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James Hansen, an actual climatologist, was predicting in the early 90s that New York would be partly underwater by 2010 and battered by gale-force winds so stro

by nvm0n2 3y ago

James Hansen, an actual climatologist, was predicting in the early 90s that New York would be partly underwater by 2010 and battered by gale-force winds so strong the windows would be boarded up. When that didn't happen he claimed he'd never made any such prediction and the people who claimed he did were making it up. Then he pushed out the date that was meant to happen to 2030. New York isn't going to be underwater by 2030 either. That's how it works with these people. They make bad predictions, pretend they never did, and then re-make them but this time it's another 20 years out. You only have to pull this stunt once to cover an entire career of prognostication and grants.

defrost 3y ago
> When that didn't happen he claimed he'd never made any such prediction but thanks to the internet and archives etc you can provide a link to the publication that quoted him on that, right? I'd like to see the actual quote, in context. The New Yorker in 1989 quotes Hansen [0]: given a global temperature increase of between one and a half and five and a half degrees Celsius, should raise sea level a foot, according to James Hansen. It is by now widely accepted that sea level will rise significantly over the next decades. The E.P.A. has estimated that it will rise between five and seven feet by 2100, and speculated about worst-case scenarios that might lead to an eleven foot rise; the National Academy of Sciences has been more conservative; other researchers have turned in even scarier numbers. Suffice it to say that included in the range of guesses of almost every panel and scientist studying the problem is an increase in global sea level of better than three feet over the next century. and he is absolutely NOT saying that "that New York would be partly underwater by 2010" .. although New York has certainly badly flooded on several occasions since 1989. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/09/11/the-end-of-nature https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/09/11/the-end-of-nat...
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110202162233/https:/www.salon.com/books/int/2001/10/23/weather/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110202162233/https:/www.salon.... While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, "If what you're saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?" He looked for a while and was quiet and didn't say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, "Well, there will be more traffic." I, of course, didn't think he heard the question right. Then he explained, "The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won't be there. The trees in the median strip will change." Then he said, "There will be more police cars." Why? "Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up." From looking up that link and double checking it for you, apparently the guy telling this story now says he mixed up 20 years and 40 when retelling it, so he says Hansen's original prediction was always for 2030. Doesn't matter, the claim is still just as wrong. The West Side Highway isn't going to sink beneath the waves in a little over 6 years, nor is there going to be tape across the windows, and the crime rate in New York has fallen over that period.
  - defrost 3y ago
    To be clear then, your "source" is A Salon reporter in 2001 quoting a third party about a recollection of a conversation they had more than a decade ago in ~ 1998 that runs contrary to direct statements that Jim Hansen made in 1998 to both congress and in interviews? > Whatever, doesn't matter, the claim is as wrong as when it was first made. To be honest it doesn't sound as if the claim was actually made. Unless you have that as an actual statement in minutes of congress, a submitted journal paper, or a direct interview. In lieu of anything better your GP comment appears to be strawmanning to poo poo somebody on the basis of something they never officially said.
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      That's a huge goal post move. Hansen has never denied making the prediction, only over what timeframe he said it would be over, so your doubt is misplaced. He did really say that. Your dates are all off by the way. The interview dates from 2001. You're looking at the date archive.org snapshotted it, not the date the article was published. The recalled conversation dates from around the time Hansen was doing his testimony to congress (end of the 1980s/early 90s). It's just an example. There's an ample supply. David Viner, a UK climatologist, predicted that "children just aren't going to know what snow is" ... in March 2000. The same news article quotes Jarich Oosten, an anthropologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, saying that "even if we no longer see snow, it will remain culturally important". And David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, said "ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow". Those children grew up and it still snows in Europe just like it always did. Climatologists have a long track record of making very long term predictions, insisting that nobody wait before acting to find out whether or not they're any good at predicting, and then eventually being proven dramatically wrong. It's a meme for a reason and this constant insistence that they never made wrong predictions is tiresome revisionism.
