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Richard Lindzen: Thoughts on the Public Discourse over Climate Change

Image via MIT.edu

MIT atmospheric science professor Richard Lindzen suggests that many claims regarding climate change are exaggerated and unnecessarily alarmist.

For over 30 years, I have been giving talks on the science of climate change. When, however, I speak to a non-expert audience, and attempt to explain such matters as climate sensitivity, the relation of global mean temperature anomaly to extreme weather, that warming has decreased profoundly for the past 18 years, etc., it is obvious that the audience’s eyes are glazing over. Although I have presented evidence as to why the issue is not a catastrophe and may likely be beneficial, the response is puzzlement. I am typically asked how this is possible. After all, 97% of scientists agree, several of the hottest years on record have occurred during the past 18 years, all sorts of extremes have become more common, polar bears are disappearing, as is arctic ice, etc. In brief, there is overwhelming evidence of warming, etc. I tended to be surprised that anyone could get away with such sophistry or even downright dishonesty, but it is, unfortunately, the case that this was not evident to many of my listeners. I will try in this brief article to explain why such claims are, in fact, evidence of the dishonesty of the alarmist position.

The 97% meme:

This claim is actually a come-down from the 1988 claim on the cover of Newsweek that all scientists agree. In either case, the claim is meant to satisfy the non-expert that he or she has no need to understand the science. Mere agreement with the 97% will indicate that one is a supporter of science and superior to anyone denying disaster. This actually satisfies a psychological need for many people. The claim is made by a number of individuals and there are a number of ways in which the claim is presented. A thorough debunking has been given in the Wall Street Journal by Bast and Spencer. One of the dodges is to poll scientists as to whether they agree that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have increased, that the Earth has been warming (albeit only a little) and that man has played some part. This is, indeed, something almost all of us can agree on, but which has no obvious implication of danger. Nonetheless this is portrayed as support for catastrophism. Other dodges involve looking at a large number of abstracts where only a few actually deal with danger. If among these few, 97% support catastrophism, the 97% is presented as pertaining to the much larger totality of abstracts. One of my favorites is the recent claim in the Christian Science Monitor (a once respected and influential newspaper): “For the record, of the nearly 70,000 peer-reviewed articles on global warming published in 2013 and 2014, four authors rejected the idea that humans are the main drivers of climate change.” I don’t think that it takes an expert to recognize that this claim is a bizarre fantasy for many obvious reasons. Even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (this body, generally referred to as the IPCC is the body created by the UN to provide ‘authoritative’ assessments of manmade climate change) doesn’t agree with the claim.

Despite the above, I am somewhat surprised that it was necessary to use the various shenanigans described above. Since this issue fully emerged in public almost 30 years ago (and was instantly incorporated into the catechism of political correctness), there has been a huge increase in government funding of the area, and the funding has been predicated on the premise of climate catastrophism. By now, most of the people working in this area have entered in response to this funding. Note that governments have essentially a monopoly over the funding in this area. I would expect that the recipients of this funding would feel obligated to support the seriousness of the problem. Certainly, opposition to this would be a suicidal career move for a young academic. Perhaps the studies simply needed to properly phrase their questions so as to achieve levels of agreement for alarm that would be large though perhaps not as large as was required for the 97% meme especially if the respondents are allowed anonymity.

The ‘warmest years on record’ meme:

 
Figure 1a Figure 1b Figure 1c

This simple claim covers a myriad of misconceptions. Under these circumstances, it is sometimes difficult to know where to begin. As in any demonization project, it begins with the ridiculous presumption that any warming whatsoever (and, for that matter, any increase in CO2) is bad, and proof of worse to come. We know that neither of these presumptions is true. People retire to the Sun Belt rather than to the arctic. CO2 is pumped into greenhouses to enhance plant growth. The emphasis on ‘warmest years on record’ appears to have been a response to the observation that the warming episode from about 1978 to 1998 appeared to have ceased and temperatures have remained almost constant since 1998. Of course, if 1998 was the hottest year on record, all the subsequent years will also be among the hottest years on record. None of this contradicts the fact that the warming (ie, the increase of temperature) has ceased. Yet, somehow, many people have been led to believe that both statements cannot be simultaneously true. At best, this assumes a very substantial level of public gullibility. The potential importance of the so-called pause (for all we know, this might not be a pause, and the temperature might even cool), is never mentioned and rarely understood. Its existence means that there is something that is at least comparable to anthropogenic forcing. However, the IPCC attribution of most of the recent (and only the recent) warming episode to man depends on the assumption in models that there is no such competitive process.

