The climate conspiracy according to Hanson

TigerHawk:

Last week, I was among the bloggers who followed the story that NASA's United States temperature data had been revised, supposedly because a "Y2K bug" had bolluxed a calculation, with the result that 1934 was now the hottest year on record, not 1998 (as had been previously claimed). Lots of mostly righty bloggers had fun with that one.

Well, NASA's top climate scientist, James Hansen, has responded. His main point is that the revisions are so small as to be irrelevant, and in any case they relate only to the U.S. data, which influence the global result immaterially. Worldwide, 2005 remains the hottest year on record, at least according to the recordkeepers.

Hansen's email also includes a broadside attack on those of us who followed the original story, charging specifically that we are the shills, unwitting or otherwise, of a conspiracy to destroy the world:

The deceit behind the attempts to discredit evidence of climate change reveals matters of importance. This deceit has a clear purpose: to confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change. The danger is that delay will cause tipping points to be passed, such that large climate impacts become inevitable, including the loss of all Arctic sea ice, destabilization of the West Antarctic ice sheet with disastrous sea level rise later this century, and extermination of a large fraction of animal and plant species….

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So, the "captains of industry" know we are destroying the planet, but they either do not have children or care about them less than they care about "short-term profit"? There is not the slightest possibility that they honestly believe that the data do not support destroying the standard of living of billions of people? This is the essence of Hansen's accusation, which is widely echoed on the left.

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There are several problems with Hanson's arguments from someone that is not a captain of industry or on the pay role of the oil companies. Start with his claim that the adjustments to the calculations were slight. Yet the results were dramatic in contradicting his thesis that the last decade was the warmest on record. Doesn't this suggest that the increased temperature has been rather slight also?

Also his projection of evil motives on those who do not buy into his apocalyptic vision does not persuade, since those of us who are skeptics know our motives are pure. The globo warmers need to respond to the arguments of the skeptics with facts and reason and not accusations. He might consider that one reason many are skeptics is the anti freedom agenda of the control freaks pushing the global warming agenda. What he seems to be saying is that he has no time for reasoned argument so hand him control of the world and all its resources.