Is NASA Climate-Change Guru's Outside Income Affecting His Reports?

James Hansen of NASA is not just any global warming Moonbat, he is Al Gore's global warming Moonbat. It was Hansen's data that was used in Gore's Oscar/Peace prize winning film. Hansen's work is ruled by one motto: "If God gives you rotten apples, tell everyone it's champagne. Let's just say that Hansen has been known to "fudge" the numbers to make his global warming message look better.

Why would the climate change guru of gurus risk his reputation by using funky numbers?  A new lawsuit seems to indicate that it was good old fashioned capitalism. The lawsuit claims Hansen privately profited from his public job in violation of federal ethics rules, and NASA allowed him to do it because of his influence in the media and celebrity status among environmental groups, which rewarded him handsomely the last four years.

 In 2007 Hansen was forced by reporter Stephen McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest year in history was not 1998 as he had claimed, but 1934.

Well It wasn't exactly a correction. He fought tooth and nail against correcting the numbers, mislead the press and in the end  Hansen didn't fully make the change.  Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request and gained access to all the NASA Documents related to the incorrect data, It showed that unlike an objective scientist, Hansen wasn't very anxious to correct his mistakes.

According to multiple press reports, when NASA corrected the error, the new data apparently caused a reshuffling of NASA's rankings for the hottest years on record in the United States, with 1934 replacing 1998 at the top of the list.

These new documents, obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), include internal GISS email correspondence as NASA scientists attempted to deal with the media firestorm resulting from the controversy. In one exchange GISS head James Hansen tells a reporter from Bloomberg that NASA had not previously published rankings with 1998 atop the list as the hottest year on record in the 20th century [not true].

In November of 2008, Hansen made the announcement that the previous month was the warmest Oct. in history. A few days later after all the doom and gloom headlines passed he announced "Oops, never mind, I was wrong." He only admitted the mistake after he was "outed" by other scientists. In reality, Oct. 08 was quite an average October. It Ranked 70th in the last 114 years.

Early this year Hansen announced "The 12-month running mean global temperature in the Goddard Space Institute analysis has reached a new record in 2010  The main factor is our estimated temperature change for the Arctic region." The GISS figures show that recent temperatures in the Arctic have been up to four degrees C warmer than the long-term mean.

Those arctic numbers that were so important to Hansen's announcement turned out to be a figment of his creative imagination.

Art Horn, at the Energy Tribune blog, has blown the whistle on Hansen and GISS. He points out that GISS has no thermometers in the Arctic! It has hardly thermometers that are even near the Arctic Circle. GISS estimates its arctic temperatures from land-based thermometers that supposedly each represent the temperatures over 1200 square kilometers. That's a pretty heroic assumption.

Meanwhile, the Danish Meteorological Institute is publishing sea-surface temperatures from the Arctic showing a cooling trend in the Arctic oceans during melt season since about 1993. Clearly, we have no accurate measure of the real temperatures and trends in the Arctic at this moment. Probably that's not very important. The Russians say that the Arctic has its own 70-year climate cycle. The files of the New York Times, in fact, are filled with stories from the 1920s and 1930s, clearly showing that the Arctic was as warm then as now.

But this is the moment when proposed energy taxes would start to scuttle 85 percent of the energy which powers the modern world and its lifestyles. Global climate alarmists, Hansen among them, are playing a desperate and short-sighted game of "pass the energy taxes."

In other word James Hansen is full of crap. He made the temperatures up...there were no thermometers in the Arctic to measure temperatures.



At least Hansen gets some extra money out of his creative use of numbers.

The NASA scientist who once claimed the Bush administration tried to "silence" his global warming claims is now accused of receiving more than $1.2 million from the very environmental organizations whose agenda he advocated.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Washington, D.C., a group claims NASA is withholding documents that show James Hansen failed to comply with ethics rules and financial disclosures regarding substantial compensation he earned outside his $180,000 taxpayer-paid position as director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.


"Hansen's office appears to be somewhat of a rogue operation. It's clearly a taxpayer-funded global warming advocacy organization," said Chris Horner, a co-founder of The American Tradition Institute, which filed the lawsuit. "The real issue here is, has Hansen been asking NASA in writing, in advance, for permission for these outside activities? We have reason to believe that has not been occurring."

Some of Hansen's extra cash came from:

• A shared $1 million prize from the Dan David Foundation for his "profound contribution to humanity." Hansen's cut ranged from $333,000 to $500,000, Horner said, adding that the precise amount is not known because Hansen's publicly available financial disclosure form only shows the prize was "an amount in excess of $5,000."

• The 2010 Blue Planet prize worth $550,000 from the Asahi Glass Foundation, which recognizes efforts to solve environmental issues.

•  The Sophie Prize for his "political activism," worth $100,000. The Sophie Prize is meant to "inspire people working towards a sustainable future."

• Speaking fees totaling $48,164 from a range of mostly environmental organizations.

•  A $15,000 participation fee, waived by the W.J. Clinton Foundation for its 2009 Waterkeeper Conference.

• $720,000 in legal advice and media consulting services provided by The George Soros Open Society Institute. Hansen said he did not take "direct" support from Soros but accepted "pro bono legal advice."

Federal rules prohibit government employees from receiving certain types of income outside their job without prior permission. Plus at the end of the year they are supposed to fill out a form which summarizes their outside income. 

The American Tradition Institute filed a Freedom of Information Act request for those two documents for Hansen. The lawsuit claims NASA has "repeatedly and unlawfully refused to produced the requested materials."

"Should the taxpayer know what's going on? Should, as FOIA intends, NASA disclose documents to shed light on its operations and its compliance within the law? We say yes. The law says yes. NASA says no," Horner said.

Mark Hess, chief of communications for the Goddard Space Center, sent Fox News NASA's response to Horner's FOIA request. It said in many cases the documents Horner requested did not exist. Horner claims they should, if Hansen was complying with the law.

We know that Hansen  has a history of fudging data, and we know that he has received outside income. America has the right to know and to investigate whether or not there is a conflict of interest behind the information supplied by the government, especially when the topic is something as controversial such as global warming. The fact that NASA is refusing to share this information makes Hansen's monetary ties more suspicious.