Hansen Speaks Out About Record 2010 Temperatures

“We don’t have a leader who is able to grasp [the issue] and say what is really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual”, says renown climatologist James Hansen in a recent interview.

Hansen is a giant in the scientific community and widely recognized as one of the first respected scientists to begin recognizing the dangers and effects of global warming. Hansen started speaking out about climate change, appearing in front of congressional committees and advising heads of state, as the data on global warming began accumulating.

Needless to say, when James Hansen speaks both climate change denialists and the scientific community listen.

In a new draft paper (pdf), co-authored with colleagues at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and recently submitted to the journal Reviews of Geophysics, Hansen blasts the climatological community for their inability to effectively communicate the overwhelming evidence for planetary warming trends - and the the massive influx of carbon and greenhouse gas in the atmosphere caused by human activity. Hansen also calls for scientists to be more transparent about how they arrive at their conclusions.

For anyone interested in how climatologists collate and interpret the all-important average global temperature datasets this paper is an illuminating read. Here is an except from the final section of the report, intended to communicate some of the problems involved with educating the public about global warming:

A greater obstacle to public communication has arisen with the politicization of reporting of global warming, a perhaps inevitable consequence of the economic and social implications of efforts required to alter the course of human-made climate change. We have the impression that the effect of politicization on communication of the science is aggravated by the fact that much of the media is owned by or strongly influenced by special economic interests.

The task of alleviating the communication obstacle posed by politicization is formidable. The difficulty is compounded by continual attacks on the credibility of scientists. Polls indicate that the attacks have been effective in causing many members of the public to doubt the reality of global warming. Human-made climate change has become an issue of surpassing importance to humanity, and global warming is the first order manifestation of increasing greenhouse gases that are predicted to drive climate change. 

Among some of the other barriers involved in climate education Hansen identifies are: mistaking local weather variability for indicators of climate change, massive corporate sponsored campaigns to discredit legitimate scientific discoveries, and unscrupulous media reporting by highly ideological television networks.  All this while ample evidence demonstrates how North America could become carbon neutral and fully energy independent within 20 years if law-makers and political leaders [sic] acted now, and with conviction.

One thing Hansen clearly communicates with this latest report is that 2010 is currently on course to become the hottest year on record, despite popular perception to the contrary following a cold winter in much of the northern hemisphere. As the paper states:

The 12-month running mean global temperature in the GISS analysis has reached a new record in 2010. The new record temperature in 2010 is particularly meaningful because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect. At the time of this writing (May 2010) the tropical Pacific Ocean has changed from El Nino conditions to ENSO-neutral and is likely headed into the cool La Nina phase of the Southern Oscillation. The 12-month running mean global temperature may continue to rise for a few more months before the ENSO change causes the next decline.It is likely that global temperature for calendar year 2010 will exceed the 2005 record, but that is not certain if a deep La Nina develops quickly. 

Unfortunately, I remain skeptical about whether this type of ‘hard’ scientific data will ever be fairly represented in the media. The Climate Denial Industry has spent billions of dollars over the last decade trying to confuse the public and slander leading scientists in the field. Only when the public begins to literally feel the devastating effects of climate change will there be a serious debate about what we can to mitigate our role in an increasingly hotter world.

As Hansen acknowledges in his paper, the race is now on to present such news in a dispassionate, transparent and authoritative manner to a public that is constantly bombarded by confusing, vague and politicized corporate media, at the same time as being aggressively courted by a noisy, anarchic and often ill-informed blogosphere.

What Hansen and his colleagues are now urgently trying to do is reboot the climate debate and start afresh. The message seems to be: if it means going back to basics and starting from the beginning all over again, then so be it.

Read the Entire Paper Here: Global Surface Temperature Change