NASA?????s hot-air scientist cashes in

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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... sen/print/

James E. Hansen will no longer be touring the country preaching his end-times hysteria, collecting a $158,832 government paycheck for it. Mr. Hansen demonstrated a certain mastery of the art of leveraging, using his position as head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies to promote a personal brand of global warming quackery. On Tuesday, Mr. Hansen announced his retirement. The vaudeville circuit won't be the same.

Giving up his sinecure frees Mr. Hansen of pesky ethics rules limiting how much extra cash he can make speaking to audiences gullible enough to believe the weather will change if only a few more people buy a Toyota Prius. Al Gore learned this lesson after losing the 2000 election, the best thing that ever happened to him. Mr. Gore, who had never held a real job, cashed in on the global warming craze, too. Forbes magazine, which tracks these things, says he accumulated $300 million.

That appeals to Mr. Hansen, who long ago traded science for celebrity. NASA's Goddard Institute was formed to perform basic research to support space missions, which Mr. Hansen transformed into a propaganda mill generating tall tales about an overheated planet. Even this bored Mr. Hansen, who regularly skipped out to mingle with Hollywood twinklies like Daryl Hannah, protesting mining operations in West Virginia to be arrested in better view of the cameras.

He once repeated the stunt in front of the White House to collect maximum attention and praise for the "courage" to say what everyone in the covens of the left wanted to hear. Some "courage." Mr. Hansen peddled outlandish rhetoric at hearings, once invoking imagery of the Holocaust to describe coal trains as "no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria." Those dispatched to the crematoria at Auschwitz or Buchenwald would no doubt have preferred passage on a "gruesome" coal train to anywhere.

Perhaps there's more here than meets the eye. Mr. Hansen reads the newspapers and he can see the tide of scientific opinion slowly but surely turning against the fanciful notion that man's collective carbon-dioxide exhalations are heating the planet. Last month, the journal Science published a paper entitled, "A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years," which was cited as "vindication" of the so-called hockey stick theory that the planet today is the hottest ever. Within two weeks, the authors "retracted" the bold claim, "clarifying" that "the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions." The term "not statistically robust" is academic argle-bargle for "the numbers don't add up."Losing the ability to instill fear through hysterical claims about an overheating planet would deny Mr. Hansen the second-most-important element of his act. The most important, of course, has always been his prestigious NASA title, which added a veneer of credibility to his wild assertions.

Mr. Hansen nevertheless remains a hero to the left. Book deals, the speaking circuit and directorships of crony capitalist "green" companies will soon elevate Mr. Hansen to the "1 percent" with Al Gore. The good news is that the rest of us won't have to pay for it.

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And in other climate change/global warming news.

New teaching standards delve more deeply into climate change

Under proposed new national science standards, students would learn concepts more thoroughly, including how human activity is driving global warming.

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The politically touchy topic of climate change will be taught more deeply to students under proposed new national science standards released Tuesday.

The Next Generation Science Standards, developed over the last 18 months by California and 25 other states in conjunction with several scientific organizations, represent the first national effort since 1996 to transform the way science is taught in thousands of classrooms. The multi-state consortium is proposing that students learn fewer concepts more deeply and not merely memorize facts but understand how scientists actually investigate and gather information.

"What's important here is that the standards will give students a deep understanding of how science and scientists actually work," said Phil Lafontaine, a California Department of Education official who helped create the proposed standards. "It's not just what we know but how we came to know it."

Each state will decide on its own whether to adopt the benchmarks, which are based on a 2011 framework by the National Research Council. In California, they will be reviewed by a panel of science experts, with public hearings set to begin later this month in Sacramento, Santa Clara and Riverside. The state Board of Education is expected to vote on them in the fall, with partial implementation scheduled for 2014-15.

The new standards come amid widespread concern that American students are falling behind global counterparts in their mastery of science and math, which are seen as critical fields for future economic growth.

"In the next decade, the number of jobs requiring highly technical skills is expected to outpace other occupations," state Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said in a statement. The new approach "will help students achieve real-world practical skills so they can help maintain California's economic and technological leadership in the world."

A recent U.S. Department of Commerce study found that over the past decade, job growth in science, technology, engineering and mathematics was three times greater than that in other fields.

For the first time, the proposed education standards identify climate change as a core concept for science classes with a focus on the relationship between that change and human activity. According to the Oakland-based National Center for Science Education, two-thirds of U.S. students in a 2011 survey said they are not learning much about the topic.

Among high school students, 86% take biology, and more than 50% take chemistry but fewer than 20% take earth sciences — the course that would cover climate change, said Frank Niepold, a climate education coordinator with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"The current state of climate change education is poor at best," said Mark McCaffrey, the Oakland center's program and policy director.

In California, climate and weather are covered in earth science standards. But the proposed new standards will more explicitly direct students to examine the scientific evidence for how and why the climate is changing and its impact.

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Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... 0335.story

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While it has been reported that 2012 was the warmest year on record for the Continental United States, NASA reported that 2012 was the ninth warmest year on record for the Planet earth.

Global warming: time to rein back on doom and gloom?