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
savethesharks (06:54:44) :
the REAL problem is that the leaders who still run this world [and thus lead the cattle]: STILL ain’t that bright.
Some turned the world order upside down more than two hundred years ago, giving power to the unfitted.
The problem with all of this enlightenment is that facts don’t matter to people who only want power. If it’s not AGW it will be some new “manufactured” crisis. Hang on folks, as Obama’s poll numbers keep dropping there certainly will be some new, even more serious diversion. Hopefully they won’t trump up some new crisis with very serious but unforeseen consequences.
bill (07:22:53) :
What I cannot understand is this statement:
The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface
I am sure he meant “energy” instead.
BTW, they are many possible kinds of water, nobel prize winner chemist Linus Pauling presented 5 of them before the Royal Society, many years ago.
eric (07:20:09) : “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.”
We have heard all this BS before. The climate models do not accurately model climate – the fact that the idea of greenhouse gas warming has been around over 100 years is irrelevant. The fact is that Earth’s climate is complex, is not well understood, and depends on more that ONLY radiative physics. Even most of the climate modelers will tell you that the action of clouds is not well understood or accounted for. I would say you are full of it.
bill (07:22:53) :
“1. How does heat get into deep ocean layers whithout heating the intervening layers? UV??”
Heat gets into the ocean at the surface, water evaporates making the salinity along with the density increase. The hot water eventually gets dense enough to sink.
“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?”
See answer to #1.
“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.”
See answer to #1.
“4.Is lindzen proposing a new form of water – heavier when hot? until it leeps upwards every so often to heat the world.”
See answer to #1.
I would like to ask for some help please.
In an article in ‘The Observer’ (UK Newspaper) yesterday by Suzanne Goldenberg and Damien Carrington they said (about the Arctic):
‘More than a million square kilometers of sea ice – a record loss – were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year. Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse’
On 9th July 2009 Geoffrey Lean in the UK Telegraph
‘In September 2007, the Arctic ice cap shrank by a massive 200,000 square miles below its previous smallest extent, something not expected, even with global warming, before 2050. Last year was little better, and so far this year is much the same’
I think from what I have read elsewhere that these statements (which sound very similar) are not true. Please can someone give me some facts and figures as to the truth of this matter? The quotes are so similar that I suspect they come from the same source. Does anyone know what that might be?
The links to the articles are as follows;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/26/climate-change-obama-administration
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/geoffrey-lean/5789961/Can-Barack-Obama-save-us-from-hell.html
Thanks
Alan Haile
London UK
COLA is showing again some pretty cool weather across the USA for the next weeks
And what story was featured on one of the evening news channels yesterday? Drought in Texas with an incredible heat wave. Crops ruined.
Earth bears scars of human destruction: astronaut
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_space_shuttle
“This is probably just a perception, but I just have the feeling that the glaciers are melting, the snow capping the mountains is less than it was 12 years ago when I saw it last time,” Thrisk said. “That saddens me a little bit.”
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
WOW, July must be really hot….can’t wait to see these numbers when they come out.
It’s been record cool here in Ky for July
All of this is very interesting.
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?
Salinity variations. You can use a pond with high salinity water on top as a solar collector. The delta Ts can get pretty large if the pond has an absorbing bottom.
Meanwhile, the NOAA is putting out GOOD stuff on forecasting using statistical models (if conditions were thus in the past and then A happens, it should happen again when those same conditions occur). The LIM model is considered to be the most reliable. See the following paper.
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/michael.alexander/alexander.el_al.revised.j_climate.5-07.pdf
The current LIM forecast for ENSO is neutral and then slightly negative through the winter. While the dynamical models indicate an El Nino event this winter, these models are in their infancy. The statistical models are older and have a longer track record. The LIM model is the one to watch in my opinion.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
eric:
Your charge that Lindzen makes “such illogical arguments, and misrepresent(s) the scientific theory that supports AGW” needs a little more support to be taken seriously. Can you elaborate?
Your point that this site is dominated by skeptics is true, but then RC is dominated by AGWers. The polarization is natural, though it may be somewhat unhelpful for a useful dialogue.
not a comment but do you accept advertising?
