It was a record-high 98 degrees
on June 23, 1988, in Washington DC,
when NASA scientist James Hansen
testified before the Senate Committee
on Energy and Natural Resources.
He claimed a “high degree of confidence”
that carbon dioxide caused global warming,
and was the primary controller
of the average temperature of our planet.
Hansen had
an accompanying paper
in the Journal of
Geophysical Research,
with several
climate predictions.
What he did was to look
at the global warming
from 1975 to 1988
and predicted
it would continue,
at a speed related to
the future growth
of CO2 emissions.
Hansen was predicting
'more of the same',
which was a safe prediction.
And with three
different predictions,
Hansen gave himself
a much better chance
of being right !
On the 30th anniversary
of Hansen’s 1988 predictions
let's see what happened.
Note that in 1988
our planet had been
warming for 20,000 years.
In 1988 Earth was about
one half degree C.
warmer than in 1880,
with an honest margin of error
larger than the warming itself !
Global average
surface temperature
did rise from 1993 to 2003.
But after 2003
the average temperature
has barely changed,
except for
a large El Niño heat release
from the Pacific Ocean
in late 2015 and early 2016,
which is local warming event
that happens roughly
every five years,
but is large enough
to increase the
global average temperature.
The global warmunists
love the oceans releasing heat
during an El Nino (aka ENSO)
because it temporarily raises
the global average temperature.
They never mention
that El Nino warming
has nothing to do with
greenhouse gasses,
such as CO2
-- you don't need
to know that !
Hansen described
three scenarios
for future
carbon dioxide
emissions growth
that led to his three
warming predictions:
He called Scenario A
“business as usual,”
with the CO2 emissions
growth rate accelerating.
Scenario A predicted
+1 degree C. warming
by 2018.
Scenario B
set CO2 emissions
growth lower,
increasing
at the same rate
as in the 1980s,
and predicted
+0.7 degree warming
by 2018.
Scenario C,
called unlikely,
had CO2 emissions
stop growing after 2000,
with a prediction
of a few tenths
of a degree C.
warming by 2000,
and no warming
after 2000.
None of Hansen's predictions
were right.
The Scenario C temperature forecast
was closest to the actual
temperature increase.
But the Scenario B CO2 emissions
were closest to the actual
CO2 emissions growth.
James Hansen
issued dire warnings
about CO2 in 1988.
They were not needed.
Computer climate models
used by the
United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change
have done even worse
than Mr. Hansen !
On average,
they predicted
double to triple
the actual warming
since 1988.
In a 2007 court case
on auto emissions,
Mr. Hansen claimed
most of Greenland’s ice
would soon melt,
raising sea levels 23 feet
over 100 years.
That's not happening
-- not even close.
On the 30th anniversary
of Mr. Hansen’s testimony,
we now know that
the constant, rapid warming
he predicted is not happening.
We had a long period,
from 2003 to mid-2015,
with almost no warming,
sometimes called "the pause",
sometimes called "the pause",
in spite of a lot of CO2
being added to the atmosphere
... which according to Hansen,
would have been impossible !