth yet it toosignificantly overstates the warming. The trend in Scenario C does not reject against the observed data, in fact the two are about equal. But this is the one that left out the rise of greenhouse gases after 2000. The observed CO2 level reached 368 ppm in 1999 and continued going up thereafter to 407 ppm in 2017. The Scenario C CO2 level reached 368 ppm in 2000 but remained fixed thereafter. Yet this scenario ended up with a warming trend most like the real world. How can this be? Here is one possibility. Suppose Hansen had offered a Scenario D, in which greenhouse gases continue to rise, but after the 1990s they have very little effect on the climate. That would play out similarly in his model to Scenario C, and it would match the data. Climate modelers will object that this explanation doesn’t fit the theories about climate change. But those were the theories Hansen used, and they don’t fit the data. The bottom line is, climate science as encoded in the models is far from settled. Ross McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph. John Christy is a Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Moderation note: As with all guest posts, please keep your comments civil and relevant.

Flashback: John Kerry’s ‘hallucinations’ about Hansen’s 1988 Climate Hearing

https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2018/06/27/hallucinations-in-high-places/ SPOTLIGHT: The event in which Jim Hansen put climate change on the media map has triggered hallucinations in high places. BIG PICTURE: I’ve previously discussed how Timothy Wirth, who chaired an historic US senate committee hearing in 1988, has given two accounts of what happened prior to its commencement. During a 2007 television interview, he jovially described taking measures to circumvent the air conditioning in the meeting room. Global warming was being discussed, and those in attendance were sweltering. After being challenged by a Washington Post fact checker in 2015, however, Wirth caved. In a written statement, he said the pre-hearing measures didn’t happen. Those were just rumours he’d heard. Although Wirth was the primary source of these rumours, his now insists he heard them second-hand and then inadvertently spread these falsehoods. (His Wikipedia entry continues to present his first account as real, and makes no mention of his retraction.) Bizarrely, the Harvard-educated Wirth isn’t the only person with fuzzy recall. When John Kerry was serving in no less a role than US Secretary of State a few years ago, the same Washington Post fact checker, Glenn Kessler, cited numerous instances, extending back years, in which Kerry claimed to have been one of the organizers of the historic 1988 hearing. According to Kerry’s narrative, that was the “very first” congressional hearing on climate change. After identifying several other hearings, including one in 1982 in which Hansen also participated, Kessler determined this wasn’t the case,  As “a junior member of the Senate in the late 1980s,” he says, Kerry “was not even a participant” in the 1988 event. He “simply spoke at a hearing that took place the following year.” Kessler describes Kerry’s “pattern of exaggeration” as “disturbing.” A few weeks later, after being alerted to the Timothy Wirth fabrication, the fact checker’s judgment hardened: Frankly, this now puts Kerry’s statements in an even a worse light [sic]. Not only did he place himself at a hearing he did not organize and attend, but he described witnessing events that did not happen. TOP TAKEAWAY: Climate change is part of the narrative powerful people construct about their own lives. Those narratives can be amazingly inaccurate. LINKS: Washington Post, Kerry’s claim that he organized the ‘very first’ hearings on climate change Washington Post, Setting the record straight: The real story of a pivotal climate-change hearing. my previous posts, Journalists relied on James Hansen’s say-so and What really happened 30 years ago?  

James Hansen Was Wrong About Global Warming

James Hansen Was Wrong About Global Warming http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/25/james-hansen-was-wrong-about-global-warming/ What should surprise us is that anyone embraced the idea in the first place

NYTs Continues with Hansen Propaganda – ‘NASA Data has been dramatically’ adjusted’ to make Hansen’s predictions stay within the lower band of his estimates’

NYTs Continues with Hansen Propaganda https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/06/24/nyts-continues-with-hansen-propaganda/ CO2 is Life NYTs Continues with Hansen Propaganda by co2islife / Yesterday, 17:05 No matter how bad Hansen’s Predictions were and are, the NYTs is too vested in promoting the Global Warming Myth. Their credibility is on the line, and they will do anything to defend their position, including twisting facts. So while his temperature forecast was not flawless, in a larger sense, Dr. Hansen’s 1988 warning has turned out to be entirely on target. As emissions have soared, the planet has warmed relentlessly, just as he said it would; 1988 is not even in the top 20 warmest years now. Every year of this century has been hotter. The ocean is rising, as Dr. Hansen predicted, and the pace seems to be accelerating. The great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are dumping ever-rising volumes of water into the sea. Coastal flooding is increasing rapidly in the United States. The Arctic Ocean ice cap has shrunk drastically. Source NASA Data has been dramatically “adjusted” to make Jimmy’s predictions stay within the lower band of his estimates. Here is the Sea Level from right down the street from the NYTs Headquarters. Sea level in lower Manhatten is almost exactly where it was in 1988. The most recent reading (-0.02) is below the reading from 2000, 1960, 1957, 1945 and 1936. 2/3rds of the months post-Testimony were below the level of July 1988. Had Jimmy given his testimony 6 months earlier, only 1 out of 10 months would have been higher. A monkey throwing darts could have done better than Jimmy. It is Hard To Overstate Just How Wrong Jim Hansen’s Predictions Have Been I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, “If what you’re saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?” He looked for a while and was quiet and didn’t say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, “Well, there will be more traffic.” I, of course, didn’t think he heard the question right. Then he explained, “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change.” Then he said, “There will be more police cars.” Why? “Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.” Source How the NYTs can continue to promote Jimmy and all this climate change nonsense is beyond me, but that is what you expect from the king of Fake Print News. They are the CNN of Newspapers. Please Like, Share, Subscribe and Comment

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