James E. Hansen (born March 29, 1941 in Denison, Iowa) heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a part of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Earth Sciences Division. He has held this position since 1981. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.
After graduate school, Hansen continued his work with radiative transfer models and attempting to understand the Venusian atmosphere. This naturally led to the same computer codes being used to understand the Earth's atmosphere. He used these codes to study the effects that aerosols and trace gases have on the climate. Hansen has also contributed to the further understanding of the Earth's climate through the development and use of global climate models.
Hansen is best known for his research in the field of climatology, his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in 1988 that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to limit the impacts of climate change.
Education
Hansen was trained in physics and astronomy in the space science program of Dr. James Van Allen at the University of Iowa. He obtained a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics with highest distinction in 1963, an M.S. in Astronomy in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Physics, in 1967, all three degrees from the University of Iowa. He participated in the NASA graduate traineeship from 1962 to 1966 and, at the same time, between 1965 and 1966, he was a visiting student at the Institute of Astrophysics at the University of Kyoto and in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo.
Research and publications
As a college student at the University of Iowa, Hansen was attracted to science and the research done by James Van Allen's space science program in the physics and astronomy department. A decade later, he focus shifted to planetary research that involved trying to understand the climate change on earth that will result from anthropogenic changes of the atmospheric composition.
Hansen has stated that one of his research interests is radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres, especially the interpretation of remote sensing of the Earth's atmosphere and surface from satellites. Because of the ability of satellites to monitor the entire globe, they may be one of the most effective ways to monitor and study global change. His other interests include the development of global circulation models to help understand the observed climate trends, and diagnosing human impacts on climate.
Atmosphere of Venus
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hansen published several papers on the planet Venus following his Ph.D. dissertation. Venus has a high brightness temperature in the radio frequencies compared to the infrared. Hansen proposed that the hot surface was the result of aerosols trapping the internal energy of the planet. More recent studies have suggested that several billion years ago Venus's atmosphere was much more like Earth's than it is now, and that there were probably substantial quantities of liquid water on the surface, but a runaway greenhouse effect was caused by the evaporation of that original water, which generated a critical level of greenhouse gases in its atmosphere.
Hansen continued his study of Venus by looking at the composition of its clouds. He looked at the near-infrared reflectivity of ice clouds, compared them to observations of Venus, and found that they qualitatively agreed. He also was able to use a radiative transfer model to establish an upper limit to the size of the ice particles if the clouds were actually made of ice. Evidence published in the early 1980s showed that the clouds consist mainly of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid droplets.
By 1974, the composition of Venus' clouds had not yet been determined, with many scientists proposing a wide variety of compounds including liquid water and aqueous solutions of ferrous chloride. Hansen and Hovenier used the polarization of sunlight reflected from the planet to establish that the clouds where spherical, and had a refractive index and cloud drop effective radius which eliminated all of the proposed cloud types except sulfuric acid. Kawabata and Hansen expanded upon this work by looking at the variation of polarization on Venus. They found that the visible clouds are a diffuse haze rather than a thick cloud, which confirmed the same results obtained from transits across the sun.
The Pioneer Venus project was launched in May 1978 and reached Venus late that same year. Hansen collaborated with Travis and other colleagues in a 1979 Science article that reported on the development and variability of clouds in the ultraviolet spectrum. They conclude that there are at least three different cloud materials that contribute to the images: a thin haze layer, sulfuric acid clouds, and an unknown ultraviolet absorber below the sulfuric acid cloud layer. The linear polarization data obtained from the same mission confirmed that the low- and mid-level clouds were sulfuric acid with radius of about 1 micrometer. Above the cloud layer was a layer of submicrometre haze.
Global temperature data
The first GISS global temperature data was published in 1987. Hansen and his co-author analyzed the surface air temperature at meteorological stations focusing on the years from 1880 to 1985. Temperatures for stations closer together than 1000 kilometers were shown to be highly correlated, especially in the mid-latitudes, which provided a way to combine the station data to provided accurate long-term variations. They conclude that global mean temperatures can be determined even though meteorological stations are typically in the Northern hemisphere and confined to continental regions. Warming in the past century was found to be 0.5-0.7 °C , with warming similar in both hemispheres. When the analysis was updated in 1988, the four warmest years on record were all in the 1980s. The two warmest years were 1981 and 1987.
