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Folks… (Crisis Forum, CHE Network and a few bcc’d individuals)
Here’s a report here on Hansen retiring from NASA to focus on campaigning:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22000810
… and may I particularly draw your collective attentions to the link from this report on his take on the levelling out over the past decade of global warming data:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130115_Temperature2012.pdf
I can very much see Hansen’s case that this levelling out can be explained in various ways. At the same time, those of us who, based on the best available data, have expressed public concern about global warming, need to remain astute to how those who deny the issue also interpret the data, and to keep that data constantly under review. For example:
For myself, I have always felt that Hansen was on the edge of the scientific consensus in terms of possible rates of sea level rise this century and said so in Hell & High Water. On the other hand, sea level rise together with storm surges from “extreme weather events” such as that which devastated coastal areas of New York last year is having a palpable effect on the ground in many parts of the world, and I attach a cutting on this from last week’s Stornoway Gazette that’s an example. I am always very wary of local sea level data because it usually fails to factor in local plate tectonics (i.e. whether the land is rising or sinking – a huge issue in many Pacific island areas), but in this case, Glasgow’s Jim Hansom (not to be confused with Hansen) knows what he’s looking at and how to disaggregate the variables.
Given the complexity and sometimes contradictory nature of the data and my own lack of competence to unpack all its variables, I primarily await the next IPCC evaluation due in 2014 – AR5 or the Fifth Assessment Report:
http://www.ipcc.ch/activities/activities.shtml#.UVvl1pOA9TQ
Meanwhile, it appears that the climate change contrarians have procured and leaked an early draft of this report, which, they say, takes a similar position to AR4 in 2007:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/14/ipcc_ar5_wg1_leaked/
My overall sense is that climate change – and with it, exacerbation of the extremes – remains very much a reality, but we have to keep our eye carefully on evaluations of the peer-reviewed data undertaken by credible scientific bodies and not trial by a media driven primarily by hedonistic consumerism.
Alastair.
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