Critic of global warming prophet missing in action for twenty years

Conservatives are cheering the letter to the Senate’s Environment Committee by John Theon, former head of climate research at NASA and, he puts it, “in effect” the supervisor of Anthropogenic Global Warming prophet James Hansen when Hanson gave his famous testimony to Congress in 1988.

Theon writes:

As Chief of several NASA Hq. Programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research. …

[James Hansen] was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). He thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.

My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.

Well, I have a question that I doubt most establishment conservatives will ask. If Hansen acted outside his professional bounds in 1988 and embarrassed the agency, why didn’t Theon say something about it then? Why did he wait twenty years to tell us this? If he had spoken up twenty years ago, he could have greatly diminished the harm Hansen has done, the climate of hysteria he has created, the damage to the careers of scientists who dissented from AGW.

Theon says that Hanson was out of line scientifically because “we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it.” Why then didn’t Theon and his colleagues hold a press conference or distribute a press release saying so? Why was it ok for Hansen to go public with his incorrect views and “embarrass” NASA, but not ok for Theon to go public with his correct views and “embarrass” Hansen?

Of course it’s helpful that Theon has come forward as an AGW dissenter. But his course of conduct—being “embarrassed” twenty years ago, but not saying anything about it until now—looks like awfully wimpy behavior.

Also, as the pro-AGW site Deltoid points out, Theon retired in 1994 and hasn’t worked in the climate field since then. So his knowledge of AGW may only date from that time.

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Mencius Moldbug writes:

Au contraire. The press has convinced you that it’s a perfectly normal phenomenon for “whistleblowers” to “go public.” And it is—when they have something the press wants to hear. What Dr. Theon had to say was nothing the press wants to hear, and it took nontrivial guts for him to contact the Republicans even in his retirement.

For example, I’m sure he will lose a significant percentage of his friends for this. So I’d be nice to him. His courage, while it may not exactly make him Lord Nelson, is certainly nontrivial.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 04, 2009 03:30 PM | Send