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).
…
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
Tl1xtor (03:00:29) :
MODERATORS!!!
I just sent Climate Justice a little note asking them to get their lawyers on the stick:
It has come to my attention that global temperatures have stalled with CO2 rising and that the head of the IPCC says we will be cooling until 2020. Can’t something be done to get temperatures rising again and to silence the head of the IPCC? Everything we have worked for is in jeopardy if something isn’t done soon.
I also note that India plans to keep building coal fired plants no matter what and that China is not slowing down either. You need to sue those countries until they get on the bandwagon. If something is not done very soon the deniers will be in control everywhere.
==
Heh.
Sam Vilain (20:06:22) :
Anthony why on earth do you reprint this rubbish.
One idiot’s “rubbish” is the thinking person’s treasure.
I don’t know who approved the comment by Tl1xtor (03:00:29) but he/she needs to go to moderator re-education camp.
@ur momisugly savethesharks (19:58:39) : Perhaps, but I wouldn’t bet money on it.
Even Newton had to toe the line to some degree. He was an accomplished politician as well as a scientist, and knew which side his bread was buttered on. He was elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. In that day, any fellow of Cambridge or Oxford had to be an ordained Anglican priest. However, the terms of the Lucasian professorship required that the holder not be active in the church (presumably so as to have more time for science). Newton argued that this should exempt him from the ordination requirement, and Charles II, whose permission was needed, accepted this argument. In April 1705 Queen Anne knighted Newton during a royal visit to Trinity College, Cambridge. The knighthood is likely to have been motivated by political considerations connected with the Parliamentary election in May 1705, rather than any recognition of Newton’s scientific work or services as Master of the Mint.
So it was also with other greats, such as Galileo, Da Vinci, Aristotle, Copernicus, Einstein, etc. A scientist ignores the political realities at the risk of his/her reputation, and in some cases, their life.
Tl1xtor (03:00:29)
It appears that either Anthony’s firewall has a hole (doubtful), or that a moderator was a bit too quick on the “approve” button?
I’m only lashing out because that post got approved before mine ;*)
JimB
What’s with the post at 03:00:29? The snipper broke?
Reply: All comments are moderated, and spam is normally caught by a filter and manually scanned – at which point it is either approved (some legitimate posts can be caught by the filter) or deleted. It is likely one of the moderators accidentally approved it while doing a bulk approve from the filtered posts.
Thanks for catching it – John
“The problem is that reason and fact have been, and always will be, bent to the wishes of those in power or who want power.”
Aldous Huxley wrote:
“Surely it’s obvious.
Doesn’t every schoolboy know it?
Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man’s.
Papio’s procurer, bursar to baboons,
Reason comes running, eager to ratify;
Comes, a catch-fart, with Philosophy, truckling to tyrants;
Comes, a pimp for Prussia, with Hegel’s Patent History”
My favourite quote from the paper.
“Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever present climate change is no substitute for prudence. ”
Exercising sound judgement in matters of science seems to be a quality lacking in some scientific groups today.
What we see on WUWT and many other sites is what we know to be true but as long as the media persist in believing or at least publishing or showing every press release or claim made by some graduate who has completed his PhD on climate change or a longer established ‘scientist’ whose grant is due,then there seems little chance that the real truth is liable to be more widely accepted. One of the main reasons, as Lindzen says, is that Co2 is a dream come true for bureaucrats.
It is a depressing fact that I have friends whose sole knowledge on climate change is what they know from the BBC or the press.
“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.”
I hate to be a party pooper, but the way I read this statement by Lindzen indicatres that he is missing the target, and in the process also setting up a sort of strqwman that the rest of the essay is devoted to knocking down. My impression from viewing the Gore movie was certainly not that he was voicing concern about an increase of a few tenths of a degree other than to point out that this was a portent of disaster to come. There may be alarmists out there who are advocating a steady climate for its own merits, but I have not encountered their writings yet. In short, I think that Lindzen very unfortunateely got off on the wrong foot. Or maybe I am reading something in to the essay or misinterpreting what he is saying.
Bob D (00:58:09)
I had a look at your exchanges with Mr Vilain. He seems like a strange individual and very like my favourite troll, the one who calls himself dhogaza.
Funny – I’m a geologist too and I have also seen the same evidence which Dr Naish has seen in the field; i.e., that the earth’s climate has always changed and oftern very rapidly, but I came to the conclusion that it’s not our fault this time. It certainly wasn’t before.
This actually belongs and is on the ““Surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean” thread. I am posting it here because the other thread has grown cold and there has been a new development on it from Lucia.
Lucia proved that the difference method does include the trend. I looked back at regular derivatives. If you take the derivative of a linear term, e.g. 3x, you get 3, so the information is still in the first derivative. The derivative of a constant WRT x is zero. But a linear trend is just that, a linear function of x.
Thanks to Lucia!
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/that-soi-paper-climate-change-worse-than-we-thought/
Reading the words “climate” and “justice” together makes me shiver.
I hope we don’t end up like Servetus or Galilei.
Eppur si muove.
page48 (22:22:57) : “I really like Richard Lindzen and appreciate his efforts. However, I wish he would stop insulting the public. It wasn’t the public who started the scare-mongering about climate and it isn’t the public, in general, that propagates it. It is the climate scientists.”
