James Hansen is sounding the climate-change alarm again, asserting that record summer heat and drought are caused by global warming. But a grade-school kid could find problems with his claim.
In a news release that goes with the NASA paper primarily written by Hansen, the agency’s top climate-change scientist says, “We now know that the chances these extreme weather events would have happened naturally, without climate change, is negligible.”
“This is not some scientific theory,” Hansen told the media. “We are now experiencing scientific fact.”
The paper compares the period from 1951 to 1980 to 1981-2010. According to Hansen and his two co-authors, summers that they consider extremely hot went from covering just 1% of the earth in the first era to 10% in the latter period.
Forget, for the moment, that the temperature record isn’t reliable. We’ll get back to that in a moment. Let’s start out by asking why Hansen picked those years and left out the 1930s, which were even warmer?
Many problems with Hansen’s paper. First off, the Texas and Oklahoma climate records don’t appear to support his statements. See further analysis here: http://sierra-rayne.blogspot.ca/2012/08/absolutely-no-statistical-evidence-for.html
It’s hotter in some places and colder in other places.
Sounds natural to me. Hansen used selected data to achieve his goal of showing the Earth is warming. It has been shown that temperature records used in his study excluded data that would show no man made warming. That is why every study shows the same results, Garbage in and Garbage Out. The CO2 link to warming has been debunked. Since Mars has shown to be warming, are we responsible?