Hansen on MSNBC Dec. 18th

As readers know, I’m on the mailing list of climate scientist James Hansen (along with thousands of others). His most recent article on temperature, science procedure, the basic science of climate change data, and how we know the temperature across the planet is going up, is like starting from scratch.  It’s meant to counteract the infamous emails from the UK University that were illegally hacked into, and which ultimately expressed nothing that negated the climate science.

You can download the entire document here and an excerpt is printed below. You can also see a Hansen interview on MSNBC from December 18th here.

The Temperature of Science, is available here.  (PDF) Here is an excerpt:

“Is it possible to totally eliminate data flaws and disinformation? Of course not. The fact
that the absence of incriminating statements in pirated e-mails is taken as evidence of wrongdoing provides a measure of what would be required to quell all criticism. I believe that the steps that we now take to assure data integrity are as much as is reasonable from the standpoint of the use of our time and resources.”

The summary is below.

Summary
The nature of messages that I receive from the public, and the fact that NASA
Headquarters received more than 2500 inquiries in the past week about our possible
“manipulation” of global temperature data, suggest that the concerns are more political than
scientific. Perhaps the messages are intended as intimidation, expected to have a chilling effect
on researchers in climate change.

The recent “success” of climate contrarians in using the pirated East Anglia e-mails to
cast doubt on the reality of global warming* seems to have energized other deniers. I am now
inundated with broad FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests for my correspondence, with
substantial impact on my time and on others in my office. I believe these to be fishing
expeditions, aimed at finding some statement(s), likely to be taken out of context, which they
would attempt to use to discredit climate science.

There are lessons from our experience about care that must be taken with data before it is
made publicly available. But there is too much interesting science to be done to allow
intimidation tactics to reduce our scientific drive and output. We can take a lesson from my 5-
year-old grandson who boldly says “I don’t quit, because I have never-give-up fighting spirit!”

There are other researchers who work more extensively on global temperature analyses
than we do – our main work concerns global satellite observations and global modeling – but
there are differences in perspectives, which, I suggest, make it useful to have more than one
analysis. Besides, it is useful to combine experience working with observed temperature
together with our work on satellite data and climate models. This combination of interests is
likely to help provide some insights into what is happening with global climate and information
on the data that are needed [...]