Real Science Proves Hansen Correct Again.

In a Real Science post, as usual aimed more at right wing politics than real science, Steve Goddard quotes James Hansen from 1986;

"Within 15 years, said Goddard Space Flight Centre honcho James Hansen, "global temperatures will rise to a level that hasn't existed on Earth in 100,000 years"

 Mr Goddard should look rather foolish as Hansen was right. Antarctic Ice Cores from Vostok  revealing temperatures going back 800,000 years show that present temperatures are warmer than at any time in over the last 100,000 years. This is something that was unknown to science back in 1986, so whether Hansen made a lucky guess or an inspired one, he was right.

This figure shows historical CO2 (right axis) and reconstructed temperature (as a difference from the mean temperature for the last 100 years) records based on Antarctic ice cores, providing data for the last 800,000 years.

 
This isn't the fist time Goddard has shown Hansen to be correct even though he remains in denial. Like many foolish people Goddard doesn't know when to quit and his defence of this evidence is to incorrectly insist that;

"According to ice cores, temperatures peaked 8,000 years ago"

 This is an old denier fallacy which was promoted by people like Don Easterbrook and long debunked by sites like Skeptical Science. 8000 years was a warm period and Easterbrook presented graphs like this one that that showed just that;

But as can be clearly seen, Easterbrooks 'present ' times stopped in 1855 just as current global temperatures started to rise. It would be rather inconvenient for a science denier to include modern temperatures and highlight that present warming really is at an unprecedented high, not seen for many thousands of years. Clearly Goddard and his other foolish promoters of myths are living in the past as current average global temperatures are higher than 8000 years ago and as shown higher than over 100,000 years ago just as Hansen said they would be.

 "There are two kinds of fools: those who can't change their opinions and those who won t."