Resisting climate hysteria
by Richard S. Lindzen on Quadrant Online
July 26, 2009
A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action
The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.
excerpts:
For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century. Supporting the notion that man has not been the cause of this unexceptional change in temperature is the fact that there is a distinct signature to greenhouse warming: surface warming should be accompanied by warming in the tropics around an altitude of about 9km that is about 2.5 times greater than at the surface. Measurements show that warming at these levels is only about 3/4 of what is seen at the surface, implying that only about a third of the surface warming is associated with the greenhouse effect, and, quite possibly, not all of even this really small warming is due to man (Lindzen, 2007, Douglass et al, 2007). This further implies that all models predicting significant warming are greatly overestimating warming. This should not be surprising (though inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data. Thus, Santer, et al (2008), argue that stretching uncertainties in observations and models might marginally eliminate the inconsistency. That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community).
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Climate alarmists respond that some of the hottest years on record have occurred during the past decade. Given that we are in a relatively warm period, this is not surprising, but it says nothing about trends.
Given that the evidence (and I have noted only a few of many pieces of evidence) strongly implies that anthropogenic warming has been greatly exaggerated, the basis for alarm due to such warming is similarly diminished. However, a really important point is that the case for alarm would still be weak even if anthropogenic global warming were significant. Polar bears, arctic summer sea ice, regional droughts and floods, coral bleaching, hurricanes, alpine glaciers, malaria, etc. etc. all depend not on some global average of surface temperature anomaly, but on a huge number of regional variables including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, and direction and magnitude of wind. The state of the ocean is also often crucial. Our ability to forecast any of these over periods beyond a few days is minimal (a leading modeler refers to it as essentially guesswork). Yet, each catastrophic forecast depends on each of these being in a specific range. The odds of any specific catastrophe actually occurring are almost zero. This was equally true for earlier forecasts of famine for the 1980’s, global cooling in the 1970’s, Y2K and many others. Regionally, year to year fluctuations in temperature are over four times larger than fluctuations in the global mean.
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In view of the above, one may reasonably ask why there is the current alarm, and, in particular, why the astounding upsurge in alarmism of the past 4 years. When an issue like global warming is around for over twenty years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence, and donations are reasonably clear. So too are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of CO2 is a dream-come-true. After all, CO2 is a product of breathing itself. Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for ‘saving’ the earth. Nations have seen how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. But, by now, things have gone much further. The case of ENRON (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative in this respect.
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And finally, there are the numerous well meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue For them, their psychic welfare is at stake.
With all this at stake, one can readily suspect that there might be a sense of urgency provoked by the possibility that warming may have ceased and that the case for such warming as was seen being due in significant measure to man, disintegrating. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, for more serious leaders, the need to courageously resist hysteria is clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever present climate change is no substitute for prudence. Nor is the assumption that the earth’s climate reached a point of perfection in the middle of the twentieth century a sign of intelligence.
Read the complete essay with references at Quadrant Online
Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
h/t to Bob Carter
Eric,
The contribution of cooling from the melting of ice could make at most a very tiny contribution to net ocean heat content. This has been affirmed by none other than James Hansen (I think it was included in the famous 2005 “warming in the pipeline” paper in Science). It has been independently confirmed by many people, and a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation (melt enough ice to raise the ocean level by 2 mm, and figure out how much the heat of fusion would cool the top 700 meters of the ocean) shows that it is negligible.
The ocean heat data is very clear, the warming stopped in about 2003, and this alone appears inconsistent with climate model projections. That the warming stopped suddenly appears inconsistent with substantial future warming “in the pipeline”, because a sudden stop is inconsistent with very long ocean lag times. This in turn casts doubt on high climate sensitivity, since high sensitivity is only possible with long ocean heat lags.
Slow ocean heat accumulation is to climate models what a card on the first floor is to a house of cards: the structure of the whole thing depends it. Take it away and the house falls. Same goes for substantial (and very uncertain) aerosol cooling that “cancels” much or most of the expected radiative forcing from well mixed gases.
Roger Peilke Sr. (no amateur he) has both published and blogged about the lack of ocean heating and how it conflicts with model projections. He publicly invited Gavin at Real Climate to conduct a (civilized) exchange about this subject. Gavin never replied. I think this speaks volumes.
eric,
“Since I am not an expert on aerosals, I can’t make a definitive judgment about where in the range of the aerosal forcings, the real forcing effect lies.”
Please note that the wide error bars mean that even the experts in that field don’t know. That is the point… nobody knows! Kind of crazy to claim model projections are “settled science” when nobody really knows if aerosol effects cancel much of the radiative forcing.
