At the time, many scientists felt his announcement to be premature. I was among them.
I was a young graduate student researching the importance of natural -- rather than human-caused -- variations in temperature, and I felt that the "signal" of human-caused climate change had not yet emerged from the "noise" of natural, long-term climate variation. As I discuss in my book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, scientists by their very nature tend to be conservative, even reticent, when it comes to discussing findings and observations that lie at the forefront of our understanding and that aren't yet part of the "accepted" body of scientific knowledge.
Dire Warning
Hansen, it turns out, was right, and the critics were wrong. Rather than being reckless, as some of his critics charged, his announcement to the world proved to be prescient -- and his critics were proven overly cautious.
Given the prescience of Hansen's science, we would be unwise to ignore his latest, more dire warning.
In a paper published today in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hansen and two colleagues argue convincingly that climate change is now not only upon us, but in fact we are fully immersed in it. Much of the extreme weather we have witnessed in recent years almost certainly contains a human-induced component. Read the full report here.
Source: by Michael E. Mann, On Earth.
