That said, you did exactly what I described originally: took bad reporting of statements and presented them as factual. Thanks for demonstrating it so well.
Firstly, his 1980s testimony talked about worst case scenarios. That was one of them. As I said previously. His 1988 speech and report to congress says no such thing about New York, neither does your linked article. What it says is that, in conversation with another person, he discussed that as a possible outcome (or perhaps a likely one, if we didn't change course somewhat... which we did). 3rd hand reporting of his words without ANY context. But you took it as fact and repeated it as such.
Secondly, that newspaper article doesn't quote him for your statement about the arctic sea ice, it simply alludes to it being something he said. With no quote and context we can't know what he actually was talking about, just how the journalist took it and decided to summarize it. Again, see the previous post for where I talked about this.
However, it is worth noting that, since satellites first began monitoring the Arctic in 1979, the average area covered by sea ice has shrunk by at least 40%. The past 15 years have seen the 15 lowest summer sea ice minimums on record. It's entirely likely he was, again, talking about worst case (or simply just bad) scenarios. It's also possible he was talking about point-of-no-return (which some believe we may have reached with arctic ice, as it's almost all 'young' ice now).
We can't know, it's not reported. What we do know thought is that what you said is false.
Again, thanks for perfectly demonstrating my point. I urge you to actually look into the sources rather than reading PopSci reporting. It will help you to not make these mistakes again.
We didn't. CO2 has continuously risen and the rise accelerated with time. Hansen's predictions should therefore have absolutely come true if he was right, but they didn't. Or do you think the graph of CO2 I showed you in the other post is misleading as well?
W.R.T. the quotes, now you're getting really desperate. Sure, sure, those poor innocent scientists keep getting ascribed word-for-word predictions they never made and they're all just too polite to complain about having words put in their mouth like that. Come on, wake up! He wasn't being misquoted. Here he is in another 2008 article written by himself in which he makes exactly the same prediction:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/jun/23/climatec...
"As a result, without any additional greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer."
Lots more CO2 was added, 15 years passed, the Arctic is not ice free. Nor are ice levels falling. Here's the data from Hanen's own former employer showing that summer ice sea levels stabilized around 2010, which should not have been possible according to these people:
The point being made, that many people have been largely misinformed about the science and what it predicts by media that misrepresented those things, still stands. The good news though is that even if James Hansen did run around telling everyone wild theories (and some argue that many of his predictions have held up remarkably well https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...) we don't have to depend on anyone's comments to the press, there is actual research being reviewed, modeled, and reassessed constantly that just doesn't get the attention alarmist news stories or interviews by authors trying to cash in on climate fear will generate.
That isn't to say that scientists don't get things wrong. Some scientists are just plain bad at their job, some scientists get paid to falsify data and bury results unfavorable to the person signing their paychecks, and some just make mistakes, and those are all things we should be working to minimize, but I'd be shocked if our best understanding of the impacts of our changing climate hadn't changed several times over the last 35 years.
Scientists getting things wrong isn't some gotcha that proves science is broken, it shows that science is working. Getting things wrongs is just one step of the process. All science does is provide the tools to give us the best understanding of something we can get with the information we have at the time. The more we learn, the more data we have, the more our understanding will change and evolve. People don't like uncertainty and some might wish science was all about dictating indisputable truths that cannot be wrong or questioned, but that's never been what science does or what it's for.
See this is the attitude that causes people to give up in disgust:
If scientists make correct predictions, that's science working!
If scientists make wrong predictions, that's also science working!
Literally no matter what they do or what happens, they cannot lose.
>> People don't like uncertainty
People are fine with scientific understanding being uncertain. They are not fine with being told by scientists that The Science is so certain it's undisputable, that the only people who disagree are paid to do so, that the world should undergo massive changes on the back of this 100% certain science and then when their predictions are all invalidated it's "hey, being wrong is all just part of the process, if you don't understand that you don't understand science!".
If scientists make a confident prediction and then turn out to have been woefully misjudging their own competence, it is correct and right that their reputations are trashed and they should get defunded. But that doesn't happen. Instead we get the Believe Science brigade who insist that all those bad predictions never happened, if they did happen it wasn't a problem and anyone saying otherwise needs to be suppressed.
And BTW both quotes come with literally an entire article of context, and Hansen wrote a whole article for the Guardian in which he makes the same predictions about Arctic ice. So please don't try to claim he never said these things. He's on record as doing so, many times in many contexts.
Well... yeah, because either way we learn something! When predictions work out, it strengths a theory, but getting some new piece of data that shatters a current theory and changes how we look at something forever is way more exciting. Science just isn't about winners and losers.
> They are not fine with being told by scientists that The Science is so certain it's undisputable,
No scientist ever says this. In fact, they're more likely to say "Please prove me wrong!"