acdha 3y ago
That’s a serious citation needed – and since my experience with science deniers started creationists I expect that to be an original source with context, not the inaccurate summary given by the person you actually read. Here’s an example something verifiable, from his Senate testimony in 1988 as covered by the Washington Post: > "The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now," Hansen testified at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. "We already reached the point where the greenhouse effect is important." > Although scientists have previously theorized about the greenhouse effect and issued vague projections of rising temperatures sometime in the next century, Hansen is the first to concretely link warming and greenhouse gases and to authoritatively proclaim the phenomenon's arrival. > He warned, moreover, of an "increasing tendency" for droughts and heat waves, especially in the Southeast and Midwest, during the balance of this decade and the 1990s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/06/24/scientist-says-greenhouse-effect-is-setting-in/3844f00f-42f4-420f-8811-62de6c989d8f/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/06/24/s... (Historical review: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2018/06/judgment-on-hansens-88-climate-testimony-he-was-right/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2018/06/judgment-on-hanse...) Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard that particular story so I’ll help you out: it’s a misstatement made by someone else (Bob Reiss) when talking to a Salon.com reporter thirteen years later in 2001, and the original question was a speculative off-the-cuff prediction about the impacts of CO2 levels doubling, which fortunately has not happened yet: > Michaels also has the facts wrong about a 1988 interview of me by Bob Reiss, in which Reiss asked me to speculate on changes that might happen in New York City in 40 years assuming CO2 doubled in amount. Michaels has it as 20 years, not 40 years, with no mention of doubled CO2. Reiss verified this fact to me, but he later sent the message: "I went back to my book and re-read the interview I had with you. I am embarrassed to say that although the book text is correct, in remembering our original conversation, during a casual phone interview with a Salon magazine reporter in 2001 I was off in years. What I asked you originally at your office window was for a prediction of what Broadway would look like in 40 years, not 20. But when I spoke to the Salon reporter 10 years later - probably because I'd been watching the predictions come true, I remembered it as a 20 year question." So give Michaels a pass on this one -- assume that he reads Salon, but he did not check the original source, Reiss' book. Source: http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailings/2011/20110126_SingingInTheRain.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailings/2011/20110126_Singi... More importantly, one man is not an entire scientific field. When talking about accuracy, we should be looking at the IPCC reports since those have a multi-decade history we can compare to actual measures change by now: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projections-on-target-so-far/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec... https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/12/4/20991315/climate-change-prediction-models-accurate https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/12/4/2099131... What’s also interesting is to see how the various lies funded by the fossil fuel industry have fared over that same time. Like the tobacco industry science deniers – in some cases the same people – they haven’t shown any track record of accuracy, flitting around from detail to detail trying to say that any unusual point on a graph disproves the entire field. We’ve heard various cases of wishful thinking around sunspots, satellite error, buoy error, urban vs. rural discrepancies, etc. and the common thread is that none of those have held up scientifically or meaningfully changed the trajectory. That’s the difference between scientists who are critically examining their own work and corporate lobbyists who are starting with the conclusion that their profit margins shouldn’t change and working backwards.

