John S. Theon: New Elderly Denier On The Block

The lead:

James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic

Washington DC: NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.

Read on, however, and you can quickly see which way this one is going to break:

1) 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...

Read the last bit closely. Being "in effect" Hansen's supervisor is here contrasted with being "in reality" Hansen's supervisor--being the guy who gives Hansen his annual performance appraisal, in other words--which, frankly, does linguistic violence to the term.

So, in short, Theon was never Hansen's "supervisor" in any accepted sense of the word.

2) “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 wrote.

The "muzzling" of James Hansen occurred during the (2nd) Bush Administration, not during the 1980s. Having retired from NASA in 1994, Theon has no personal knowledge of the time period in question. Furthermore...

3) He's a geezer, and therefore fits the standard profile of a climate change denier.

...and he's a geezer that seems to have had some kind of conversion to AGW skepticism well after his retirement. In 1991 he seemed to be entirely comfortable with the line of Hansen's thinking as well as the use of climate models in general:

Undoubtedly, humankind is affecting the environment. Inadvertent climate system changes
brought about by mass loadings of carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), methane, etc., have thrust global change into the limelight. Radiative budget effects (i.e., greenhouse gases and global warming) and ozone depletion in the stratosphere certainly have heightened public awareness; however, climate change goes far beyond these fashionable concerns. The scientific community has to confront the myriad pieces that make up the climate puzzle. Scientists must discern the difference between natural and human-induced change, and decision makers must place the pieces in a manner that balances scientific recommendation against the demands of a higher population and an improved standard of living, which are heavily taxing the Earth's resources. be quantified and incorporated into climate models.

4) He's being working the climate skeptic "rubber chicken" circuit for about a year now, performing before such audiences as the Republican Women’s Club and the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance.

h/t to Steve from Brisbane, who did much of the legwork in the comments here.

And an update here!