Quick post, I’m in between sessions here in Washington DC.
Dr. Richard Lindzen just gave a keynote talk on climate sensitivity and the state of climate science. Here is the powerpoint below:
Powerpoint link, “hot off the press” so to speak, minutes old.
More later
Excellent summary. Now lets get on with living.
Good points, well made!
Any link to life audio or video feed/webcast?
Love that ad showing an X over a jet contrail that’s ah Water vapor.Like Algore’s steam-out of the cooling towers in his movie…
This may be a good time to see some reason in DC…
The thing that makes the AGW argument withstand criticism is the fact that the theory is combined with a plausible mechanism complete with mathematical equations, computers, elaborate models, funding, and media coverage. With media coverage added to the mix, any attempt to falsify AGW, no matter how well done, will have little power. Falsifying it without coming up with anything else is like trying to destroy a tank with a hammer. That little phrase “What else could it be?” becomes a clanging bell extolling a default AGW win if we cannot come up with an equally plausible elaborate mechanism and overriding theory. The default hammer, “The system is very complex and we don’t know much about it.” will not provide a foothold on the beach. It has to be tank for tank.
The feedback equation used is similar to a “voltage-series” feedback model used in electronics. But there are other kinds of feedback such as “voltage-shunt”, “current-series”, and “current-shunt” in electronics. Are there analogues to these in climate theory? Also, these feedback models assume that the feedback connection does not significantly load the circuit and is one-way. How realistic are these assumptions for climate? We can safely asuume that the earth does not affect the sun, but what else can we assume? Just a few random thoughts.
I don’t think there is any “it”, but I do understand your point. So far no one has shown that we’re seeing anything out of the ordinary. But the AGW clique says we need to disprove them and come up with a valid “explanation”. I don’t see anything that needs explaining.
Pamela Gray (07:16:02) :
NO positive feedback because air CAN NOT hold heat enough time (comprende?). CO2 which is a very small part of air 0.038 % = 3.8 per ten thousand just heats up and cools down. (check air volumetric heat capacity vs. water volumetric heat capacity)
Do you hallucinate your “prophet” being a scientist with more knowledge than NIELS BOHR? See:
http://www.giurfa.com/gh_experiments.pdf
What GWrs. say is equivalent as to say that you can warm your feet with a bottle filled with air instead of water, it would mean, also , that a baloon filled with hot air and a lot of CO2 (from the combustion of propane in burner) will not fly!!!!!!. Do you know why it flies up and away?…Because it is eager to give off its heat up above, to get rid of it.
There is no such a thing as “green house effect” but “trapped heat”.
Last but not least: The earth it is not covered with a bowl shaped glass on it, it is open to sky, and its atmosphere it is not infinite as to avoid cooling up there next to space.
RE: Pamela Gray
I agree. Until people become sensible in thought and the press stops with its sensationalist nature, ‘Climate Change’ will always be in greater presedence than its nemesis.
Or the earth will have to start cooling drastically, which I have doubts about. In all probability, the earth with bobble back and forth from warm to cool in the next 30 years…toying with our minds to figure out if it will indefinitely warm or cool. At least by then, models will be well outside of 95% ‘robustness’ and credibility to modelers will be non existent.
Pamela,
The “tank” you seek is ridicule. When people become aware that the “scientific” studies relied upon by AGW alarmists are never audited (much less replicated) because the authors of the studies refuse to make their data and code available, they will see that the emperor has no clothes. When they understand that the climate models have never been validated, same thing. When people realize that the hockey stick (completely changed understanding of global temperature history) was accepted without question, they will laugh out loud.
Everyone who works somewhere can relate to the idea of a young guy coming in and saying “Hey, I’ve done a study. Everything you thought you knew about our business is completely wrong!” The public knows that there is no way in hell that everyone at work would shrug shoulders, say OK, and change the business without bothering to check this new “study”. When they learn that the hockey stick was accepted that way, they’ll roll their eyes.
Imagine the response of the typical voter when they learn for the first time that close to 90% of the US temperature sites fail to meet basic scientific standards and ours are the best in the world. And none of the so-called “scientists” ever bothered to check.
The AGW war will be won by making fun of the alarmists — by pointing out how sloppy and unserious so much of the work is.
OT (sort of) but if penguin populations are key global warming indicators then surely the discovery of ten new colonies made up of ‘thousands of birds’ demands a rethink though of course the science is settled)?
“Emperor penguin populations are a useful climate change indicator due to the birds’ reliance on sea ice. They are the least common Antarctic penguin, with an estimated 200,000 breeding pairs.”
At the very least the ‘estimated 200,000 breeding pairs’ needs a rethink.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/02/wildlife-poles
Unfortunately , I fear Pamela is correct . Note how this month’s conference has gotten no coverage in the media , even Fox . Our only real hope is to delay any political action until the failure of the AGW models becomes readily apparent .
One question –
Why does the SST data end at 2000?
And, more rhetorically speaking, why do scientists have such a lack of spelling, punctuation and grammar skills? At the very least, could he not have hired a proofreader?
Anyone know if the ERBE plot is the latest after recent updates to correct for various things like drift?
This is good stuff, well done.