In this case settled science is a strawman argument.
I certainly don’t claim all of the science is settled. Neither do climate scientists that I have read. It is quite the opposite.
The effects of aerosols and clouds obviously aren’t and scientists who write on those topics recognize it.
There are parts of the science that are pretty well settled. We know how the lapse rate works, we know how the radiation propagation works in clear air. I think that is a fair claim.
Eric,
It was not my intention to set up a strawman argument. My point was very sincere: politicians are in the process of setting up a cap and trade system of carbon emissions permits what will be at first moderately expensive and completely ineffective (probably the only thing James Hansen and I agree on!) but ultimately extremely expensive and draconian, all based mainly on the projections of climate models, which themselves rest in key areas on much less than certain science. The proposed cap and trade system has “for certain” substantial costs and much less than certain benefits. While I will not be around to suffer the worst of the cap and trade impacts, I am honestly concerned about the costs that will be paid for this program by the next three generations, and especially the costs for the world’s poorest.
I agree that most lapse rate issues and radiation propagation, as well as total radiative forcing effects from infrared absorbing gases (independent of feedbacks) are all pretty well understood. I think it is also fair to say we agree that the science of aerosols and clouds are not settled (as you say “It is quite the opposite”). I consider any agreement at all on substantive climate issues very positive.
Thank you for a civilized exchange.
I agree that disagreements between us lie in the area of tradeoffs between doing averting climate change, evaluation of mitigation of unfair burdens on inhabitants of regions adversely affected, and doing nothing, which must be evaluated based on imperfectly known probabilities of climate problems.
The people that do climate science are aware of this problem. It is their job to evaluate the probable consequences of different scenarios. I think they are trying to do this in a sincere and honest way. They have a huge responsibility.
http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/roundtables/the-uncertainty-climate-modeling?order=asc
I do not have the background or experience substitute my judgment for theirs, and I have more understanding than the average persons who comment here.
On the other had, I think that the majority of posters here are willing to accept any theory that will provide an outcome which dispenses with the need to do anything.
@Eric,
All evdence is now pointng to CO2 only havng a minor role in clmate, at best. The climate is non-linear, and has always had periods of warmng and cooling – the growth of CO2 has done nothng to stop this pattern.
Case for AGW has been falsified and clmatologsts need to look elsewhere for the cause of warming since the LIA. I suspect the sun and water (in all it’s forms) could be the major driver of these regular swings.
Tenuc (13:08:01) :
“@Eric,
All evdence is now pointng to CO2 only havng a minor role in clmate, at best. The climate is non-linear, and has always had periods of warmng and cooling – the growth of CO2 has done nothng to stop this pattern.
Case for AGW has been falsified and clmatologsts need to look elsewhere for the cause of warming since the LIA. I suspect the sun and water (in all it’s forms) could be the major driver of these regular swings.”
You cannot be correct. If all the evidence is pointing as you say to CO2 having a minor role at best, the overwhelming majority of scientists, 97.4% of those who research climate wouldn’t say that CO2 is a significant factor. The fact that natural fluctuations of climate exist and are strong, doesn’t mean that AGW is not an important factor over time. Tsonis and Swanson, who have studied and simulated the natural variations of climate say this.
eric:
It appears that you are the one who cannot be correct. Where did that 97.4% number come from? Since you couldn’t find 97.4% of any group agreeing that today is Friday, it is obviously a bogus number [and of course what you were trying to say is the percentage that agree CO2 is ‘significant’]. What is today’s definition of “significant”? Keep in mind that the minuscule amount of warming due to human activity is so small that it is unmeasurable.
We know the approximate percentage of human emitted CO2 versus the percentage emitted naturally. It is nothing to be concerned about.
@Eric.
Sorry Eric, perhaps my reply was not clear enough – my English not always good.
AGW is only theory and as with any theory it fails when falsified. The falsification has now happened and the logic work like this:-
GST stable since 2002 – CO2 continued to rise over the same period.
Therefore either CO2 has no effect on clmate OR some other factor was powerful enough to stop the theorised warmng effect of CO2. Either way AGW theory is now falsfied and we should be trying to find out the real causes of climate change. However, politics and vested interest wll not let this happen until carbon tax becomes reality.
Even if 99.99% of scientists believe a theory to be true, only one fact needed to falsify. Many examples of this from the past – e.g. flat earth, plate tectonics. Real science DOES NOT WORK BY CONSENSUS.
