This is a letter professor Richard Lindzen of MIT sent to the Boston Globe and was published today. It is well worth the read.
KERRY EMANUEL’S Feb. 15 op-ed “Climate changes are proven fact’’ is more advocacy than assessment. Vague terms such as “consistent with,’’ “probably,’’ and “potentially’’ hardly change this. Certainly climate change is real; it occurs all the time. To claim that the little we’ve seen is larger than any change we “have been able to discern’’ for a thousand years is disingenuous. Panels of the National Academy of Sciences and Congress have concluded that the methods used to claim this cannot be used for more than 400 years, if at all. Even the head of the deservedly maligned Climatic Research Unit acknowledges that the medieval period may well have been warmer than the present.
The claim that everything other than models represents “mere opinion and speculation’’ is also peculiar. Despite their faults, models show that projections of significant warming depend critically on clouds and water vapor, and the physics of these processes can be observationally tested (the normal scientific approach); at this point, the models seem to be failing.
Finally, given a generation of environmental propaganda, a presidential science adviser (John Holdren) who has promoted alarm since the 1970s, and a government that proposes funding levels for climate research about 20 times the levels in 1991, courage seems hardly the appropriate description – at least for scientists supporting such alarm.
Richard S. Lindzen
Cambridge
The writer is Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Here, here (or is it hear, hear?). Good retort.
[REPLY – The latter. ~ Evan]
It’s the water vapor feedback, stupid.
======================
I love you Richard. Oh maybe love is too strong a term. No, actually I think I was right the first time, for your quiet determination a statue should be built in your honour.
Exactly! To cite Richard Feynman – climate models do not have “something else [that] comes out right” which is serious since it may mean that our understanding of the climate is insufficient.
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
climate research about 20 times the levels in 1991
Many will change sides…
Don’t worry, they’ll have the fudge factors in the models corrected real soon now so that they will in the future predict more global warming-caused snow fall.
I note that energy costs continue to get hotter even if the climate isn’t heating up. Watts are up with that!
Emanuel and Curry are cut of the same cloth. They make occasionally make a guest post here and there, which on the surface seems objective. When one reads the post again the hidden advocacy becomes clear. Confirmation bias is strong with this two.
[snip we will not be discussing smoking and lung cancer here]
I asked my mother why she checked daily weather reports when I was a toddler. Even then I knew they were more pathetic than prophetic.
Global climate change seems a strange crux for environmental arguments, when what many consider to be the causes of such change generally consists of waste, excess, apathy, and indolence, anyhow, all of which are behaviors humanity has reason to curb.
I’d rather stop looking for enormous, catastrophic, cataclysmic reasons to stop burning fossil fuels, et cetera, and start taking the “small” reasons for what they seem to be to many people: perfectly sound judgments against sophomoric behavior.
…Behaviors which, of course, are to be named by oneself — not me. In the end, I’m hardly an environmental activist.
Thanks for Your Ink, Sir,
-BothEyes
Prof Lindzen,
Nice letter.
I wanted it to not end so quickly.
John
Lindzen has proved time and again to be the adult in this debate. He continues to be the adult. Everyone should find on Youtube the global warming symposium held at MIT in November. You can see Lindzen is the adult among the kiddies. Everything the man says about science or scientists is rich with understanding of scientific method. Scientists owe him a great debt of gratitude. Freedom loving people do too.
Matthew (11:52:13) :
I love you Richard. Oh maybe love is too strong a term. No, actually I think I was right the first time, for your quiet determination a statue should be built in your honour.
I think I’m somewhat bromantically inclined toward him too 😛
How he manages to keep his cool amidst the crap-storm the believer community has hurled his way, I’ll never understand
Some of those climate models use neural networks – these are even cited in AR4 e.g. see Chapter 9, P 690 and search on ‘neural’ throughout AR4.
Neural networks are supposed to somehow discern and emulate a pattern between inputs and outputs. They are a pseudo-science technology based on the assumption that anything that acts like a brain neuron must somehow have intelligence. They should never be used to predict complex systems such as climate, for which they are utterly useless.
Professor Lindzen is the voice of reason. Holden is a fanatic, like so many Obummer has appointed. WUWT should try to get Lindzen to do a weekly or monthly post, he is unimpeachable, articulate, and erudite.
Saw Coleman’s piece, this business about thermistor cables is astonishing, should be played up. NCDC claims they produce a COOLING bias, requiring them to fudge the numbers upward. Our tax dollars at work!
“consistent with,’’ “probably,’’ and “potentially” = “weasel words”
Few politicians are going to get off lightly. If climategate broke in two-three years time, and the carbon tax was in force, then the Boston harbor might have been an ideal place to throw few of them in. Yanks should remember ‘no taxation without consultation’.
Compate Lindzen’s non-sensational approach to this: the Warmers in England are ready to redirect their hysteria to another dragon–that of insufficient oxygen! Can you imagine that??
Typical atmosphere is generally 21% oxygen. Mass of the entire atmosphere is 5.8 E 15 tons and 21% of that is 1.22 E 15 tons. Divide that by 6 billion people and the world per capita mass of oxygen is ~203,000 tons.
That’s per man, woman, and child on the earth. That’s not enough? How are they going to spin this into a catastrophe?
I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see, although it perhaps proves again they’re not interested in numbers or logic.
(Now what on earth am I going to do with 203 thousand tons of oxygen?)
Mathew,
“for your quiet determination a statue should be built in your honour.”
I second that. Perhaps it’s time to retire the statue of Lincoln to make way for the new millenium. No disrepect to Abe, of course.
Lindzen held his own pretty well at the talk he gave at Fermilab.
Lindzen Colloquim at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory 2/10/10
The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming
http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/Colloquium/100210Lindzen/index.htm#
DirkH (11:56:20) :
Matters not how much they change the fudge factors to predict GW Cooling.
That is precisely where the face of it meets the pie.
NOAA got a face full of gooey stuff when thier model forecast for the current winter was 180 out, blowing the forecast for an entire continent. The MET had 2 seasons of pie in the face.
The credibility of agencies using these failed models is in inverse proportion to how long they fail to toss them in the proper receptacle.
If they wish to wear a happy expression covered in sticky stuff, that is their choice.
An earlier quote by Prof Lindzen:
“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”
Some one of Richard Lindzen stature is much more suited to writing op-eds in the Boston Globe than just letters to the editor. My guess is they won’t publish them if he submits them.
@RockyRoad
Try breathing it. That works fine for me 😉
But seriously , have you got a link to where you got that?
Smokey – the same bemused amazement was prevalent post-Listeria, salmonella in eggs, avian flu, CJD/BSE, swine flu. The list continues to grow.
The quiet voice of reason in the wilderness is as an oasis in the desert – hard to find, but bloody refreshing when you do.