The focus on the temperature record, itself, is worth delving into a bit. What exactly is this temperature that is being looked at? It certainly can’t be the average surface temperature. Averaging temperatures from places as disparate as Death Valley and Mount Everest is hardly more meaningful than averaging phone numbers in a telephone book (for those of you who still remember phone books). What is done, instead, is to average what are called temperature anomalies. Here, one takes thirty year averages at each station and records the deviations from this average. These are referred to as anomalies and it is the anomalies that are averaged over the globe. The only attempt I know of to illustrate the steps in this process was by the late Stan Grotch at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Figure 1a shows the scatter plot of the station anomalies. Figure 1b then shows the result of averaging these anomalies. Most scientists would conclude that there was a remarkable degree of cancellation and that the result was almost complete cancellation. However, instead, one stretches the temperature scale by almost a factor of 10 so as to make the minuscule changes in Figure 1b look more significant. The result is shown in Figure 1c. There is quite a lot of random noise in Figure 1c, and this noise is a pretty good indication of the uncertainty of the analysis (roughly +/- 0.2C). The usual presentations show something considerably smoother. Sometimes this is the result of smoothing the record with something called running means. It is also the case that Grotch used data from the UK Meteorological Office which was from land based stations. Including data from the ocean leads to smoother looking series but the absolute accuracy of the data is worse given that the ocean data mixes very different measurement techniques (buckets in old ship data, ship intakes after WW1, satellite measurements of skin temperature (which is quite different from surface temperature), and buoy data).

Figure 2

These issues are summarized in Figure 2 which presents an idealized schematic of the temperature record and its uncertainty. We see very clearly that because the rise ceases in 1998, that this implies that 18 of the 18 warmest years on record (for the schematic presentation) have occurred during the last 18 years. We also see that the uncertainty together with the smallness of the changes offers ample scope for adjustments that dramatically alter the appearance of the record (note that uncertainty is rarely indicated on such graphs).

At this point, one is likely to run into arguments over the minutia of the temperature record, but this would simply amount to muddying the waters so to speak. Nothing can alter the fact that the changes one is speaking about are small. Of course ‘small’ is relative. Consider three measures of smallness.

Figure 3

Figure 3 shows the variations in temperature in Boston over a one month period. The dark blue bars show the actual range of temperatures for each day. The dark gray bars show the climatological range of temperatures for that date, and the light gray bars show the range between the record-breaking low and record-breaking high for that date. In the middle is a red line. The width of that line corresponds to the range of temperature in the global mean temperature anomaly record for the past 175 years. This shows that the temperature change that we are discussing is small compared to our routine sensual experience. Keep this in mind when someone claims to ‘feel’ global warming.

The next measure is how does the observed change compare with what we might expect from greenhouse warming. Now, CO2 is not the only anthropogenic greenhouse gas.

Figure 4. Red bar represents observations. Gray bars show model predictions.

When all of them are included, the UN IPCC finds that we are just about at the greenhouse forcing of climate that one expects from a doubling of CO2, and the temperature increase has been about 0.8C. If man’s emissions are responsible for all of the temperature change over that past 60 years, this still points to a lower sensitivity (sensitivity, by convention, generally refers to the temperature increase produced by a doubling of CO2 when the system reaches equilibrium) than produced by the least sensitive models (which claim to have sensitivities of from 1.5-4.5C for a doubling of CO2). And, the lower sensitivities are understood to be unproblematic. However, the IPCC only claims man is responsible for most of the warming. The sensitivity might then be much lower. Of course, the situation is not quite so simple, but calculations do show that for higher sensitivities one has to cancel some (and often quite a lot) of the greenhouse forcing with what was assumed to be unknown aerosol cooling in order for the models to remain consistent with past observations (a recent article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society points out that there are, in fact, quite a number of arbitrary adjustments made to models in order to get some agreement with the past record). As the aerosol forcing becomes less uncertain, we see that high sensitivities have become untenable. This is entirely consistent with the fact that virtually all models used to predict ‘dangerous’ warming over-predict observed warming after the ‘calibration’ periods. That is to say, observed warming is small compared to what the models upon which concerns are based are predicting. This is illustrated in Figure 4. As I have mentioned, uncertainties allow for substantial adjustments in the temperature record. One rather infamous case involved NOAA’s adjustments in a paper by Karl et al that replace the pause with continued warming. But it was easy to show that even with this adjustment, models continued to show more warming than even the ‘adjusted’ time series showed. Moreover, most papers since have rejected the Karl et al adjustment (which just coincidentally came out with much publicity just before the Paris climate conference).