HTH.
eric (04:50:10) :
““We are not saying there is not warming due to human activity,” Tsonis told CNSNews.com”
So, eric? Neither is Lindzen. Swanson clearly has a different view from Tsonis. I doubt Swanson thinks that “we can’t say what human activity is doing”-which is not saying there is no effect. The dispute is on the magnitude. As far as I can tell, Tsonis thinks the magnitude can’t be detected with certainty, Swanson thinks it is even bigger than suggested, and Lindzen thinks it’s insignificant. Tsonis, I think, is quite honorable compared to you, saying “I don’t know”. What’s wrong with that? It’s certainly more honest than glibly certain assertions made by some…
Tenuc,
“AGW is only theory and as with any theory it fails when falsified. The falsification has now happened and the logic work like this:-
GST stable since 2002 – CO2 continued to rise over the same period.
Therefore either CO2 has no effect on clmate OR some other factor was powerful enough to stop the theorised warmng effect of CO2. Either way AGW theory is now falsfied and we should be trying to find out the real causes of climate change. However, politics and vested interest wll not let this happen until carbon tax becomes reality.”
I think your logic is wrong. Short term natural variations are strong and can cover up a long term trend like the GHE. The word stop, implying that GHG radiational forcing, and positive feedback phenomena, are no longer operative, is not the only alternative, or even the logical alternative. Other factors that change the climate could also be more dominant – ocean currents, solar minimum, and aerosol increases. Tsonis and Swanson in their paper, focus on ocean index oscillations and predict that a temporary pause in global warming will occur. However we see that El Nino is starting up again, and the cooling period may be over.
The history of recent global temperatures and the noise in the data, shows that a long term linear trend of 0.2C/decade may temporarily be overwhelmed by climate noise for a decade and more.
eric (05:18:53)
So, we’ve now had around a decade of coolng, and by admitting that other factors have over-ridded the effects of CO2 you too must agree that it has only a weak effect, at best. Theory falsified.
You predict a continuation of the warmng soon. My prediction is that it will contnue for some tme.
I think climate history is on my side (below is vague approch to climate wisdom, but detailed meaningful trends are useless in a dynamic chaotic system):-
1410-1500 cold (Sporer minimum) – Low Solar Activity(LSA)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA)
1610-1700 cold (Maunder minimum) – (LSA)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold (Dalton minimum) – (LSA)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold???) – (LSA???)
The sun and water (in all it’s forms) are likely to be the major climate drivers.
@Eric
Sorry, second paragraph should read as:-
You predict a continuation of the warmng soon. My prediction is that it will continue cooling for another decade or two.
Smokey (14:42:38) :
“eric:
“You cannot be correct. If all the evidence is pointing as you say to CO2 having a minor role at best, the overwhelming majority of scientists, 97.4% of those who research climate wouldn’t say that CO2 is a significant factor.”
It appears that you are the one who cannot be correct. Where did that 97.4% number come from? Since you couldn’t find 97.4% of any group agreeing that today is Friday, it is obviously a bogus number [and of course what you were trying to say is the percentage that agree CO2 is ‘significant’]. What is today’s definition of “significant”? Keep in mind that the minuscule amount of warming due to human activity is so small that it is unmeasurable.
We know the approximate percentage of human emitted CO2 versus the percentage emitted naturally. It is nothing to be concerned about”
Here is the reference:
http://bucksdelux.com/random/climate_change.pdfe
“1. When compared with pre-1800s
levels,
do you think that mean global temperatures
have generally risen, fallen, or
remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant
contributing factor in changing
mean global temperatures?
Results show that overall, 90% of participants
answered “risen” to question 1
and 82% answered yes to question 2. In
general, as the level of active research
and specialization in climate science
increases, so does agreement with the two
primary questions (Figure 1). In our survey,
the most specialized and knowledgeable
respondents (with regard to climate
change) are those who listed climate science
as their area of expertise and who
also have published more than 50% of
their recent peer-reviewed
papers on the
subject of climate change (79 individuals
in total). Of these specialists, 96.2%
(76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1
and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question
2”
Tenuc (11:30:06) :
“So, we’ve now had around a decade of coolng, and by admitting that other factors have over-ridded the effects of CO2 you too must agree that it has only a weak effect, at best. Theory falsified.”
I don’t know how you define weak. If the long term trend is 3 degrees/ century, and it continues, that is not weak. Over the space of a decade, it can be overwhelmed by climate noise, which has a larger amplitude, if you look at the data.
eric,
Sorry, but your link is no good.
Neither is the question it purports to answer.
