“If you Ignore the recent Warming, There’s Been No warming”: Deniers Go Full Arm-Wave on Hansen’s 1988 Predictions

There’s been a flurry of climate denial activity coinciding with the 30 anniversary of James Hansen’s uncannily accurate testimony to congress on climate change, June 23, 1988.  If you have not seen my vid on this, it’s at the bottom of the post.

Prominently, the Rupert (Fox News) Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal published a piece by serial climate denier and right wing think tank shill Pat Michaels, and a lesser known flack.

The piece is full of holes. Basically, “there’s been no warming since 1998 if you ignore all that warming.”

Dana Nuccitelli shines a light in the Guardian.  Zeke Hausfather, above, has some supporting information.

Guardian:

The incredible accuracy of Hansen’s climate model predictions debunks a number of climate denier myths. It shows that climate models are accurate and reliable, that global warming is proceeding as climate scientists predicted, and thus that we should probably start listening to them and take action to address the existential threat it poses.

Hansen’s predictions have thus become a target of climate denier misinformation. It began way back in 1998, when the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels – who has admitted that something like 40% of his salary comes from the fossil fuel industry – arguably committed perjury in testimony to Congress. Invited by Republicans to testify as the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement was in the works, Michaels was asked to evaluate how Hansen’s predictions were faring 10 years later.

In his presentation, Michaels deleted Hansen’s Scenarios B and C – the ones closest to reality – and only showed Scenario A to make it seem as though Hansen had drastically over-predicted global warming. Deleting inconvenient data in order to fool his audience became a habit for Patrick Michaels, who quickly earned a reputation of dishonesty in the climate science world, but has nevertheless remained a favorite of oil industry and conservative media.

Last week in the Wall Street Journal, Michaels was joined by Ryan Maue in an op-ed that again grossly distorted Hansen’s 1988 paper. Maue is a young scientist with a contrarian streak who’s published some serious research on hurricanes, but since joining the Cato Institute last year, seems to have sold off his remaining credibility to the fossil fuel industry.

In their WSJ opinion piece, Michaels and Maue claimed (emphasis mine-Peter):

Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect.

They provided no evidence to support this claim (evidence and facts seem not to be allowed on the WSJ Opinion page), and it takes just 30 seconds to fact check. In reality, global surface temperatures have increased by about 0.35°C since 2000 – precisely in line with Hansen’s 1988 model projections, as shown above. And it’s unscientific to simply “discount” the El Niño of 2015-16, because between the years 1999 and 2014, seven were cooled by La Niña events while just four experienced an El Niño warming. Yet despite the preponderance of La Niña events, global surface temperatures still warmed 0.15°C during that time. There’s simply not an ounce of truth to Michaels’ and Maue’s central WSJ claim.

It’s also worth noting that Hansen’s 1988 paper accurately predicted the geographic pattern of global warming, with the Arctic region warming fastest and more warming over land masses than the oceans. And climate deniers in the 1980s like Richard Lindzen were predicting “that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small.” If anyone deserves criticism for inaccurate climate predictions, it’s deniers like Lindzen who thought there wouldn’t be any significant warming, when in reality we’ve seen the dramatic global warming that James Hansen predicted.

Michaels’ and Maue’s misinformation didn’t stop there:

Once again, this unsupported assertion is completely wrong. I evaluated the IPCC’s global warming projections in my book, and showed in detail that theirs have been among the most accurate predictions. The climate model temperature projections in the 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports were all remarkably accurate; the IPCC predicted global warming almost exactly right.

Below – “Radio lab” style interview with former Cato Institute climate denial hack Jerry Taylor. Now woke, as my video interview shows.

In discussing his climate awakening, Taylor relates how he relied heavily on a colleague, who most observers take to be Pat Michaels, for his talking points on climate change – talking points that Taylor eventually recognized, to his horror, were dishonest manipulations. (if you’re pressed, cut to 5:45)

Below, a team of science all-stars gives their evaluation of Hansen’s predictions plus 30 years.