The third approach is somewhat different. Instead of arguing that the change is not small, it argues that the change is ‘unprecedented.’ This is Michael Mann’s infamous ‘hockey stick.’ Here, Mann used tree rings from bristle cone pines to estimate Northern Hemisphere temperatures back hundreds of years. This was done by calibrating the tree ring data with surface observations for a thirty year period, and using this calibration to estimate temperatures in the distant past in order to eliminate the medieval warm period. Indeed, this reconstruction showed flat temperatures for the past thousand years. The usual test for such a procedure would be to see how the calibration worked for observations after the calibration period. Unfortunately, the results failed to show the warming found in the surface data. The solution was starkly simple and stupid. The tree ring record was cut off at the end of the calibration period and replaced by the actual surface record. In the Climategate emails (Climategate refers to a huge release of emails from various scientists supporting alarm where the suppression of opposing views, the intimidation of editors, the manipulation of data, etc. were all discussed), this was referred to as Mann’s trick.

The whole point of the above was to make clear that we are not concerned with warming per se, but with how much warming. It is essential to avoid the environmental tendency to regard anything that may be bad in large quantities to be avoided at any level however small. In point of fact small warming is likely to be beneficial on many counts. If you have assimilated the above, you should be able to analyze media presentations like this one to see that amidst all the rhetoric, the author is pretty much saying nothing while even misrepresenting what the IPCC says.

The extreme weather meme:

Every line weather forecaster knows that extreme events occur someplace virtually every day. The present temptation to attribute these normally occurring events to climate change is patently dishonest. Roger Pielke, Jr. actually wrote a book detailing the fact that there is no trend in virtually any extreme event (including tornados, hurricanes, droughts, floods, etc.) with some actually decreasing. Even the UN’s IPCC acknowledges that there is no basis for attributing such events to anthropogenic climate change.

Figure 5. Temperature map for North America.

The situation with respect to extreme temperatures actually contradicts not just observations but basic meteorological theory. Figure 5 shows a map of temperatures for North America on February 27th, 2008. Extreme temperatures at any location occur when air motions carry air from the coldest or warmest points on the map. Now, in a warmer climate, it is expected that the temperature difference between the tropics and the high latitudes will decrease. Thus the range of possible extremes will be reduced. More important is the fact that the motions that carry these temperatures arise from a process called baroclinic instability, and this instability derives from the magnitude of the aforementioned temperature difference. Thus, in a warmer world, these winds will be weaker and less capable of carrying extreme temperatures to remote locations. Claims of greater extremes in temperature simply ignore the basic physics, and rely, for their acceptance, on the ignorance of the audience.

The claims of extreme weather transcend the usual use of misleading claims. They often amount to claims for the exact opposite of what is actually occurring. The object of the claims is simply to be as scary as possible, and if that requires claiming the opposite of the true situation, so be it.

Sea level rise:

Globally averaged sea level appears to have been rising at the rate of about 6 inches a century for thousands of years. Until the advent of satellites, sea level was essentially measured with tide gauges which measure the sea level relative to the land level. Unfortunately, the land level is also changing, and as Emery and Aubrey note, tectonics are the major source of change at many locations. Beginning in 1979 we began to use satellites to measure actual sea level. The results were surprisingly close to the previous tide gauge estimates, but slightly higher, but one sees from Wunsch et al (DOI: 10.1175/2007JCLI1840.1) that one is in no position to argue that small differences from changing methodologies represents acceleration. Regardless, the changes are small compared to the claims that suggest disastrous changes. However, even in the early 1980’s advocates of warming alarm like S. Schneider argued that sea level would be an easily appreciated scare tactic. The fact that people like Al Gore and Susan Solomon (former head of the IPCC’s Scientific Assessment) have invested heavily in ocean front property supports the notion that the issue is propagandistic rather than scientific.