With the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, 1992 saw a cooling in the global temperatures. There was speculation that this would cause the next few years to be cooler because of the large serial correlation in the global temperatures. Bassett and Lin found the statistical odds of a new temperature record to be small. Hansen countered by saying that having insider information shifts the odds to those that know the physics of the climate system, and that whether there is a new temperature record depends upon the particular data set used.
The temperature data was updated in 1999 to report that 1998 was the warmest year since the instrumental data began in 1880. They also found that the rate of temperature change was larger than any time in instrument history, and conclude that the recent El Nino was not totally responsible for the large temperature anomaly in 1998. In spite of this, the United States had seen a smaller degree of warming, and the eastern U.S. and the western Atlantic Ocean had actually cooled slightly.
2001 saw a major update to how the temperature was calculated. It incorporated corrections due to the following reasons: time-of-observation bias, station history changes, classification of rural/urban stations, the urban adjustment based on satellite measurements of night light intensity, and relying more on rural station than urban. Evidence was found of local urban warming in urban, suburban and small-town records.
The anomalously high global temperature in 1998 due to El Niño resulted in a brief drop in subsequent years. However, a 2001 Hansen report in the journal Science states that global warming continues, and that the increasing temperatures should stimulate discussions on how to slow global warming. The temperature data was updated in 2006 to report that temperatures are now 0.8 °C warmer than a century ago, and conclude that the recent global warming is a real climate change and not an artifact from the urban heat island effect. The regional variation of warming, with more warming in the higher latitudes, is further evidence of warming that is anthropogenic in origin.
In 2007, Stephen McIntyre notified GISS that many of the U.S. temperature records from the Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) displayed a discontinuity around the year 2000. NASA corrected the data and credited McIntyre with pointing out the flaw. Hansen indicated that he felt that several news organizations had overreacted to this mistake.
Black carbon
Hansen has also contributed toward the understanding of black carbon on regional climate. In recent decades, northern China has experienced increased drought, and southern China has received increased summer rain resulting in a larger number of floods. Southern China has had a decrease in temperatures while most of the world has warmed. In a paper with Menon and colleagues, through the use of observations and climate models results, they conclude that the black carbon heats the air, increases convection and precipitation, and leads to larger surface cooling than if the aerosols were sulfates.
A year later, Hansen teamed with Makiko Sato to publish a study on
Global Warming is False | Facebook
Welcome to the official Facebook Page of Global Warming is False. Get exclusive content and interact with Global Warming is False right from Facebook. Join Facebook to create your ...
Al Gore: The False Prophet of Global Warming
Posts: 71 Joined: 5/8/2005 Status: offline: Al Gore: The False Prophet of Global Warming "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ...
newworldliberty.wordpress.com
The false religion of global warming
hysteria – a psychiatric condition variously characterized by emotional excitability, excessive anxiety, sensory and motor disturbances, or the unconscious simulation of organic ...
Global Warming and Bad Weather | Newsweek The Smart List | Newsweek ...
TECHNOLOGY | TRUE OR FALSE ... storm or other extreme weather, scientists trip over themselves to absolve global warming.
Another False Alarm on Global Warming - by David E. Wojick, Ph.D ...
Author: David E. Wojick, Ph.D., Publication: Heartland Perspectives, Issue: 2005, Published: May 02, 2005, Publisher: The Heartland Institute, Summary: Global warming alarmists are ...
DailyTech - Greenpeace Sued Over False Global Warming Claims
Altered Photographs of Sea Level Rise to Blame ... A group of Spanish homeowners and real estate developers have filed suit against Greenpeace for its global warming campaign ...
Amazon.com: Global Warming False Alarm: The Bad Science Behind the ...
Amazon.com: Global Warming False Alarm: The Bad Science Behind the United Nations' Assertion that Man-made CO2 Causes Global Warming (9780984098903): Ralph B. Alexander: Books
False & Destructive "Solutions" to Global Warming: Groups Condemn ...
Nairobi, Kenya-The Gaia Foundation, Global Forest Coalition, Global Justice Ecology Project, Large Scale Biofuels Action Group, the STOP GE Trees Campaign and World Rainforest ...
A False Frenzy on Global Warming
When I was the political reporter and weekend anchor at WISN TV, the CBS affiliate in Milwaukee, John Coleman was our weatherman. He was s strong conservative and was known for his ...