Old Post Article Quotes NASA Chief Predicting Global Cooling

I made a promise to myself recently not to blog about Anthropogenic Global Warming, but this evening I watched an excellent two-hour History Channel science special on How the Earth was Made.

I was pleasantly surprised when the brand new program ended with a short half-minute on Global Warming, which I then expected to segue into the usual Sky is Falling manifesto, but instead noted that the Earth may be warming, but we are in a warm interval between Ice Ages and that NYC would be under a glacier 15,000 years from now, no matter what we did.

Evidently, that is what James Hansen at NASA believed before he went into his current Cargo Cult Science mode.

On July 9, 1971, the Post published a story headlined "U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming." It told of a prediction by NASA and Columbia University scientist S.I. Rasool. The culprit: man's use of fossil fuels.

The Post reported that Rasool, writing in Science, argued that in "the next 50 years" fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun's rays that the Earth's average temperature could fall by six degrees.

Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, Rasool claimed, "could be sufficient to trigger an ice age."

Aiding Rasool's research, the Post reported, was a "computer program developed by Dr. James Hansen," who was, according to his resume, a Columbia University research associate at the time.

So what about those greenhouse gases that man pumps into the skies? Weren't they worried about them causing a greenhouse effect that would heat the planet, as Hansen, Al Gore and a host of others so fervently believe today?

"They found no need to worry about the carbon dioxide fuel-burning puts in the atmosphere."

Hmmm.... Did the scales fall from Hansen's eyes, or did he and a Stanford perfesser cook up a scheme to promote Global Warming [I can't find original reference to a 1987 communication between Hansen & his Stanford friend effectively plotting to cook the stats & conclusions to effect the desired goal of a warming trend.]? Investor's Daily:

Hansen has some explaining to do. The public deserves to know how he was converted from an apparent believer in a coming ice age who had no worries about greenhouse gas emissions to a global warming fear monger.

This is a man, as Lockwood noted in his message to the Times' John McCaslin, who has called those skeptical of his global warming theory "court jesters." We wonder: What choice words did he have for those who were skeptical of the ice age theory in 1971?

People can change their positions based on new information or by taking a closer or more open-minded look at what is already known. There's nothing wrong with a reversal or modification of views as long as it is arrived at honestly.

But what about political hypocrisy? It's clear that Hansen is as much a political animal as he is a scientist. Did he switch from one approaching cataclysm to another because he thought it would be easier to sell to the public? Was it a career advancement move or an honest change of heart on science, based on empirical evidence?

The IRCC has already "disappeared the Middle Age Warm period." Cargo Cult Science would dictate that Hansen keep fiddling with the data to get his required conclusion. The Investor's Business Daily link above ends with a pregnant question:

If Hansen wants to change positions again, the time is now. With NASA having recently revised historical temperature data that Hansen himself compiled, the door has been opened for him to embrace the ice age projections of the early 1970s.

Could be he's feeling a little chill in the air again.

The consensus among geologists is that with the position of the continents & the present ocean currents, an Ice Age will recur in the next dozen thousand years.
But geologists are scientists, whereas Hansen is a climatologist. And everyone knows what Mark Twain said about the weather. They just ignore melting ice caps on Mars.