Arctic sea ice:

Satellites have been observing arctic (and Antarctic) sea ice since 1979. Every year there is a pronounced annual cycle where the almost complete winter coverage is much reduced each summer. During this period there has been a noticeable downtrend is summer ice in the arctic (with the opposite behavior in the Antarctic), though in recent years, the coverage appears to have stabilized. In terms of climate change, 40 years is, of course, a rather short interval. Still, there have been the inevitable attempts to extrapolate short period trends leading to claims that the arctic should have already reached ice free conditions. Extrapolating short term trends is obviously inappropriate. Extrapolating surface temperature changes from dawn to dusk would lead to a boiling climate in days. This would be silly. The extrapolation of arctic summer ice coverage looks like it might be comparably silly. Moreover, although the satellite coverage is immensely better than what was previously available, the data is far from perfect. The satellites can confuse ice topped with melt water with ice free regions. In addition, temperature might not be the main cause of reduced sea ice coverage. Summer ice tends to be fragile, and changing winds play an important role in blowing ice out of the arctic sea. Associating changing summer sea ice coverage with climate change is, itself, dubious. Existing climate models hardly unambiguously predict the observed behavior. Predictions for 2100 range from no change to complete disappearance. Thus, it cannot be said that the sea ice behavior confirms any plausible prediction.

It is sometimes noted that concerns for disappearing arctic sea ice were issued in 1922, suggesting that such behavior is not unique to the present. The data used, at that time, came from the neighborhood of Spitzbergen. A marine biologist and climate campaigner has argued that what was described was a local phenomenon, but, despite the claim, the evidence presented by the author is far from conclusive. Among other things, the author was selective in his choice of ‘evidence.’

All one can say, at this point, is that the behavior of arctic sea ice represents one of the numerous interesting phenomena that the earth presents us with, and for which neither the understanding nor the needed records exist. It probably pays to note that melting sea ice does not contribute to sea level rise. Moreover, man has long dreamt of the opening of this Northwest Passage. It is curious that it is now viewed with alarm. Of course, as Mencken noted, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” The environmental movement has elevated this aim well beyond what Mencken noted.

Polar bear meme:

I suspect that Al Gore undertook considerable focus-group research to determine the remarkable effectiveness of the notion that climate change would endanger polar bears. His use of an obviously photo shopped picture of a pathetic polar bear on an ice float suggests this. As Susan Crockford, a specialist in polar bear evolution, points out, there had indeed been a significant decrease in polar bear population in the past due to hunting and earlier due to commercial exploitation of polar bear fur. This has led to successful protective measures and sufficient recovery of polar bear population, that hunting has again been permitted. There is no evidence that changes in summer sea ice have had any adverse impact on polar bear population, and, given that polar bears can swim for over a hundred miles, there seems to be little reason to suppose that it would. Nonetheless, for the small community of polar bear experts, the climate related concerns have presented an obvious attraction.

Ocean acidification:

This is again one of those obscure claims that sounds scary but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Ever since the acid rain scare, it has been realized that the public responds with alarm to anything with the word ‘acid’ in it. In point of fact, the ocean is basic rather than acidic (ie, its ph is always appreciably higher than 7, and there is no possibility of increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 bringing it down to 7; note that ph is a measure of acidity or basicness: values greater than 7 are basic and less than 7 acid.), and the purported changes simply refer to making the ocean a bit less basic. However, such a more correct description would lack the scare component. As usual, there is so much wrong with this claim that it takes a fairly long article to go over it all. I recommend the following source.

Death of coral reefs:

The alleged death of coral reefs is partly linked to the acidification issue above, and as we see, the linkage is almost opposite to what is claimed. There is also the matter of warming per se leading to coral bleaching. A typical alarmist presentation can be found here.

The article is behind a pay wall, but most universities provide access to Nature. The reasoned response to this paper is provided here.

As Steele, the author of the above, points out, bleaching has common causes other than warming and is far from a death sentence for corals whose capacity to recover is substantial. This article is a bit polemical, but essentially correct.

Global warming as the cause of everything:

As we see from the above, there is a tendency to blame everything unpleasant on global warming. The absurd extent of this tendency is illustrated on the following here. That hasn’t stopped the EPA from using such stuff to claim large health benefits for its climate change policies. Moreover, I fear that with so many claims, there is always the question ‘what about ….?’ Hardly anyone has the time and energy to deal with the huge number of claims. Fortunately, most are self-evidently absurd. Nation magazine recently came up with what is a bit of a champion is this regard. CO2, it should be noted, is hardly poisonous. On the contrary, it is essential for life on our planet and levels as high as 5000 ppm are considered safe on our submarines and on the space station (current atmospheric levels are around 400 ppm, while, due to our breathing, indoor levels can be much higher). The Nation article is typical in that it makes many bizarre claims in a brief space. It argues that a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus led to temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Of course, no one can claim that the earth is subject to such a runaway, but even on Venus, the hot surface depends primarily on the closeness of Venus to the sun and the existence of a dense sulfuric acid cloud covering the planet. Relatedly, Mars, which also has much more CO2 than the earth, is much further from the sun and very cold. As we have seen many times already, such matters are mere details when one is in the business of scaring the public.

