Saturday, June 20, 2009
Global Warming - The Man Who Cried Doom
This article points out how politics plays such a large role in things.
Two men, both employed by NASA, are treated very differently; exceptionally, very differently...
Two men, both employed by NASA, are treated very differently; exceptionally, very differently...
At the WeeklyStandard.com, Michael Goldfarb writes about it:
"Spencer, a meteorologist by training and a skeptic of man-made global warming, was genuinely muzzled during the Clinton administration. 'I would get the message down through the NASA chain [of command] of what I could and couldn't say in testimony.'
Spencer left NASA with little fuss for a job at the University of Alabama in 2001, but he still seems in awe of Hansen's ability to do as he pleases. 'For many years Hansen got away with going around NASA rules, and they looked the other way because it helped sell Mission to Planet Earth,' the NASA research program studying human effects on climate. Spencer figures that 'at some point, someone in the Bush administration said 'why don't you start enforcing your rules?' "
Gray says that Hansen's 'testimony is not working out' anyway. There's been a 'slight cooling since 2001. . . . They're scrambling,' he says. And indeed Hansen got caught with his hand in the cookie jar in 2007, when Stephen McIntyre, the man who debunked the infamous 'hockey stick' graph showing stable Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures for most of the last millennia before a sharp upturn, found a flaw in Hansen's numbers. McIntyre analyzed NASA's temperature records for the last century and found that, contrary to Hansen's charts, 1998 was not the hottest year on record. That honor belongs to 1934, and five of the ten hottest years on record are now found prior to World War II."
