From 1989 :
Where does he come up with this crap? The odds of severe summer drought during the 1950s were 1 in 2, not 1 in 20.
Contiguous U.S., Palmer Modified Drought Index (PMDI), 36-Month Period Ending in March, 1898-2013
Like Obama, Hansen speaks very confidently about things he knows nothing about.
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Obviously it was early in the morning and his meds hadn’t kicked in.
Judith Curry testified to Congress yesterday, and part of it was specifically about the 1950’s drought being driven by long term ocean cycles:
“….The second factor is natural climate variability. Apart from a possible impact from humaninduced
climate change, many extreme weather and climate events have documented relationships with
natural climate variability, notably El Niño/La Niña, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), and
Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). We are currently in the warm phase of the AMO and the cool phase of the PDO. The previous analogue for this regime was the 1950s, or more specifically the period from 1946 to 1964. This period was also very active in terms of Atlantic hurricanes, especially with regards to U.S. landfalling major hurricanes. Drought in the U.S. is more frequent during the warm phase of the AMO, with drought in the U.S. southwest and Texas being more common during the cool phase of the PDO.”
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/curry-testimony-2013-il.pdf
Hansen as scientist is maybe like Suzuki as scientist: way back he was, but for decades he has been a management wonk and an social activist.
When technical people become management, they take the best of optimization, i.e. extension protocols and apply them to the worst of data, i.e. the filtered and sanitized summaries of the sort management wants. The two talking points that fall out of the summaries are then exploited and expanded to the hilt. For a company – say an electric car company – the gross activity of the last three quarters is trended forward for 10 years: that’s how the president of the corp could say we would have 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015 (or thereabouts) even while the battery technology was failing and the price (and carbon footprint) of electric cars was going through the troposphere. For Hansen (and Suzuki), the temperature and other profiles produced are made of silver and gold, the final drafts of the computer models are irrefutable (otherwise they would still be working on them); all he has to do is extend the lines from then until then.
Meanwhile the people that Hansen (and Suzuki) used to be are watching batteries catch fire, sales limited to wealthy celebrities, costs in excess of sales prices, temperatures and sealevels that don’t match on the local scale what the group trend is, and predictions that don’t match observations on a time-scale they should.
It is consistent: the same way a general sees a war by moving figures around a sand-and-paper mache battlefield versus the soldier plodding along in the muck and rain of a November French countryside.
Data and decisions deteriorate with altitude.
The Prez also praised Solyndra as the “future”. He was right because it looks like we are collapsing.
The less that you know about something, the more confidently and more freely you can speak about it. Hansen is a Master of Ignorance.
Hansen was in Portland promoting a carbon tax starting at $10 a ton an rising to $100 while saying the govt. cannot take any of it and it would be refunded to everybody with shares. He said this would reduce carbon emissions by 30% because people will seek out non-carbon purchases. What’s a non-carbon purchase? This is the wildest off-the-wall hairbrained scheme of the century. Raise all the prices and then hand people a token return. To think a govt., will impose a tax and not take any of it is nuts, they will take all of it.
To prove he’s double-nuts he says a million people die every year from pollution of air and water from fossil fuels. Where’s the bodies?
Our friend David Appell reported on this over at Quark if anybody would like to drop by.