Well if Hansen's hypothesis really was a "bedrock principle of climate science" than you might have a point. At this point it is merely a guess, an "hypothesis" in other words. And the guess appears to be wrong. I'll grant you that the idea is not solely due to Hansen, but he was the one we credit with it because it was his paper published with colleagues, in Science (1981), that established him as a global warming pioneer and his remarks in that Senate hearing in the 1980s that got the whole ball rolling. And too, of course, among both the lay public and the science community, he has been a prominent and very outspoken advocate for the hypothesis. It is highly appropriate, therefore, that he have his name associated with the hypothesis. [Will he become America's version of Lysenko, I wonder?] From the Times: Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate By PHILIP SHABECOFF, Special to the New York Times Published: June 24, 1988 The earth has been warmer in the first five months of this year than in any comparable period since measurements began 130 years ago, and the higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution, a space agency scientist reported today. Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the ''greenhouse effect.'' But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere. Dr. Hansen, a leading expert on climate change, said in an interview that there was no ''magic number'' that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather. But he added, ''It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.'' An Impact Lasting Centuries If Dr. Hansen and other scientists are correct, then humans, by burning of fossil fuels and other activities, have altered the global climate in a manner that will affect life on earth for centuries to come. Dr. Hansen, director of NASA's Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, testifed before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He and other scientists testifying before the Senate panel today said that projections of the climate change that is now apparently occurring mean that the Southeastern and Midwestern sections of the United States will be subject to frequent episodes of very high temperatures and drought in the next decade and beyond. But they cautioned that it was not possible to attribute a specific heat wave to the greenhouse effect, given the still limited state of knowledge on the subject. Some Dispute Link Some scientists still argue that warmer temperatures in recent years may be a result of natural fluctuations rather than human-induced changes. Several Senators on the Committee joined witnesses in calling for action now on a broad national and international program to slow the pace of global warming. Senator Timothy E. Wirth, the Colorado Democrat who presided at hearing today, said: ''As I read it, the scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth's atmosphere gets warmer. Now, the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.'' Trapping of Solar Radiation Mathematical models have predicted for some years now that a buildup of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil and other gases emitted by human activities into the atmosphere would cause the earth's surface to warm by trapping infrared radiation from the sun, turning the entire earth into a kind of greenhouse. If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit from the year 2025 to 2050, according to these projections. This rise in temperature is not expected to be uniform around the globe but to be greater in the higher latitudes, reaching as much as 20 degrees, and lower at the Equator. The rise in global temperature is predicted to cause a thermal expansion of the oceans and to melt glaciers and polar ice, thus causing sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century. Scientists have already detected a slight rise in sea levels. At the same time, heat would cause inland waters to evaporate more rapidly, thus lowering the level of bodies of water such as the Great Lakes. Dr. Hansen, who records temperatures from readings at monitoring stations around the world, had previously reported that four of the hottest years on record occurred in the 1980's. Compared with a 30-year base period from 1950 to 1980, when the global temperature averaged 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature was one-third of a degree higher last year. In the entire century before 1880, global temperature had risen by half a degree, rising in the late 1800's and early 20th century, then roughly stabilizing for unknown reasons for several decades in the middle of the century. Warmest Year Expected In the first five months of this year, the temperature averaged about four-tenths of a degree above the base period, Dr. Hansen reported today. ''The first five months of 1988 are so warm globally that we conclude that 1988 will be the warmest year on record unless there is a remarkable, improbable cooling in the remainder of the year,'' he told the Senate committee. He also said that current climate patterns were consistent with the projections of the greenhouse effect in several respects in addition to the rise in temperature. For example, he said, the rise in temperature is greater in high latitudes than in low, is greater over continents than oceans, and there is cooling in the upper atmosphere as the lower atmosphere warms up.