Concluding remarks:

The accumulation of false and/or misleading claims is often referred to as the ‘overwhelming evidence’ for forthcoming catastrophe. Without these claims, one might legitimately ask whether there is any evidence at all.

Despite this, climate change has been the alleged motivation for numerous policies, which, for the most part, seem to have done more harm  than the purported climate change, and have the obvious capacity to do much more. Perhaps the best that can be said for these efforts is that they are acknowledged to have little impact on either CO2 levels or temperatures despite their immense cost. This is relatively good news since there is ample evidence that both changes are likely to be beneficial although the immense waste of money is not.

I haven’t spent much time on the details of the science, but there is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multi-factor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.

Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From the Editors: If you would like to provide a response to Mr. Lindzen’s article to be posted on Merion West, please submit it to to editor@merionwest.com.

 

82 thoughts on “Richard Lindzen: Thoughts on the Public Discourse over Climate Change

  1. Not everything was covered.

    We are often told in news items that pound for pound methane is 86 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. This tells us nothing about how much methane will run the temperature up. As near as I can figure out: Methane is on track to run the temperature up a few hundredths of a degree over the next 100 years. That’s not noticeable and probably not measurable and certainly not worth wasting valuable resources on.

    The news warns us that the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Caps are shrinking due to Climate Change and will result in catastrophic sea level rise. If you think about it, ice cap loss and gain of mass is a function of precipitation and the calving of icebergs. That cause and effect relationship is separated by hundreds of years. Hence the change in ice mass today is likely due to the change in precipitation patterns hundreds of years ago. Assigning the cause of today’s ice loss on current CO2 emissions and climate is just plain silly.

  2. The author seems to be a subscriber to the notion of alternative facts. He states as fact that 1998 was the warmest ever when that is clearly untrue. Why take the rest seriously?

    1. Perhaps William you should take a look at the data directly from NASA and NOAA during and just prior to the very time period you are mocking. Do you actually believe an atmospheric physicist would bungle up this information. In your hurry to attempt to make a put-down, you’ve simply displayed your lack of scientific knowledge. Your refusal to research, read, and learn says much more about you than about Lindzen’s article.

    2. First of all, “alternative facts” is an oxymoron. A fact, by definition is a fact. The alternative adjective is a relativism meant to obfuscate and denigrate.

      To answer your question:

      1. Dr. Lindzen didn’t state that 1998 was the warmest year. He stated that it was the terminal year of a 20 year year-to-year increase. Two very different points.

      2. Disagreement with one point of an assessment is not a reason to invalidate in its entirety.

      3. Dr. Lindzen is an acknowledged expert in the field, whether you agree with his conclusions aren’t. Unless you are on equal footing with regard to empirical knowledge if the, you would be wise to be more judicious with your comments.

    3. How can one have a notion of alternative facts? Seems that it only exists as a term in the mind of ‘fact checkers’.

  3. The error bar: regular people think errors occur randomly and in mathematically balanced proportions. Therefore that a centre value is an excellent determinationo of the actual value. The idea that reality may hover near the bottom or wander within the band doesn’t make sense to them. So there is a false sense of certainty even with large error bars.
    How does the IPCC range still survive credibility? Because the “average” is perceived as truth. No explanation of how the boundary paths can be now achieved matters. Each serves to create the central truth.
    Reality follows a consistent set of rules even when variables …. vary. Only one path will occur. Only one model is correct. But this is hard to get across. Too much certainty has been given to “scientists” and engineers. Especially if computers are involved.

  4. He also thinks there is no link between smoking and cancer. Even took money from tobacco companies to prove it!
    A shill is a shill, no matter what the academic qualifications.
    Give him a wide birth.

    1. Yes, MIT has a long history of appointing looney tunes to high academic positions, particularly in the sciences. /sarc off

    2. He said no such thing. What he said was that the link was far from proven as the inevitable link proponents have claimed it is. The Money is behind the people who have sued the folks who Earned it.. It’s You who should be given a wide berth. He makes infinitely more sense than the now mega rich Al Gore.

      1. Actually, just asking for peer reviewed publications shows a level ignorance that is unacceptable when responding to this article and many like it. There are a number of reasons including recent research showing the peer review process is completely broken and extremely unreliable. In addition, research opposing the “scientific consensus” has a terrible time getting published in scientific journals because the organizations publishing those journals are dependent on the AGW hypothesis being true. Dependent both financially and to protect the credibility of the political scientists that run those organizations.