Why? Because they don’t define “significant.” That is a vague, arbitrary word that means very different things to different people. It’s a weasel word. Gorons love weasel words because they can mean whatever a warmist wants them to mean.
Does significant mean >10%? >50%? Or maybe, anything above the background noise level? Or maybe even, “measurable”?
No, it couldn’t mean ‘measurable,’ because AGW has never been measured. It is only found in the fevered imagination of those programming their always wrong GCMs.
And any poll that comes up with 97.4% of respondents agreeing on something is complete bogosity. No unbiased person would believe those results.
When someone comes up with a neutral, unbiased, secret ballot poll of legitimate rank-and-file people working in the field [not self-identified like that poll is], wake me.
In the mean time, as the planet’s temperature continues to cool, and CO2 continues to rise, bogus polls are all the AGW crowd has left. They’ve been flat wrong about everything: increasing hurricanes, the ozone hole, coral bleaching, drowning polar bears, predictions of future warming, CO2=AGW, sea ice extent, fast rising sea levels, and everything else they blame on AGW. They’ve been wrong on everything.
So believe that ridiculous poll if you like. The rest of us will be listening to what planet Earth is actually telling us: CO2=AGW is a crock.
eric (11:55:36) :
I don’t know how you define weak. If the long term trend is 3 degrees/ century, and it continues, that is not weak. Over the space of a decade, it can be overwhelmed by climate noise, which has a larger amplitude, if you look at the data.
The 3 degrees/century is a fiction of the very inadequet models being used. Scientists do not have sufficient knowledge about how our climate works to model it effectivley and even if they did we don’t have sufficent data granularty or accuracy of measure to produce ‘prediction’ results. Don’t believe the consenus on AGW, it is clearly wrong, investgate and form your own opinion.
Interestingly, the climate noise you mention is the natural stuff which drives long-term climate change and is responsible for kicking it into a high or low energy state (see bottom of my previous post).
Please read up on chaos theory and you’ll fnd some surprising things about chaotic systems, like our climate, which the IPCC fails to relate. Climate is in constant change at all scales and bifurcations often occur – linear temperature trends do not exist, rather climate flips from one state to another.
Tenuc,
The climate is a chaotic system, which causes it to have a noisy behavior. It also reacts to radiative forcing factors. You are creating a false dichotomy.
The fact that you believe that AGW is not going to change the climate significantly does not amount to falsification, as you claim.
Tenuc,
“I think climate history is on my side (below is vague approch to climate wisdom, but detailed meaningful trends are useless in a dynamic chaotic system):-
1410-1500 cold (Sporer minimum) – Low Solar Activity(LSA)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA)
1610-1700 cold (Maunder minimum) – (LSA)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold (Dalton minimum) – (LSA)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold???) – (LSA???)
The sun and water (in all it’s forms) are likely to be the major climate drivers.”
You are assuming the future and present are exactly like the past. You are saying that the sun, and ocean are the only drivers of climate. First of all the ocean does not drive the climate in the same sense as the sun and other radiative forcing. The ocean stores and recirculates the energy, , but does not directly affect the heat entering or escaping the earth-atmosphere system.
AGW is a new and unprecendented mechanism, so appealing to precedent is not a valid argument.
I think one or the reasons for the climate hysteria is that the public does not distinguish between research and what Thomas Kuhn called normal science. Research is a race to be the first to publish new results that can advance science. Only after a rigorous scientific debate do theses results become part of normal science. The public is led to believe that climate change has reached the normal science level. Several alarmist blogs will evaluate a researcher according to the number of peer reviewed papers he has published. As a researcher myself, I know that a paper is normally peer-reviewed by only three to four scientists which are chosen by the editor. By examing how the IPCC reports have evolved with time we can see that the science on climate change is not settled. For example, prior to 2001, a medieval warming was shown in the IPCC reports for the temperature history curves. Then in 2001 the medieval warming disapeared (Mann hockey stick graph) only to reappear in the IPCC 2007 report. The climate models significantly overpredict the global temperature. The public does not appreciate the uncertainty in the numerical models and the concept that the influence of CO2 on temperature is obtained indirectly through adjustable parameters (radiative forcings). I work in a goverment lab which distributes funds and performs research on the effects of CO2 on forests and wildlife. We also investigate methods of sequestring CO2. None of my colleagues who work on climate change show the hysteria which is observed in the media. They generally cite the IPCC reports as their premise for assuming that climate change is mostly anthropogenic. I think the public needs to understand that climate change is still a research topic as so well described by Richard Lindzen.
Raymond .
Well said!!!