Next to Al Gore, NASA's James Hansen may be the most oft-quoted proponent of the theory of man-made global warming. But thirty-five years ago, this celebrity scientist apparently touted another theory: a human-generated ice age.

Rasool used a computer program that Hansen wrote. That does not mean that Hansen agreed with Rasool's conclusions. If I borrow your pen, does that mean you agree with everything I write with your pen? More on what's wrong with the IBD editorial here.

Tim: Developing computer models predicting climate change, which is what Hansen still does, is not comparable to lending someone a pen. What are you talking about? You also erroneously state in the article linked above that Stephen Schneider did not promote the idea of global cooling in the 1970s. I've seen his words, and he quite clearly did this. I might add that Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb, talks about the possibility of a coming man-caused ice age. Like Schneider and Hansen, Ehrlich now touts man-caused global warming. Hansen, as IBD states, has a lot of explaining to do.

You also have a lot of explaining to do Tim Lambert!

You don't seem to understand the difference between a computer model and a computer program. The program takes various numbers that are fed into it that describe initial conditions and climate parameters and output the resulting temperatures. The model is the program plus the parameters. In 1971 Hansen had a computer model for the climate of Venus. Rasool and Schneider took his program and used it to make a computer model for Earth. If Hansen had agreed with their conclusions, he could have signed on as an author of their paper.

Rasool and Schneider did not predict an ice age, but they did predict cooling. By 1975, Schneider had changed his mind and was predicting warming.

Tim: When the rubber hits the road, the programs are really just more fundamental (and incomplete) models, aren't they? And doesn't the writer of the program do more here than the inputter of the parameters generating the model? So it is more than a pencil, isn't it? I mean, he did real intellectual work trying to understand climates and map them mathematically for the sake of prediction. And he did such a good job that plugging data into one of his programs in the 70s predicted massive global cooling.

So, the accusation is: regarding one of the leading scientists and program-creators for global warming agitprop, his programs for climate change predictions were previously used in the global cooling agitprop. Perhaps the IBD overstates, but not by a whole lot.

It seems to me that both makers of models for climate change and makers of programs used in generating models of climate change need to admit that they aren't terribly good at what they do. Their conclusions fall well short of knowledge, and perhaps should not be the basis for a world revolution in property rights and international order.

So now every scientist with a computer model/program is Nostradamus?

It's getting stupid out there.

Right...so one crazy scientist who had an incorrect theory about climate thirty years ago means that the entire scientific basis for modern climate change is overturned.

Brilliant logic.

Have you thought about publishing this as a book?

You'd be laughed out of the publisher's offices.

The point would be what makes either theory worthy? Is the most recent one more prescient or accurate?

The Troll returns! I was wondering how long it would take before we saw him again. And with such a clever new name! What's up, you get laif off from 7-11 and have some time on your hands?

Sucit,

You give no consideration to the degree of each prediction. The first one is not, "we predict it's going get colder". It's really more like chicken little, having been convinced that the sky is not falling, checking the sky to see if it's going up instead, and worried that we might be losing our atmosphere.

Back in the '60's I developed a weather changing machine, which was in essence a sophisticated heat beam which we called a "laser". Using these "lasers", we punch a hole in the protective layer around the world which we called the "ozone layer". Slowly but surly ultraviolet rays would pour in increasing the risk of skin cancer, that is unless the world pays us a hefty ransom.

Interesting link regarding global warming:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,298216,00.html