“Hansen vs. The World” (Richard Kerr on Climate Science Uncertainty in 1989) – Interested in that?
By Robert Bradley Jr. – January 13, 2022
A historical oddity is how the US government and Exxon “know” about “greenhouse signals” and human-caused climate change when climate scientists don’t. so. But that is the state of the debate where PR and lawsuits overwhelm a rational view of knowledge. (below)
“In my expert opinion, in the short period not long after President Carter took office in 1977,” James Gustave Speth said, “there was a growing interest and a real urgency in the government. states that burning fossil fuels is heating the planet and causing climate change in many ways that could be catastrophic…. ” [1]
“Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue,” said an article in Scientific American. “This knowledge has not stopped the company… spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation.”
But Science. . .
How do the US government and Exxon know about “greenhouse signals” and human-caused climate change when climate science doesn’t? But that is the state of the debate where PR and lawsuits overwhelm a rational view of knowledge.
In the real world, global cooling is the fear. “Certainly the threat of another ice age was the subject of much scientific and popular discussion in the 1970s, Harold Bernard, Jr., said in The Greenhouse Effect.
Lots of books and articles titled ‘The Cooling,’ ‘Blizzard,’ ‘Ice’ and ‘A Mini Ice Age May Be Beginning in a Decade’. The ‘snow blitz’ theory was popularized on the public television show ‘The Weather Machine’ in 1975. And certainly the winters of the late 1970s were enough to give us shivers in the imagination. [2]
And in the late 1980s and early 1990s (and even today), the evidence for the positive and negative effects of carbon dioxide on the global climate was controversial. [3]
Richard Kerr, a longtime writer on global warming at Science, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He documents how the mainstream of climate science refutes James Hansen’s assertions that the occurrence of global warming and the intensifying greenhouse effect is opinion rather than science.
Kerr wrote in mid-1989:
If many of Hansen’s colleagues find his first view of warming trends regrettable, they suggest that his second view – that warming, with “high confidence”, may be linked regarding the greenhouse effect – is unforgivable. None of the greenhouse researchers selected at the meeting could agree with him. Michael Schlesinger, a modeler at Oregon State University, said: “Taken together, his claims give people the feeling that the greenhouse effect has been detected with certainty. “Our current understanding does not support that. Confidence in detection has now fallen to near zero.”
Continued uncertainty
There is no stable science about a climate crisis after James Hansen ignited it in 1988. In 1998, William K. Stevens, who wrote a column on global warming for the New York Times, cited it. “A leading expert on greenhouse signal detection, climatologist Thomas Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder:
“They are making progress, and there is a lot of hard work involved, and I value them the most,” Dr. Tom Wigley… said of Dr. Mann and his colleagues. “But I think there’s a limit to how far you can go.” As for using proxy data to detect man-made greenhouse gases, he said, “I don’t think we’re going to get to the point where we’re going to be completely convinced.”
So again, what does Exxon or the US government (or anyone else) know about the power of the enhanced greenhouse effect, as a bleak answer to rising CO2 levels and Other man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?
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[1] Speth, They Knew: The Role of the US Federal Government in 50 Years of the Climate Crisis (MIT Press: 2021), p. 11.
[2] Harold Bernard, Jr., The Greenhouse Effect (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing, 1980), p. 20
[3] With human-caused global warming, qualitative raises the question of quantitatively being good, benign, and benign. Climate economists generally consider lower range warming to be beneficial, while higher warming scenarios are neutral to negative. (Climate models can be calibrated to tell you anything).
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