In front of cameras, a hot and sweaty James Hansen of NASA gave his famous global warming EOTWAWKI testimony...lucky for the rest of us, this climate "expert" was spectacularly wrong.....
During a hot June 1988, NASA's James Hansen provided a provocative, stage-crafted testimony to the U.S. Senate.
His message? The world of 1988 was the hottest ever, since the 1800's, and it was due to humans' fossil fuel CO2 emissions; and more importantly, global warming would continue its upward path, rapidly getting worse and then becoming a threat to civilization unless CO2 emissions were constrained - i.e. reduced significantly.
Why his EOTWAWKI message? Because the modern crystal ball - his computer climate model simulations - told him so.
This chart plots the global temperatures using the most advanced, costly climate measuring technology provided to the scientific community by the American taxpayer. The empirical measurement evidence over the last 26.5 years since his testimony tells a different story than what Hansen predicted.
What do the satellites say? This state-of-the-art measurement technology ignores crystal ball predictions by experts and instead objectively reports that over the last 18 years "global warming" has been a non-issue. Despite record amounts of greenhouse gases being spewed into the atmosphere, global warming has not accelerated and has not become a threat.
How bad were Hansen's computer model predictions?
In his testimony, he spoke of causation between global warming and CO2 emissions - the more CO2 released, the greater and faster temps will rise. Yet, over the last 18 years, the world has experienced a very tiny cooling trend, per the satellites. And the "causation"? Well...ahem...calculating the statistical correlation between global temperatures and CO2 ppm levels over the last 18 years produces a negative correlation, with a r2 of 0.0004.
Dr. Hansen does deserve credit however. The first 8.5 years after his testimony, satellites measured the global warming trend at a +1.22°C increase by 2100AD. And the r2 for temperatures and CO2 was 0.21 (note to climatologists of alarmism persuasion: one does not want to make predictions of catastrophe with this statistical attribute level).
The conclusion? The end of the global warming 'EOTWAWKI' as we know it, no? Damn those stubborn facts!
Additional global temperature charts. Charts for climate models and greenhouse gases.
Note. Excel used to plot datasets and 36-month (3 year) averages; plus used to calculate R2 and linear trends. RSS temperature dataset and CO2 dataset. Global temperatures as of end of December 2014.