      2. Really? You want peer review on this? After billions have been paid to underhanded scientists for the purpose of pushing the climate change hoax so they could keep their “research” funded and the money rolling in? Peer review is how “global warming” became the trillions of dollars hoax that it is. Morons seem to think that peer review equals factual.

      3. “Peer Review” is increasingly problematic. A recent study of the reliability of “peer reviewed” papers published in “reputable journals” found that about 80% percent reported research results that could not be replicated. This is a problem that affects ALL fields of of science:

        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/

        If you locate and study the so-called “climategate” emails, the authors explicitly consider how to suppress papers that criticize or contradict their work. This explicit verbal discussion of how to corrupt the peer review process. Also there is the issue of replicability, which resides at the heart of all science and is particularly critical – in its absence – in climate science. Once again, climate scientists such as Phil Jones explicitly rejected making available unadjusted data and code that would allow alternate methodological approaches to address the replicability of their work. So, simply because a claim doesn’t appear in a peer reviewed context has no necessary implications about its merit.

    3. You, too, need to learn to do research rather than just spouting progressive BS. He was talking about second hand smoke and whether you want to believe it or not, there is zero evidence that second hand smoke causes lung cancer. There’s no doubt that it can be a bother and possibly in the situation where an individual spends an inordinate amount of time in a small space with a smoker and no ventilation. But, under the vast majority of situations, there is no correlation between second hand smoke and lung cancer. It is idiotic and extremely unreasonable (as well as unscientific) to make an accusation of fraud just because one doesn’t like the results of the research.

  5. Concerning Linzen and the tobacco industry – I believe this is all based on an analysis he did of a report that claimed to prove that PASSIVE smoking is a significant cause of lung cancer. Note the keywords here, “passive smoking” (not actual smoking), “prove” and “significant”.

    He was simply commenting on the rigor of the statistics in that report. Furthermore, the WHO (World Health Organization) agreed with him!

  6. Interesting. Very scientifically literate and informed, but still reads like a political hit piece on the mainstream scientific conclusions. I’m not sure I accept all his seemingly factual statements, regarding weather extremes and corals for example. I’ve read too much arguing the other way, those authors are respected scientists too with plenty of evidence for their conclusions.

    Like all these papers he makes a big deal over the “pause”. But even though this is a recent article, he doesn’t discuss the last three record years, or the emerging evidence that there never was a pause, just ocean absorbing heat rather than atmosphere combined with short term weather shifts.

    Learned a few things though, about the methodology. Clearly there’s a lot scientists don’t know. Clearly we need to collect a lot more data.

    I’m happy to accept that some of the actions taken so far are stupid, and some of the science / messaging on the other side is hysterical, that the peer-review and funding process for science in general has issues.

    But it’s also stupid to dismiss it all and do nothing, continue subsidizing fossil fuels, defund the ongoing science, undermine Paris Accords and cross our fingers..

    1. Erik best comments I’ve ever read. You demonstrate balanced thoughts and are open to both sides of the theory/conspirary :) Just like everybody should be!

      Luke

    2. Eric, if you are “not sure” of the facts, perhaps you need to learn more about the debate before forming an opinion. Thanks to the problem of bias in “peer reviewed” publications in support of “policy,” you need to venture into the realms of actually studying basic first principles like the Second of Thermodynamics, heat transfer and the geological record. The latter falsified the “catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” decades before the policy debate formed. The “its stupid to do nothing” trope is a big “lawyer-powered” part of the problem – the “precautionary principle.” However, unless you actually know what the problem is, or even that there is a problem, “doing something” could itself be astoundingly stupid.

      Subsidizing fossil fuel is no worse than subsidizing “green” fuels, and as much as it is contrary to popular “wisdom,” “green energy” – windmills, solar farms, batteries, etc. – are readily as damaging to the environment as fossil fuels may be. In fact if the increased plant cover reported in satellite imagery in the last two decades is actually attributable to increased CO2, as seems likely, then fossil fuels that are cleanly burned are “greener” than so-called renewable energy. You only have to see one desert solar farm covering 2,000 acres to recognize the ecological impact multiple similar facilities make on one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet. You only need to see the dead birds including raptors and other co-called migratory birds arrayed under windmills to know that the environmentalist support of renewable energy (wind and solar) is ignorance at best and hypocrisy at worst, and those disasters are subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars a year.