by nvm0n2 3y ago

defrost 3y ago

> When that didn't happen he claimed he'd never made any such prediction but thanks to the internet and archives etc you can provide a link to the publication that quoted him on that, right? I'd like to see the actual quote, in context. The New Yorker in 1989 quotes Hansen [0]: given a global temperature increase of between one and a half and five and a half degrees Celsius, should raise sea level a foot, according to James Hansen. It is by now widely accepted that sea level will rise significantly over the next decades. The E.P.A. has estimated that it will rise between five and seven feet by 2100, and speculated about worst-case scenarios that might lead to an eleven foot rise; the National Academy of Sciences has been more conservative; other researchers have turned in even scarier numbers. Suffice it to say that included in the range of guesses of almost every panel and scientist studying the problem is an increase in global sea level of better than three feet over the next century. and he is absolutely NOT saying that "that New York would be partly underwater by 2010" .. although New York has certainly badly flooded on several occasions since 1989. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/09/11/the-end-of-nature https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/09/11/the-end-of-nat...

nvm0n2 3y ago
Here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110202162233/https:/www.salon.com/books/int/2001/10/23/weather/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110202162233/https:/www.salon.... While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, "If what you're saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?" He looked for a while and was quiet and didn't say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, "Well, there will be more traffic." I, of course, didn't think he heard the question right. Then he explained, "The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won't be there. The trees in the median strip will change." Then he said, "There will be more police cars." Why? "Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up." From looking up that link and double checking it for you, apparently the guy telling this story now says he mixed up 20 years and 40 when retelling it, so he says Hansen's original prediction was always for 2030. Doesn't matter, the claim is still just as wrong. The West Side Highway isn't going to sink beneath the waves in a little over 6 years, nor is there going to be tape across the windows, and the crime rate in New York has fallen over that period.
- defrost 3y ago
  To be clear then, your "source" is A Salon reporter in 2001 quoting a third party about a recollection of a conversation they had more than a decade ago in ~ 1998 that runs contrary to direct statements that Jim Hansen made in 1998 to both congress and in interviews? > Whatever, doesn't matter, the claim is as wrong as when it was first made. To be honest it doesn't sound as if the claim was actually made. Unless you have that as an actual statement in minutes of congress, a submitted journal paper, or a direct interview. In lieu of anything better your GP comment appears to be strawmanning to poo poo somebody on the basis of something they never officially said.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    That's a huge goal post move. Hansen has never denied making the prediction, only over what timeframe he said it would be over, so your doubt is misplaced. He did really say that. Your dates are all off by the way. The interview dates from 2001. You're looking at the date archive.org snapshotted it, not the date the article was published. The recalled conversation dates from around the time Hansen was doing his testimony to congress (end of the 1980s/early 90s). It's just an example. There's an ample supply. David Viner, a UK climatologist, predicted that "children just aren't going to know what snow is" ... in March 2000. The same news article quotes Jarich Oosten, an anthropologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, saying that "even if we no longer see snow, it will remain culturally important". And David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, said "ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow". Those children grew up and it still snows in Europe just like it always did. Climatologists have a long track record of making very long term predictions, insisting that nobody wait before acting to find out whether or not they're any good at predicting, and then eventually being proven dramatically wrong. It's a meme for a reason and this constant insistence that they never made wrong predictions is tiresome revisionism.

acdha 3y ago

That’s a serious citation needed – and since my experience with science deniers started creationists I expect that to be an original source with context, not the inaccurate summary given by the person you actually read. Here’s an example something verifiable, from his Senate testimony in 1988 as covered by the Washington Post: > "The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now," Hansen testified at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. "We already reached the point where the greenhouse effect is important." > Although scientists have previously theorized about the greenhouse effect and issued vague projections of rising temperatures sometime in the next century, Hansen is the first to concretely link warming and greenhouse gases and to authoritatively proclaim the phenomenon's arrival. > He warned, moreover, of an "increasing tendency" for droughts and heat waves, especially in the Southeast and Midwest, during the balance of this decade and the 1990s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/06/24/scientist-says-greenhouse-effect-is-setting-in/3844f00f-42f4-420f-8811-62de6c989d8f/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/06/24/s... (Historical review: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2018/06/judgment-on-hansens-88-climate-testimony-he-was-right/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2018/06/judgment-on-hanse...) Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard that particular story so I’ll help you out: it’s a misstatement made by someone else (Bob Reiss) when talking to a Salon.com reporter thirteen years later in 2001, and the original question was a speculative off-the-cuff prediction about the impacts of CO2 levels doubling, which fortunately has not happened yet: > Michaels also has the facts wrong about a 1988 interview of me by Bob Reiss, in which Reiss asked me to speculate on changes that might happen in New York City in 40 years assuming CO2 doubled in amount. Michaels has it as 20 years, not 40 years, with no mention of doubled CO2. Reiss verified this fact to me, but he later sent the message: "I went back to my book and re-read the interview I had with you. I am embarrassed to say that although the book text is correct, in remembering our original conversation, during a casual phone interview with a Salon magazine reporter in 2001 I was off in years. What I asked you originally at your office window was for a prediction of what Broadway would look like in 40 years, not 20. But when I spoke to the Salon reporter 10 years later - probably because I'd been watching the predictions come true, I remembered it as a 20 year question." So give Michaels a pass on this one -- assume that he reads Salon, but he did not check the original source, Reiss' book. Source: http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailings/2011/20110126_SingingInTheRain.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailings/2011/20110126_Singi... More importantly, one man is not an entire scientific field. When talking about accuracy, we should be looking at the IPCC reports since those have a multi-decade history we can compare to actual measures change by now: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projections-on-target-so-far/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec... https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/12/4/20991315/climate-change-prediction-models-accurate https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/12/4/2099131... What’s also interesting is to see how the various lies funded by the fossil fuel industry have fared over that same time. Like the tobacco industry science deniers – in some cases the same people – they haven’t shown any track record of accuracy, flitting around from detail to detail trying to say that any unusual point on a graph disproves the entire field. We’ve heard various cases of wishful thinking around sunspots, satellite error, buoy error, urban vs. rural discrepancies, etc. and the common thread is that none of those have held up scientifically or meaningfully changed the trajectory. That’s the difference between scientists who are critically examining their own work and corporate lobbyists who are starting with the conclusion that their profit margins shouldn’t change and working backwards.