James Hansen, a NASA gadfly that thinks President Bush has suppressed his message about global warming while accepting 1500 invitations to talk about it, has strangely gone silent. Now mind you, I've gotten e-mail questionnaires from the NASA Inspector General asking me if my scientific results have been suppressed, so Hansen's complaints are being taken very seriously by upper management. But Hansen's current silence isn't Bush's doing, it's his own.

Evidently the Goddard Institute of Space Science, which while part of NASA, is a lonely outpost at Columbia University in Manhattan, not the crowded atmosphere of GSFC in Beltsville MD, is responsible for the global warming model that Hansen has done his best to sensationalize. Now Manhattan has had a long history of good science: from the nuclear physics at Brookhaven up on Long Island, to the theoreticians down in Columbia University, who perhaps loaned their name to "The Manhattan Project". But alas, political correctness has triumphed so completely in Manhattan, that Brookhaven was forced to close down its nuclear reactor a few years ago over hyperventilation about tritium release, and Columbia's nuclear physics personnel is down to 2/35 in the department with 0/35 who work on reactors. So it is not surprising that GISS should discover global warming, or that Physics Today should carry a glowing defense of GISS, or even that Hansen should imagine Bush is personally persecuting him. Remember, this is the town where billboards sell shelves with the slogan "Your closet is scarier than Bush's agenda."

But GISS is funded by NASA, and NASA doesn't usually get into the terrestrial weather business which is NOAA's turf, so the exact relationship between Hansen's computer fantasies and NASA's mission remain murky. One might imagine that Hansen has used satellite data in calibrating his climate model, which is a tenuous link to NASA's mission, but one would be wrong. Hansen calibrated his model with terrestrial temperature data, freely available from NOAA. John Christy, here in Huntsville, has made a career studying the satellite data sets, and while it is true that they only go back 3 decades, they show little if any warming. So Hansen has had to use land-based thermometers to back his model. (Why NASA continues to fund this nonsense is above my pay grade.)

But the temperatures that go into the model are flawed, as is well known, because many sites have become urbanized with black asphalt parking lots built around the little hutches housing the thermometers. Thus they show not global warming, but parking-lot warming, the University of Tucson being a classic example. So Hansen applies a special algorithm to his temperature data, a secret recipe that he will not share with anyone. He takes the data and "flattens it", but in so doing, he makes the Grand Canyon thermometer data show a 20th century cooling, when the raw data, measured miles from any parking lots, is generally flat already. But then in 2000 he decides "enough with flattening", and he then brings the temperature curves up. This takes the raw Grand Canyon data and warps it into a fantastic warming scenario in the past decade. And he's done this with everyone.

Worse, his special sauce recipe had a "millennium bug" in it that over-compensated the data since 2000. All this was inferred by the patient sleuthing of an economist from Canada, Stephen McIntyre, who in his spare time  has made a name uncovering numerical chicanery in the global warming camp. He could accomplish this, without any help from Hansen, because he had the temperature data before and after GISS did their "correction". Now mind you, Hansen has never publicly said that he corrects the temperatures, what he has said often and stridently was that "temperatures are rising" and that "1998 was the hottest summer on record."  The many experimentalists who have pointed out that a majority of thermometer records in America, such as the dozen or so thermometers in the state of Alabama, do not show rising temperatures, have been dismissed as incompetent amateurs. Now the truth comes out, it was all in the sauce.

Hansen quietly fixed the millennium bug in the code, and carried a sentence or two saying that 1998 was now the 2nd hottest summer after 1935, and that the fix amounted to 0.1C change in the average. I suppose he was hoping for a non-event. But Rush Limbaugh got hold of the statement, and starting blaring to the world that the global warming danger appears to exist only in NASA's models. After three solid days of notoriety, Hansen lost it, and published a rambling 5 page tract (on a Columbia University site no less)  on the vast right wing conspiracy that was making a tempest in a teapot over a 0.1 C change, when everyone know the future of the human race rests on our shoulders. (In rebuttal, more worthy climate scientists point out that the changes were more serious than that, since some thermometers had been artificially enhanced by as much as 1.1 C)  Impending catastrophe or not, Hansen still will not release the recipe for his sauce.

But what Hansen has found, is that he has lost more than a debate over temperature corrected thermometers, he has lost the confidence of the public. In touting the "hottest summers" over the past decade, Hansen never once admitted to "fixing" the numbers. Now that he is caught, and caught doing it wrong, he defends himself by saying "it doesn't matter". In the words of the famous joke, "We have already ascertained what you are, now we are just haggling over the price."

To practitioners of PoMo science, there is never any reason to be held captive to the numbers, to be forced to conclusions. Rather, the numbers flow out of the firmly held conclusions that began the simulation. To Hansen, the data are not dictating his global warming model, and so it is of little consequence how many programming errors have permeated his work. It really is "no big deal". But to the public, the authority of "Science" arises from its objectivity, its mathematical certainty, its brute facts. And when the public discover the subterfuge of PoMo relativism dressing in the mantle  of scientific objectivity, they naturally think it is a big deal.

Such will be the end of all "global warming" hysteria, not with a bang, but a whimper, not with noble speeches of contrition, but with rambling harangues full of dark conspiracies. Likewise the noble storming of the Bastille ended with the chaos of The Terror. When the scientific establishment has cashed in its objectivity for the easy money of the global warming research, there will be no stopping the bandwagon without a train wreck, without the loss of public support, without damaged reputations. I predict Hansen will not last two more years with NASA.

But I'm sure Columbia will have a chair for him.