I wish that true science was the rule, it’s not. Junk science is devloped to attach and implement agendas. Let it be a warning to all you politicans, the people will only put up with so much and they will turn on you. You think you have power, you’ll see how much power you have when you turn on Cap and Tax and they vote you out on the street and maybe worse. You better take notice to what Thomas Jefferson has written, people are talking now.
Why is it that the people who are clearly rampant liars, in the pay of big oil, gas, & coal companies (fact), & of no technical significance within the Climate Change non-debate, always present their cases in such a calm, reflective, authoritive & considered, yet gentle manner? ;-))
Why are those who tell us the truth, the whole truth, & nothing but the truth, absolute experts in the field of Climate Science, always do so shouting from the highest steeple, procaiming impending doom & disaster & catastrophe, thumping the AGW bible at the pulpit, demanding that we repent of our sins against Gaia? :-((
Excellent piece! Looking forward to more soon!
It appears that Dr. Lindzen’s tolerance for fools is diminishing in his advancing maturity, for which we should all be thankful.
Pamela Gray writes “That little phrase “What else could it be?” becomes a clanging bell extolling a default AGW win if we cannot come up with an equally plausible elaborate mechanism and overriding theory.”
There is an extremely plausible alternate hypothesis. I dont understand the physics, but the idea is that high clouds warm the earth, and low clouds cool it. High clouds are inhibited by ions, and low clouds are more numerous with nuclei produced by galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). When the sun is active magnetically, bursts of the solar wind sweep ions from the top of the atmosphere, and we get more high clouds. The sun’s magnetic field keeps GCRs away, so there are fewer low clouds; result a warming world. When the sun is magnetically inactive, there are more ions at high altitude, so fewer high altitude clouds. With lots of GCRs, there are lots of low level clouds (?Asperatus). Hence a cooler world. The correlation with historical data is better and over a far longer time span than that of AGW. But neither hypothesis has much in the way of experimental data to support it. AGW has a lot more PR “spin”, and the unquestioning support of the mainstream media.
Why is there a second ICCC conference just a few months after the last ICCC conference? I cannot find any explanations. Isn’t this abnormal?
OT, but the sun’s sure cranking it up. Not only is there a significant SC24 sunspot group in the NH, but there’s now an SC23 sunspeck in the SH.
To add to Pamela Gray’s comments the AGW movement has also entwined themselves into the Energy Debate so they have the fallback position of even if we are wrong on the whole Global Warming stuff the solutions will solve the perceived energy problems. A second line of defense as it were.
I personally believe that the two are mutually exclusive, because we have parts of the solutions and are not implementing them because the constant whining of enviromentalists. What is wrong with incremental progress? New coal power stations are cleaner than the 40 year old ones that they could replace, the aging Nuclear reactors all need to be replaced with much more efficent and safer installations. They have blocked progress in electricity for decades.
Then the imaginary link between solar and wind to oil. It is made up. Does nto exist. Displacing DOMESTIC COAL does not help with IMPORTED OIL. There is a leap of faith into transportation that does not exist, which is the electrification of the fleet. While it may happen one day it will require a much more stable and robust electirical grid than what we have and what we are planning with our wind farms and solar arrays.
There is a simple fact that cannot be denied … If the current solar trends continue, and most say it will, then it will soon be so cold, the snow piled so high, the ice growing so thick, that Al Gore will be the only person left on planet earth who does not KNOW Al Gore is a kook.
Patience. In Canada they already refer to this winter as “the winter that never ends”. We have friends who are right now visiting relatives there.
Now is a good time to think, does anybody actually know how a glaciation ice age begins? Because we are overdue …
Tarpon
An Ice age begins with a heat wave that ends. Right now here on Canada’s wet coast we are in the declining phase of a heat wave. The clouds are begining to build up contrary to the forcast. We can expect to go into the deep freeze by the weekend.
Excellent summary. One wonders why Professor Linden lends his name to the
MIT Center for Global Climate Change.
Pamela Gray is most perceptive. When [the powers that be] finish using East and West Coast elites headed by a teleprompter-guided, ineligible, Chicago-way President to shut down energy development, manufacturing, and industry in the U.S., who will be minding the store? Where has the money come from that has bought all forms of mass media (except the internet thus far) and that is buying our academies, e.g., MIT’s “independent-of-department-and-faculties’-scholarly/scientific-overview” Center for Global Climate Change, for this purpose? CGCC is headed by Robert Prinn who not only chooses to use computer models that cannot predict past climate, much less the future, but also publishes research about “sniffing out” any whiff of new or old greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in order to stop their manufacture. He also appears to use faulty physics of these gases to make his points. When he and other pseudo-scientists are finished demolishing reality, there will be no transformation of raw materials into productive (and profitable) outcomes in the U.S. and the “West”.
Just where do you think all this funding might be coming from? I am all for tanks, but at least we might build bigger and bigger hammers as we catch onto the program. Perhaps they might make these tanks inoperable.
Though I am a foreigner, I am beginning to suspect that there is something else behind those who adhere to global warming/climate change, something a bit emotional. Perhaps if they are liberals, which obviously is their right, they feel they are obliged to believe in such theories, but they are not, they still can be good liberal citizens without the need to believe in that non-scientific crap. Be free!, nobody obliges you to believe in that non-sense and let science to those who really know it.