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James Hansen of NASA is one of the leading climate alarmists, and possesses a scientific credibility lacking in the Goracle.  But Hansen really has become a parody of himself, more activist than scientist.  His supervisor at NASA was a skeptic.  And as Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review wrote a year ago:

If you’ve paid any attention to the global warming debate, you’ve heard of James Hansen.

Hansen is the politicized NASA climate scientist who virtually invented the global warming issue in the broiling summer of 1988 when he was the star doomsayer at Senate hearings called by Al Gore.

Since then, Hansen has received better press than Mother Teresa. In hundreds of interviews and glowing profiles, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has been treated as objective and/or infallible by an adoring mainstream liberal media.

Yet Hansen’s not even close to being an objective scientist. He is openly ideological and rabidly partisan. His political pals and financial patrons are liberal Democrats — Gore, John Kerry and left-wing groups funded by George Soros and Teresa Heinz.

Nor is Hansen part of the hallowed scientific “consensus” on global warming. He’s much more apocalyptic. He still predicts faster and much greater sea-level rises, ice-sheet meltings and species extinctions than the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Hansen’s Teflon credibility wasn’t even scratched after the August revelation that since 2000 he and his fellow scientists had been incorrectly crunching the data from about 1,200 ground weather stations that NASA uses to take the country’s annual average temperature — and which the unquestioning mainstream media used as “proof” the country has been getting hotter every year since 1998.

Maybe Hansen will be proved right.  But these days he seems more interested in ideology than science.

James Hansen of NASA has become one of the leading climate alarmists.  Quite simply, the world is about to end.  That being the case, industry executives who don’t toe the line (only wrecking the economy can save humanity from destruction) should be tried in a kind of environmental Nuremberg Trial.

It turns out that Hansen’s supervisor, at least, was not so enamored of his work.  Reports the Spectator in London:

But now the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works reports that James Hansen’s former supervisor, retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon, former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Programme at NASA who was responsible for all weather and climate research in the agency from1982 to 1994, has said he thinks man-made global warming theory is anti-scientific bunk:

‘I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man-made,’ Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. ‘I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation… Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress…

Theon declared ‘climate models are useless.’ ‘My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,’ Theon explained. ‘Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,’ he added.

It’s too bad Dr. Theon’s views don’t get the same attention as those of Dr. Hansen.