Ruh Roh...
NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.
Just in time for Gore's urbi et orbi to the Democrats in Congress.
I suspect that Democrats will listen politely and perhaps applaud, but the bloom is off the global warming rose. Dr. Theon could have come forward at anytime after 1988 and denounced his subordinate, but as an employee of the Federal government, and clearly a political creature, he deemed it unsafe to do so.
Now its safe.
Theon's arguments are unsurprisingly, nothing new.
Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” he added.
I've been saying that since the 90s...
An interesting dynamic, don't you think? The truth has always been quite obvious because while the climate is complex, the lies used to fabricate the global warming hoax are mundane. A perfunctory understanding of the limitation of data models and their predictive abilities is enough to poke holes in the flimsy fabric of this lie.
Yet the lie persisted for a very long time, even building strength since it was first spoken. The global warming hoax is has been a social labratory for understanding the nature of both low and high politics. Rather than lying outside of society like some priestly caste, scientists are tightly woven into the political dynamics of universities, corporations and the government. They're "freedom" exists within the framework of acceptable avenues of research.
Yet, the nature of politics isn't subtle, and its rhetorical excesses create enormous credibility problems for people whose lives and careers are bases on expressing cautious implications from their research. The currency of science is "being right".
I suspect that what doomed the global warming hoax was the fundamental incompatibility of the political and scientific cultures. Professional liars and professional truth-tellers cannot have a happy marriage. The best most scientists could do, both ethically and in the interests of their careers was to shut the hell up, but some couldn't, and having spoken, others found they could not, and eventually the repudiation of the junk science of global warming snowballed into the avalanche that we are witnessing today.
Of course, I like to think that God threw a metaphorically lightning bolt at Al Gore's head by giving us a blast of chilly weather these past couple of years as well.
UPDATE: The hardcore dupes are going to take a lot more convincing.
