Hansen recently made this dire statement.
“Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.”
Which is the exact opposite of what he said in 1999.
Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s “Dust Bowl” that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
What caused his change of thinking? US temperatures have cooled since 1999 – so it can’t be that.
CONTIGUOUS UNITED STATES Climate Summary
The US has gotten wetter since 1999, so it can’t be that.
There haven’t been any studies which back up Hansen’s claims.
The Hansen piece is policy more than it is science, to be sure, and one can read it for the former. But facts should, and do, matter to some. The vision of a Midwest Dustbowl is a scary one, and the author appears intent to instill fear rather than reason.
The article makes these additional assertions:
“The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather…”
This is patently false. Take temperature over the U.S. as an example. The variability of daily temperature over the U.S. is much larger than the anthropogenic warming signal at the time scales of local weather. Depending on season and location, the disparity is at least a factor of 5 to 10.
Martin Hoerling – NOAA’s extreme weather expert
Varied Views on Extreme Weather in a Warming Climate – NYTimes.com
Hansen is a loose canon. He is operating outside the bounds of science – shouting fire in a crowded theatre, without providing any evidence to back it up. Fifty of NASA’s finest have called for his junk science to be removed from the organization. It is time for him to be retired, before he succeeds in destroying America’s energy future.
For ‘settled science’ it sure flips back and forth a lot doesn’t it?
Hansen’s noise about the global warming signal is drowned out by normal random weather.
This problem cuts both ways. To those who value empirical evidence, the measurements in question are so small compared to error bars that the overall impression is that the whole hullabaloo is the sort of tempest in a teapot Crichton described in State of Fear. But ambiguity and lack of resolution magnified the effect of prejudice. Only when listing the beneficiaries of the looting spree (e.g. nations not mentioned by name in the Kyoto Protocol) does a clearly discernible pattern of transfer payments from producers to nonproducers, and from semi-free economies to command economies swim into sharp relief.
I read it and instead of statement, found prophesizing. This calls to mind something HL Mencken wrote back when mystical totalitarianism was swiftly engulfing the country:
“Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.”