flacaltenn
Diamond Member
It seems that way back in the year 2000 (my how time flies) Dr. Hansen co-authored a paper that attributed the warming to pollution and not CO2. Shocker of shockers. And it was published in olfrauds fav PNAS.
Rather than attempting to improperly parse the abstract, why not look at the contextual understandings provided by the actual text of the research paper?
"Global warming in the twenty-first century: An alternative scenario" - http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2000/2000_Hansen_etal_2.pdf
The global surface temperature has increased by about 0.5°C since 1975 (1, 2), a burst of warming that has taken the global temperature to its highest level in the past millennium (3). There is a growing consensus (4) that the warming is at least in part a consequence of increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs).
GHGs cause a global climate forcing, i.e., an imposed perturbation of the Earths energy balance with space (5). There are many competing natural and anthropogenic climate forcings, but increasing GHGs are estimated to be the largest forcing and to result in a net positive forcing, especially during the past few decades (4, 6). Evidence supporting this interpretation is provided by observed heat storage in the ocean (7), which is positive and of the magnitude of the energy imbalance estimated from climate forcings for recent decades (8)...
...Climate forcing by CO2 is the largest forcing, but it does not dwarf the others (Fig. 1). Forcing by CH4 (0.7 Wym2) is half as large as that of CO2, and the total forcing by non-CO2 GHGs (1.4Wym2) equals that of CO2. Moreover, in comparing forcings
(...)
of course it is important to realize that Dr Hansen's considerations took place back pre-2000 in an era when our planetary CO2 emissions were significantly lower than they currently are. If we had been prepared to act decisively and aggressively to tackle climate change back 12+ years ago, the more gradualist approach suggested by Hansen in this post, might well have had a shot at producing some good results, after a decade where the rate of emission increase has more than doubled it seems much more a case of wishful thinking on the part of Dr Hansen.
Are you saying that all those models run in 2000 with dreadful consequences were garbage because Hansen et al had NO IDEA what emissions would look like 10 years later?
Critical thinking -- go buy a wad..