Posted by Tina
James Hansen’s former boss, on James Hansen, Lawrence Solomon
** James Hansen of NASA’s GISS has been the single-most influential scientist in the world in promoting the view that global warming represents a catastrophic risk to the planet. His former supervisor at NASA, Dr. John S. Theon, now publicly disagrees with Hansen’s work. In the correspondence below from earlier this month, Theon dismisses the validity of Hansen’s work, charges that some scientists manipulated climate change data, and formally joined the ranks of the deniers. **
** Yes, one could say that I was, in effect, Hansens supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation. He was never muzzled even though he violated NASAs official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). He thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress. *** My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy. **