Say goodbye to Lower Manhattan, everybody! By midnight tonight, it will be gone forever—drowned by the melting icecaps of the disappearing Arctic.

Obviously this will be quite sad for people who live in New York.

But it will be a tremendous vindication for the expertise of James Hansen, the former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) who saw this disaster coming as far back as 2008.

In the highly unlikely event that James Hansen is proved wrong and New Yorkers wake up tomorrow morning to find their city unsubmerged it could prove somewhat embarrassing. Not so much for Hansen, perhaps, who appears to have no sense of embarrassment or shame. But definitely—or so you’d hope—for all the politicians, environmental activists, teachers and so on who have spent the last few decades giving so much credence to his experty expertise.

It was Hansen, remember, who basically launched the whole global warming scare.

Hansen was the guy who in 1988 declared at a packed congressional hearing, as sweat visibly poured from his brow, that “the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements.”

Though this claim was disowned by his former supervisor Dr. John Theon who felt that Hansen had “embarrassed NASA”, it was swallowed lock stock and barrel by most of the world’s media, and a good many of its politicians, with consequences we are ruing to this day.

The great physicist and mathematician Dr. Freeman Dyson once said, “The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers. … Hansen has turned his science into ideology.”

So let’s hope, for the sake of Hansen’s credibility—and for the sake of all those who pinned their faith and their policymaking decisions on his expertise—that New York is underwater tomorrow.

Otherwise, Hansen and his people will have an awful lot of explaining and apologizing to do.

Or so you’d hope…