I disagree with that. I was (semi) concious in the 70s when the environmental movement was getting up to steam. Those are the people who have put us in the mess more than any other group. Environmentalists are ruining the country in the name of saving the planet. They need to be singled out for derision.v (And no, this does not mean I don’t want to take care of air and water and forests – I like having them around.)
papertiger – if it were “climate change” opponents who’d taken that money, that item would make headlines across the country, and almost assuredly make the front page of the NYT.
But since the ones taking the money were “morally pure” AGW proponents and Big Government proponents, I guarantee you will never hear another word about this story in any MSM outlet. It will be censored and forgotten – it doesn’t fit the political narrative they are sworn to sell.
Just watch and see.
Game changer? Not a chance. No one will see it unless there is some underground movement to get the word out.
C Colenaty (05:44:49) :”Or maybe I am reading something in to the essay or misinterpreting what he [Lindzen] is saying.”
Thanks for that disclaimer…because I agree with you on that count….that you are reading something in to what he was saying.
There is no “strawman” in his essay…at all. It’s tighter than a drum.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
C Colenaty (05:44:49) : It is you who missed the target.
Curiousgeorge (05:05:46) : “So it was also with other greats, such as Galileo, Da Vinci, Aristotle, Copernicus, Einstein, etc. A scientist ignores the political realities at the risk of his/her reputation, and in some cases, their life.”
Thanks for that bit of history, Curious George. And I am not inclined to disagree at all with the above summation.
But in spite of the fact that so many people are cattle and they will follow anything, to expound a bit: the REAL problem is that the leaders who still run this world [and thus lead the cattle]: STILL ain’t that bright.
I won’t name any names….
georgebushbarackobamakarlrovealgorejohnholdrenjohnashcroftjameshansen etc. ad nauseum.
The more and more normal, sane, and yes, just plain ole middle class people I talk to, the LESS they buy the bills of goods they are being fed.
And given the “leaders” we have in the world today and the bastardization of science to a degree not seen in our lifetimes…all the joe and jane average citizens out there SHOULD be cynical and mistrustful.
That is what I was saying that we are on the cusp where we could, with the right “upper and mid level support” [heh heh for all you weather fiends out there] evolve in a way which will be positive for our species and for the planet.
If not….then we will of course….devolve.
But I remain optimistic….as long as there are scientists like Professor Lindzen using his position for the good and calling it like it is…and as long as there are places like Wattsupwiththat.com to help proliferate the free flow of information and the truth.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Geoff Sherrington (20:03:58) : Are you suggesting that, somehow, those aliens managed before dying, to transmigrate to those then recent born babies?
Who knows!…some look older even when subjected to cosmetic surgery.
It is interesting to read this piece and the comments. There is only on comment that takes issue with Lindzen’s piece. This shows how the internet is working against a real dialog between people of opposing views. People come here to affirm their views, rather than to understand the issue of climate change.
I am appalled that a prestigious scientist such as Lindzen can make such illogical arguments, and misrepresent the scientific theory that supports AGW.
C Colenaty (05:44:49)
has it right, when he says,
“I hate to be a party pooper, but the way I read this statement by Lindzen indicatres that he is missing the target, and in the process also setting up a sort of strqwman that the rest of the essay is devoted to knocking down. My impression from viewing the Gore movie was certainly not that he was voicing concern about an increase of a few tenths of a degree other than to point out that this was a portent of disaster to come. There may be alarmists out there who are advocating a steady climate for its own merits, but I have not encountered their writings yet. In short, I think that Lindzen very unfortunateely got off on the wrong foot. Or maybe I am reading something in to the essay or misinterpreting what he is saying.”
In fact the idea of AGW is 100 years old, is based on radiation physics and the temperture dependence of the vapor pressure of water. The other factors that determine climate are also observed and modeled to determine their impact. The theory was developed well before the warming trend of the last 35 years became evident. The science did not originate with environmentalists or politicians at all.
As a matter of fact, climate change has the opposite characteristics of an issue attractive to politicians. A concrete clear threat like terrorism is a great political issue. Nobody really has seen climate change, and most people are skeptical that humans can alter climate. This makes it a poor issue for winning elections and staying in office.
What I cannot understand is this statement:
The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface
1. How does heat get into deep ocean layers whithout heating the intervening layers? UV??
2. How does heat lurk in deep layers for many years without finding the need to obey physical properties of liquids and rise to the surface?
3. All ocean currents seem to rely on the more normal hot water running along the top, getting cold at the pole and running back along the bottom.
4. Is lindzen proposing a new form of water – heavier when hot? until it leeps upwards every so often to heat the world.
Confused – I am!
For the modellers, I have found a bargain:
Retailers whose PRINCIPAL business is Second Hand Models.
http://www.ukmodelshops.co.uk/counties/modelShops
The referenced article:
A new dynamical mechanism for major 1 climate shifts.
Anastasios A. Tsonis, Kyle Swanson, & Sergey Kravtsov
http://www.uwm.edu/~kravtsov/downloads/GRL-Tsonis.pdf
There is a great series in the Financial Post written by Lawrence Soloman concerning the monies behind the “Climate Change” brouhaha. Here is the one that explains the Enron reference, a great read as is the entire series!
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/05/30/lawrence-solomon-enron-s-other-secret.aspx