> that the only people who disagree are paid to do so
They don't say that either, but let's face it, people getting paid to lie and spread misinformation is a big problem. Scientists disagree with each other all the time and that's totally fine! It's desirable even! Here's the catch though, if you want dispute science and be taken seriously, you have to be able to back that up with evidence. Blindly questioning or disagreeing for no reason or for purely emotional or ideological reasons is worthless. You can always fight science with science, but somebody has to be able to check your math, review your methods, and reproduce your results. If your data or your work is weaker, it's not going change many minds.
> that the world should undergo massive changes on the back of this 100% certain science
Again, science isn't going to be 100% certain about anything, but realistically, based on what information we have, it can still be pretty damn sure about things. It's only logical to take advantage of the best understanding we have and to let it guide our choices and our policy. "Ignore what we know is most likely correct" is just a bad strategy.
> If scientists make a confident prediction and then turn out to have been woefully misjudging their own competence, it is correct and right that their reputations are trashed and they should get defunded.
If a scientist continuously makes careless mistakes, then I'd say it should tarnish their reputation and that funding should to go to better qualified researchers, but predictions can turn out to be wrong without there being any mistakes at all and without misjudgements about competence too. Testing our understanding of how we think things work is a critical part of the process, and by necessity sometimes those tests fail and those failures further shape and refine our understanding leading to new tests.
Getting something wrong doesn't make a scientist a failure, and we're supposed to have guardrails in place to help prevent and catch avoidable errors. We should have people performing meaningful peer-review, and there should be many eyes on important research, with many people replicating studies to confirm results, and others trying to poke holes in those theories wherever they can.
Right now, we absolutely aren't doing enough of that. There's a lot of problems with how science is being done and how it's funded, but again, if something has become widely accepted and you want to dispute it, you'd better come with facts and be ready to accept that disproving someone isn't going to turn into a witch hunt. Even if you are successful at proving that a popular theory is wrong, people are just going to adjust their models, update the text books, and use it as an example of science working as intended, because that's literally a case of science working as intended.
I wish real scientists behaved in the way you imagine they do. The world would be a better place for it. Unfortunately, real scientists do all these things and more. They call themselves scientists, but don't live up to the role. Here's the same article I cited elsewhere in the thread (beyond a now flagged/killed post), by James Hansen in 2008. A famous scientist indeed but just one example of many possible examples.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/jun/23/climatec...
- "Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99%."
- "fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming."
Impossible to get clearer than that: exactly the kinds of statements I was complaining about.
And what of checking their data, reviewing their methods, reproducing their results? In short, why not fight science with science? Again, sadly you're describing imaginary scientists, the sort of people we would hope do climatology. Actual climatologists do NOT allow their science to be fought with science and actively go out of their way to prevent people checking their maths, reviewing their methods and reproducing their results.
Here's an old story that sums up what happens when someone - an invited IPCC reviewer no less - actually tries to do that kind of review
https://climateaudit.org/2007/03/28/accessing-hegerl-data/
One of the most important IPCC representations is the supposedly tremendous quality control of its review process. I’ve mentioned in passing on a number of occasions that, when I sought to obtain supporting data for then unpublished articles, IPCC threatened to expel me as a reviewer.
[...]
Osborn immediately replied, calling the request that the data be archived an abuse of my position as an IPCC peer reviewer. Rosanne D’Arrigo (CG2-2590) wrote to Osborn and Briffa, advocating that I be “fired” as an IPCC reviewer. D’Arrigo urged the Climategaters to be “very cautious about our emails as Lord V will stop at nothing”
Universities don't care if their professors are engaged in pseudo-science so these stories never have happy endings. The bad apples always win, are never fired and media/politics repeats their bogus claims ad nauseum.
James Hansen is perhaps the most famous climatologist, he works at NASA and testified to Congress about global warming at the end of the 1980s. Back then he was telling people that by ~2010 highways in New York would be underwater, there'd be tape on the windows due to high winds and that crime would have increased due to the heat.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110202162233/https://www.salon...
Not that it might happen, or there was a worst case possibility that it would happen. That it would definitely happen.
None of that occurred (and in fact crime in New York went down a lot) but he didn't learn anything. Here he is in 2008. "Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years the Arctic will be free of ice in the summer".
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1988&dat=20080624&id=...
It's now 35 years after his first prediction and 15 years after his second. New York isn't under water and the Arctic isn't ice free in the summer.
When people claim that scientists never get it wrong, that when people remember bad predictions it actually never happened and if it did it was all the journalist's fault, then they are making the problem worse because it gives scientists a license to exaggerate or lie. A license which they are happy to abuse, as the Hansen story shows.