NASA's famous in-house climate quack rivals notorious doomsday cultists, such as Harold Camping and others - as the empirical evidence reveals, James Hansen's headline grabbing prediction of boiling oceans, from too much CO2, is from the theater of propaganda absurdity
(click on chart to enlarge - data sources)
James Hansen and his disciples at NASA's climate research agency (GISS) have become infamous for their climate doomsday predictions since the late 1980s. (Many of those end-of-the-world type predictions can be found here.)
Likely, the most absurd, recently published, fear-mongering NASA's Hansen prediction was that the oceans will soon be boiling from increased atmospheric CO2 levels (click on James Hansen picture for video of the "boiling" prediction).
Depending on the salinity of the given area's ocean/sea water, the boiling point will range from greater than 212F degrees to 215F degrees. After decades of massive human CO2 emissions how close are the oceans' temperatures to NASA's doomsday boiling?
It's not even a disaster-twinkle in Harold Camping's eyes.
The above chart plots the impressive growth of CO2 levels since 1880, and the associated, yet incredibly small increase of the oceans' temperature (°F). For context, the charts include plots of NOAA's global, N. and S. Hemisphere, U.S. continental and the Met Office's Central England temperatures.
None of these plots depict the "runaway" warming predicted by Hansen (note the near-boiling 210°F on left axis).
To be more specific, for the oceans to do a James Hansen boil, they need to warm by only some 140F degrees. But over the last 132 years, they have warmed less than one degree - not exactly "runaway" as envisioned by NASA.
Additionally, if we are on the path to runaway boiling oceans, the UK's home island would be experiencing some very hellish warming in recent times. Although the Central England temperatures have increased since 1880, over the last 15 years they are declining at a -7.90°F/century rate - that's right, a minus 7.9 degrees per century.
There is hope though. Like Harold Camping, James Hansen appears to be backtracking from his green-religion, non-scientific predictions.
Other modern temperature charts.