  7. You can tell a lot about a person by how much they put their money where their mouth is.

    From Wikipedia:

    The November 10, 2004 online version of Reason magazine reported that Lindzen is “willing to take bets that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now”.[69] However, on June 8, 2005 they reported that Lindzen insisted that he had been misquoted, after James Annan contacted Lindzen to make the bet but claimed that “Lindzen would take only 50 to 1 odds”.[70]

  8. Everyone loves what you guys tend to be up
    too. Such clever work and reporting! Keep up the wonderful works guys I’ve
    incorporated you guys to our blogroll.

    1. William,

      I would be inclined to say that the “untruth” is in considering anything significant in the minuscule range of 0.4 degrees with an error range of 0.2 degrees (HALF the measure).

    2. Note that this piece was published in April 2017. While Lindzen presumably could have and should have known that global temperature anomalies spiked upward in 2015 (and have stayed there), his basic point about the 15-year pause in warming after 1998 is still worth taking. On balance, I don’t believe Lindzen gives us a particularly fair-minded critique, and he ultimately fights polemical alarmism with his own version of counter-polemics. Still, it’s good to have some skeptical voices in the conversation, as long as we avoid accepting any of them as the gospel truth.

  9. They can’t help it!
    They were born *(and raised and educated and trained) that way..
    *(see photos above)

  10. It is somewhat surprising that the Man Made Global Warming story has become part of political correctness, when it was pushed into international politics by the highly incorrect Margaret Thatcher, who used it as a weapon against British coal miners. Her speeches at the UN really started the bandwagon. (Gore had spoken about it earlier in the US Congress, but no-one in the real world payed any attention. )

  11. Dr. Lindzen, for what it’s worth, I want to thank you for all you’ve done over the years. As a kid growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, my heroes were not sports stars, despite being a fairly elite athlete myself. My heroes were astronauts and scientists. Today, my heroes are still astronauts and scientists. Oddly enough, I grew up with a kid who became an astronaut and spent time on the ISS. I’m so Jealous! Anyway, thank you for speaking out even in the face of attacks from ignorance, attacks from political activists, and even the occasional ethically challenged fellow scientist. Thanks also to scientists like Dr. Curry, Dr. Spencer, Dr. Christy, and many many others who speak out despite receiving the same sort of attacks waged upon you. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! And a thousand times, thank you.

  12. Dr Linzen, I know, in my own very small way, how hard it is to speak out against the current orthodoxy of AGW. I can’t imagine the slings and arrows you’ve had to deflect or absorb but I do want to take a minute to thank you as deeply and sincerely as I can for your willingness to stand up and speak the truth.
    In the future your name will rank highly in the annals of science for your efforts against this current incarnation of the Tulip Craze. Best of luck to you, sir.

  13. I am just a lowly Engineer. I have been studying CAGW since 2007, especially trying to understand the fundamental science for stating the link between atmospheric CO2 increase to a rise in Global Warming.

    I have yet to find a credible empirical scientific study that states this link in its conclusion.

    Without that link being established, any money spent on “battling climate change” is wasted. Even worse, it is money used to gain support from the public on any other conclusions the government cabal wants to promulgate.

