HANSEN LOADS THE DICE—AGAIN

As our front-page shocker blares, NASA modeler James Hansen now admits that the models predicted too much warming, and that the planet is getting greener.

We find this encouraging.

But these salutary developments have panicked federal apocalysts. People just don’t seem to be noticing climate change enough (maybe because things aren’t changing all that much). In response, Hansen proposes a new, simple "Common-Sense Climate Index" that will take complicated climatic quantities and put them in terms so simple that global warming will become "noticeable to the lay person."

There’s a real irony here. Starting in the late 1980s, Hansen began to tell every available reporter that, in his words, "the man in the street" would notice global warming very soon—first in the early 1990s and then (because it failed to appear earlier) in the mid-1990s. It’s now the late 1990s. Obviously, if "the man" had picked this up, there would be no need to trump up a government-sponsored hysteria index like the one he proposes.

There are only two fundamental problems. The new index doesn’t detect a noticeable climate change where anybody actually lives, and the common-sense index makes no sense.

Using local climate data from a large number of monitoring stations in the Northern Hemisphere, Harness derives his index from a variety of temperature and precipitation measures. The index is designed so that when climate change is greater than one, it becomes perceptible to local residents (who will then presumably all write their Congresspersons).

Positive index numbers indicate changes associated with greenhouse warming. But despite Hansen’s admonition that "the sense of changes expected to accompany global warming [is] reasonably well defined," since these reasonably well-defined changes are based on climate models, that are not, in fact, well defined at all.

Hansen admits as much near the end of the article, when he points out that the greenhouse effect is changing at only half the rate he assumed it would in his models, which were used to create the current panic.

But the need to construct concern out of apathy is obvious and so the index strikes at all the "hot buttons."

The index glows red when there are more hot days at a given locale. "Hot days" are based on the maximum temperature on the 10th-hottest day of the year between 1951 and 1980 (in New York City, for example, this temperature is 91°F).

Now we don’t like to gamble, but we’ll bet you that most of these hot days will occur in the summer at most places. But climate models and observations all suggest that little summer warming will occur from greenhouse gases.

Here’s another example: "...global warming should cause intensification of both extremes of the hydrologic cycle: droughts and forest fires, on the one hand, and heavy precipitation and floods, on the other." Despite the lack of support for this notion, it nevertheless persists because climate models keep showing it. So high index values include both extreme precipitation events and plant moisture deficit (drought) events.

In fact, there is little evidence that our greenhouse future climate will be more extreme. In truth, the global warming signal—the condition that will indicate a change—may well be a more moderate (less variable) climate from year to year. That’s what’s been happening for the last 40 years.

When all of the calculations are made, the bottom line shows that the only places where their index is greater than one is over portions of Siberia and Alaska. So the people living there would definitely be detecting climate change right now—especially since, as Hansen forgot to mention, the warming is almost all in the dead of their hideous winter.

To try to put a positive spin on what was no doubt a disappointing result, Hansen summarized that, "At most places in the world the climate index...has changed in the sense expected for global warming." Which underscores the apocalysts’ greatest dilemma. If the index were designed properly to detect the real effects of increased greenhouse gases, it would look for a lengthening of the growing season, a planetary greening, a warming of the coldest winter air masses, and fewer weather extremes.

Some of these changes are in fact happening, but if these truths about global warming were publicized with half the verve as the alleged negative consequences, federal climatologists wouldn’t wouldn’t be wasting your money trying to convince you to worry about it.

You can always tell when Hansen is talking to the great unwashed, because, as with this latest article, he dusts off the old climate dice. Those following this issue for a while may remember that a decade ago, Hansen prepared some dice with red and blue faces to represent hot and cold years, and then suggested that mankind’s industrial progress is loading the dice with more red faces. (He actually rolled them on This Week With David Brinkley in 1988.)

We think the most important feature of Hansen’s new index is probably the panic button.