For those who really want to learn what Piezoe has been explaining... this new essay... is really cutting edge. below is an except. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/21/on-co2-residence-times-the-chicken-or-the-egg/ Figure 5. Left: global annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions rise near-monotonically and the annual differences are small. Right: an index of surface conditions (blue: 80% temperature change, 20% soil-moisture content) is closely correlated with fluctuations in CO2 concentration (green). Annual fluctuations of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are small, but those of atmospheric CO2 concentration are very much larger, from which Professor Salby infers that their major cause is not Man but Nature, via changes in temperature. For instance, Henry’s Law holds that a cooler ocean can take up more CO2. In that thought, perhaps, lies the reconciliation of the Born and Pettersson viewpoints. For the sources and sinks of CO2 are not static, as Mr. Born’s equations (1-4) and analogy assume, but dynamic. Increase the CO2 concentration and the biosphere responds with an observed global increase in net plant productivity. The planet gets greener as trees and plants gobble up the plant food we emit for them. Similarly, if the weather gets a great deal warmer, as it briefly did during the Great el Niño of 1997/8, outgassing from the ocean will briefly double the annual net CO2 emission. But if it gets a great deal cooler, as it did in 1991/2 following the eruption of Pinatubo, net annual accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere falls to little more than zero notwithstanding our emissions. It is possible, then, that as the world cools in response to the continuing decline in solar activity the ocean sink may take up more CO2 than we emit, even if we do not reduce our emissions. Interestingly, several groups are working on demonstrating that, just as Professor Salby can explain recent fluctuations in Co2 concentration as a function of the time-integral of temperature change, in turn temperature change can be explained as a function of the time-integral of variations in solar activity. It’s the Sun, stupid! It is trivially true that we are adding newly-liberated CO2 to the atmosphere every year, in contrast to the 14C pulse that ended in 1963 with the bomb tests. However, the bomb-test curve does show that just about all CO2 molecules conveniently marked with one or two extra neutrons in their nuclei will nearly all have come out of the atmosphere within 50 years. To look at it another way, if we stopped adding CO2 to the atmosphere today, the excess remaining in the atmosphere after 100 years would be 1.5% of whatever we have added, and that is all. What is more, that value is not only theoretically derivable as the ratio of the contents of the atmospheric carbon reservoir to those of the combined active reservoirs of the hydrosphere and biosphere but also empirically consistent with the observed bomb-test curve (Fig. 1). If the IPCC were right, though, the 50-200yr residence time of CO2 that it imagines would imply much-elevated concentrations for another century or two, for otherwise, it would not bother to make such an issue of the residence time. For the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere does make a difference to future concentration levels.
1. I thought the essay was new but it was from last year. For some reason it popped up when I typed watts... 2. note to the doonesbury comic... the reason we are not growing as many avocados is in part because of the drought caused by the global cooling our globe has experienced since the turn of the century. we here in CA hope to have a strong el nino as the warming will likely bring much needed rains to our coast.
Scientists clueless about if the earth is either warming or cooling... A global temperature conundrum: Cooling or warming climate? http://m.phys.org/news/2014-08-global-temperature-conundrum-cooling-climate.html When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently requested a figure for its annual report, to show global temperature trends over the last 10,000 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Zhengyu Liu knew that was going to be a problem. "We have been building models and there are now robust contradictions," says Liu, a professor in the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. "Data from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming." Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, Liu and colleagues from Rutgers University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, the University of Hawaii, the University of Reading, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Albany describe a consistent global warming trend over the course of the Holocene, our current geological epoch, counter to a study published last year that described a period of global cooling before human influence. The scientists call this problem the Holocene temperature conundrum. It has important implications for understanding climate change and evaluating climate models, as well as for the benchmarks used to create climate models for the future. It does not, the authors emphasize, change the evidence of human impact on global climate beginning in the 20th century. "The question is, 'Who is right?'" says Liu. "Or, maybe none of us is completely right. It could be partly a data problem, since some of the data in last year's study contradicts itself. It could partly be a model problem because of some missing physical mechanisms." (More at above url)
Piezoe, do you work for a "think tank" or some similar entity who's purpose is to spread doubt and disinformation about global warming?
Ooooo, cutting edge! Has it proven that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas? Because that is the only way AGW could be proven wrong.
NASA has already showing you co2 is also a coolant in out atmosphere. So you have to wonder what the net impact is.
When are you going to admit that you are a member of an organized "crusher crew" organized by Skeptical Science and other groups whose sole intent is to "drown out" those who do not accept their alarmist global warming positions.
From the article; " It does not, the authors emphasize, change the evidence of human impact on global climate beginning in the 20th century. "
The irony is that since he presents no science... his threads help us get on the front page of google and show the world that the belief that man made co2 causes warming is at just a guess. fraudcurrents has done more to show agw to be a scam than just about anyone, (other than those who post on wattsupwiththat and hockeyschic... etc.