Global warming blasphemy alert

Uh oh (via Moonbattery):

Washington DC: NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fears soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of anthropogenic global warming fears

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man-made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation,” Theon, the former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA Headquarters and former Chief of the Atmospheric Dynamics & Radiation Branch explained.

“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). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” Theon wrote.

Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “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,” Theon explained. “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,” he added.

Make sure to read the whole thing. There are several links contained within.

This comes right on the heel’s of The Goracle’s annual trek to Congress in order to appeal for more money to research “man-made global warming.” Suffice it to say that Dr. Theon’s claims will be too “inconvenient” for Gore to address.

McQ responds:

Frankly I think the Al Gore AGW nonsense is in deep scientific trouble as more and more scientists join the increasing ranks of the skeptics. The trick, however, is to get the blinders off the media. Until that happens, the politicians will continue to think the underlying “science” is solid and settled and will cap-and-trade us into bankruptcy.

Getting those blinders off the media may be difficult since there is a large “save the world” streak running through contemporary journalism. As we’ve found out in many cases, subject matter expertise isn’t at all a requirement for journalists when writing about something. Instead it is the agenda which takes precedence. It’s more important that they have passion and “care” about something than get the facts right. After all, if they’re wrong, who gets hurt with a “cleaner world”?

And, of course, there’s the funding dilemma which still exists which is equally based on an agenda. For all the talk about returning science to its proper place by the incoming administration, it seems science is still for sale and will gladly find for the agenda of whatever agency is funding it.

Those are two pretty big obstacles yet to be overcome, but this growing groundswell of scientific skepticism is heartening to see. Perhaps it will be enough to overcome the pseudo-science that has pushed us to the brink of committing ourselves to financial ruin over nothing. We’ll see.

I doubt it, considering President Obama has appointed a known socialist & master global warming alarmist to be his “climate czar.” Any remote “hope” for any climate skepticism coming out of this administration flew out the window with that pick.

Not that there was much to begin with.