Last seen 53 miles west of Venus

From The American Thinker:

James Hansen, NASA's True Believer in the global warming credo, has just been quoted by the Globe & Mail of Canada as follows:

"Prof. Hansen and his colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 - or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago."

In an email to the Globe and Mail, Hansen writes:

"If we follow 'business-as-usual' growth of greenhouse gas emissions... I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several meters, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose."

For all you non-metric folks, 25 meters equals 82 feet, or about as high as an eight-story building. "Several meters" is only about 9-15 feet. That's the wall of water that is going to drown all the coastal plains of the world if Hansen's predictions come to pass.

So you have a choice. You can either (a) hop in your car and head for the hills, or (b) consider the very real possibility that Dr. James Hansen has jumped the shark, and is rocketing upward fast enough to achieve orbital velocity. I personally think he has slipped the surly bonds of earth, as the poet says. NASA's Prophet of Doom is up, up and away, with a beautiful vrroom.

Dr. Hansen is a math modeler in the climate change game. How does he get Planetary Doom from a math model? It's very simple. You build in "positive feedback loops." That is, you look in the vast toolbox of climate variables to find just two factors that might reinforce each other in a catastrophic loop. For instance, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might create a greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, which causes more water evaporation, which causes more greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, etc., etc. Keep looping that, and you raise world temps by just one degree Centigrade, so the polar ice caps melt and the oceans rise, up to 25 meters. See? It's easy.

The big problem with this scenario is that the climate system almost certainly has negative feedback loops, i.e., causal connections that work to bring temperatures back to a rough baseline. The climate is likely to have self-regulation mechanisms in much the way that our bodies have self-regulating loops to stabilize our temperature, blood sugar, and a hundred other variables. Why does that seem likely? Because the world hasn't burned up or drowned in quite a long time, even though temperature variations and greenhouse gases have existed for many millions of years. Such factors as clouds and air particulates are believed to lower temperatures. With a little imagination we could easily build math models for self-regulating loops that would tend to stabilize temperatures. (But it might be hard to swing the federal grant support for those models.)

However, Dr. Hansen is a true True Believer. So he is not bothered by doubt. He is tremendously irritated by the very existence of doubters, however, like Steve MacIntyre of ClimateAudit.org, who has twice punctured Dr. Hansen's beautiful balloon -- once by knocking down the infamous "hockey stick" curve, and more recently, by showing that Dr. Hansen blew it by claiming that 1998 was the hottest year on record in the continental United States. Turns out that the Dust Bowl was hotter than today, as any farmer might have guessed. Drat it, another beautiful hypothesis, crunched by ugly facts.

Go read the rest.

This kind of hysteria from the loons is a good sign. It means that they have a glimmer that the house of cards is about to come down around them and they are desperatly trying to keep it standing for just a little while longer. No doubt so that they can milk it for a few more millions in grant money.