  14. Kudos to Dr. Lindzen!
    Some interesting facts [provided that I am correct] to me.
    Some of the famous cherry blossoms around Washington, D.C.’s Tidal Basin suffered “widespread damage” because of bitterly cold weather, and this is the first time in the trees’ 105-year history that they will not reach peak bloom.
    I have read and heard that the 97% refers to climate scientists, which represent a relatively small fraction of all scientists.
    There appears to be a considerable lack of knowledge and lack of a thorough understanding of the sciences behind climate change / global warming.
    Coral reefs are adversely affected by the anthropogenic pollution of the oceans.
    The background amount of CO2 in our atmosphere recently passed the 400-ppm mark, while the amount of water vapor ranges from about 100 to 42,000 ppm.
    The energy budget number of 200 watts per square meter is sufficient to evaporate a layer of about 0.31 mm per hour of water from a body of water.
    While water vapor is a greenhouse gas, it [as clouds] also reflects incoming solar radiation which can be over four times as much as the radiation from earth.
    While we do have some of the necessary knowledge and understanding of the science behind say climate, we certainly don’t appear to have sufficient understanding and knowledge about it.
    As the biosphere warms up water evaporation would increase likewise, which in turn would result in an increase of clouds.
    Insufficiency of robust data and uncertainty about its accuracy casts a question mark on the robustness of the climate models’ projected forecasts.
    Statistics can provide useful forecasting data about problems; however, it does not provide solutions to the problems.
    Extrapolating, more so than interpolating, does not provide robust and accurate results.
    It is discouraging to hear or read about so many opinions being expressed as facts, particularly by scientists.
    Believing does not explain a thing, particularly in science.
    There is an average of one Argo float per 90,450 km^2 [about the area of Portugal or Indiana]. The Argo floats [about 4000] can dive down to about 2 km, or less than half the average ocean depth.
    There is an average of one weather station in the US per 5720 km^2 [greater than the area of Delaware].
    The McMurdo Dry Valleys located in Antarctica is the No 1 driest place in the world. Lloró, a town situated in Chocó, Colombia, is probably the place with the largest measured rainfall in the world, averaging 13,300 mm per year (523.6 in).
    The highest recorded temperature on earth appears to be over 54 C, and the lowest about less than -89 C.
    Climate varies randomly within a 24 hr period over a temperature range of up to about +/- 10 C anywhere on earth: climate thus appears to be chaotic and unpredictable and much less defined say by systems of equations.
    Exhaled air has 16% oxygen, 4% [or about 100 times the amount of CO2 in the air inhaled] carbon dioxide and is saturated with water vapor.
    Some questions, also of interest to me.
    Why don’t we do something about stopping and cleaning up our biosphere?
    Why don’t we stop wasting energy and our natural resources?
    Does it to make sense to trust results expressed in tenths of a degree obtained with incomplete data of unknown or questionable accuracy?
    Why don’t we determine what is the net effect of water vapor in the thermal balance of our biosphere?
    Why don’t we start thinking about what to do with the overpopulation of our planet, which to me is the most important problem?

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  16. There is a political theory that underlies the science (or pseudo science) of global warming / climate change. Without understanding that first, none of this can make any sense in any comprehensive way.

    The New York Times reported on Nov. 3, 2017: “Directly contradicting much of the Trump administration’s position on climate change, 13 federal agencies unveiled an exhaustive scientific report on Friday that says humans are the dominant cause of the global temperature rise that has created the warmest period in the history of civilization. … The report was approved for release by the White House, but the findings come as the Trump administration is defending its climate change policies.”

    So, is there, or isn’t there, man-made Global Warming? American President Donald Trump’s position on virtually every matter including global warming is usually one of strawman — for the American and international establishment’s actual policies are rarely if ever crafted in the White House itself. The fact of the matter is that all establishments and their scientists worldwide tote a common party-line: they religiously claim that Global-Warming / Climate Change is man-made. Their staunchest detractors also religiously claim that there isn’t any global warming at all, but are then hard pressed to explain the drastic changes in weather seen occurring worldwide which is now presented by the establishment party-line not as Global Warming as it was a decade ago, but as planetary level Climate Change. Some other detractors suggest that Climate Change may be real, but that it is principally not due to man’s activity; that, planetary level climate change is predominantly a natural cyclic phenomenon based on the sun’s activity, and therefore it is likely solar system wide phenomenon. While still others, only a handful, perhaps more in tune with the political vagaries of Machiavellian statecraft and the making of the public mind with Hegelian Dialectic imposed political choices, suggest that the alarmist attitude is to Machiavellianly fashion a boogieman as the problem pretext, in order to usher in Carbon Credit as the solution. They believe that the real agenda behind these pseudo science laced political shenanigans is to curtail humanity’s unbridled growth and population explosion — the long running real agenda of the oligarchy driving nation-states towards one-world government. This group of detractors fear that the ultimate political agenda of the world government exponents is dystopic eugenics, selective mass population reduction, and the enactment of global laws for controlled breeding, wherein, birthing is transformed from the natural right of the human species to a law-sanctioned privilege as has been witnessed in Communist China! This latter rather well-read intelligent lot, who understandably so fear dystopia that they see its seeds planted in virtually every global policy that is signed off by the so called representative governments which silently erode national sovereignty in baby-steps, are generally dismissed by the establishment as “conspiracy theorist”, kooks and nut-jobs. To assist in that labeling and marginalization, a great deal of “beneficial cognitive diversity” is also cunningly introduced into the mix of public opinion which pitches outlandish theories. All this creates massive confusion in the public mind. Whom to believe? What to believe? Is science really divorced from political science? Is pseudo science being used to globally push an elitist agenda down mankind’s throat? What a Hegelian Mind-fck!

    Full analysis of the underlying political theory is here: http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2016/11/global-warming-climate-change-whats-it.html

    Zahir Ebrahim
    Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
    Email: humanbeingsfirst@gmail.com

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