Chief Global Warming Scaremonger

Dr. James Hansen started the global warming hysteria with his testimony before a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Al Gore in 1988. He now runs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is one of four agencies responsible for monitoring global temperatures. In fact, GISS temperature numbers are the most frequently reported since they are consistently higher temperatures than those of the other three groups reporting global temperatures to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His friend, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, is chairman of the IPCC. Dr. Pachauri is a former railway engineer with no prior background in climate science.

Dr. Hansen was forced by US meteorologist Anthony Watts and by the Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre (who debunked the infamous "hockey stick" temperature graph) in 2007 to admit that his US surface temperatures claiming that the 1990s were the hottest decade of the 1900s were wrong. The 1930s were hotter. This is the man who has called for criminal prosecution of those who speak out against the idea that we are facing a man-made global warming catastrophe. He supported Greenpeace activists who damaged a coal-fired power station in England, while claiming that the power plant did more damage than the Greenpeace terrorists did.

So, what is Dr. Hansen up to most recently? Well, earlier this month his GISS released temperature maps showing that much of Russia was 10 degrees hotter than usual in the month of October. Meanwhile, China's official news agency had reported that Tibet had suffered the worst snowstorm ever in October and reports of unusually low temperatures and early snowstorms for the Alps, New Zealand, China, and the American Great Plains were filed in October. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claimed there were 63 local snowfall records in October, along with 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month. They said October was the 70th warmest October in 114 years. Note that that makes it cooler than the average for 114 years, most of whose cooler Octobers should have been before the popular claim that the Earth is getting ever warmer.

So how did GISS have such high temperatures for much of Russia? It turns out that it was because they used September numbers both for September and for October! September is usually a warmer month than is October. Their initial response to being found wanting on this once again by Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts was to claim that they had found a hot-spot in the Arctic. Odd, given that satellite images showed the Arctic ice to have recovered from the summer melt at a rate 30% faster than it had in 2007, which was a year of globally lowered temperatures!

Meanwhile, IPCC Chairman Dr. Pachauri, gave a talk in Australia at a university saying that global temperatures are rising very much faster than ever. Behind him was a temperature graph showing that temperatures have not risen in years, despite rising atmospheric CO2, and that they have dropped since 2007.

These are the fearless leaders who would clamp Cap and Trade limits on the use of fossil fuels on us and wreck our economies. They would yoke us to expensive, dangerous, and inconvenient electric cars, leave us shivering in our homes and offices, and leave us without electricity to light the dark, operate our laboratory equipment, and even to recharge those damned electric vehicles. What is the real agenda that causes them to distort the climate record and work so hard to bring misery to the people of this planet Earth? I think it is a love of socialism and a hatred for individualism.