I have a book published about ‘Climate change’ which comes from a Christian perspective (but is NOT ‘recent creationism’). It is called “While the Earth Endures: creation, cosmology and climate change” by Philip Foster and a foreword by Prof David Bellamy OBE. It has had one or two helpful endorsements, including one from Vaclav Klaus. Brief details of book on Website.
Bill, he didn’t specify the direction. Somewhat deceptive phrasing I’ll admit. And he may have been speaking in the strict definition of “heat”, ie: “a form of energy”. It could have been made clearer, and it may be worthwhile to ask him to clarify what he said.
bill (07:22:53) :
Confused you are.
The new form of water that Dr. Lindzen is proposing is salt water.
The density of the salt water in the ocean is a function of salinity and temperature.
Yes indeed warmer water with high salinity can settle below cold, less saline water.
Probably not new news to most but from today’s UK Daily Telegraph a postive effect of climate change in the Middle Ages. In South America and during the MWP.
Isn’t it an alarmist “fact” that the MWP was only a Northern Hemisphere phenomenon ? I know that CO2 Science has details of many hundreds of studies that disprove that very important part of the alarmist story.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/5916353/Climate-change-helped-the-Incas-build-civilisation.html
CC says:
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.
Well of course. And the rise of temperature in my neighborhood yesterday was about 25F from 3 AM to 3 PM. Portent of disaster to come or natural variation? Only the models know for sure. I’ll ask Louisa Lockhart and get her opinion. Her natural variations are rather spectacular so I’m sure her opinion would be given suitable weight. Given that her deviations are well beyond standard I’m sure we can impute considerable significance to them.
Seriously. The IPCC say that with CO2 rising we are going to be in a cooling phase until 2020. Evidently CO2 is not as forcing as it once was.
Eric “The theory was developed well before the warming trend of the last 35 years became evident.”
HUH??? And the “warming trend” [of the last 35 years] has been well-developed and around longer than the “theory” of AGW.
Its called the recovery from the Little Ice Age.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
This piece makes it difficult to take Lindzen seriously. For example, he says:
In fact, tropical tropospheric amplification is not “a distinct signature to greenhouse warming”. It is a consequence of the fact that the vertical temperature structure of the tropical troposphere is closely pegged to the moist adiabatic lapse rate. The prediction of this amplification by climate models occurs whether you force them with increasing greenhouse gases or with increasing solar irradiance ( http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/ ). [The significant difference that you see in the vertical structure for these two forcings is that the solar forcing results in warming of the stratosphere whereas greenhouse gas forcing results in cooling of the stratosphere. Cooling is what is actually observed.]
His further argument about modifying the data is silly: It is well-known that there are extreme data quality issues when trying to pull out the multidecadal trend in the tropical troposphere. For example, the two major satellite data analyses (UAH and RSS) don’t agree well with each other. And, the radiosonde data has known artifacts in these multidecadal trends. Furthermore, it is notable that over a fairly broad range of timescales (months to several years), fluctuations in temperature do seem to obey tropical tropospheric amplification. Since these results are insensitive to the sort of artifacts that infect multidecadal trends, you have a situation where the best data seems to be in basic agreement with the theory…and it is only the most unreliable data that seems to be in disagreement.
But, at any rate, the extent of agreement or disagreement does not tell us anything about the mechanism causing the warming. (It does tell us something about how well the models are treating the convective and other processes in the tropical atmosphere…but only to the extent that the data are reliable enough.)
Hmmmm!
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?
Jim (07:42:44) :
Heat gets into the ocean at the surface, water evaporates making the salinity along with the density increase. The hot water eventually gets dense enough to sink.
M. Simon (07:53:55) :
Salinity variations. You can use a pond with high salinity water on top as a solar collector. The delta Ts can get pretty large if the pond has an absorbing bottom.
Does salt water sink or rise?
Well, I would go with sink in a non static ocean.
So hot water becomes salty and sinks. But then it must pass though cold water and would therefore share the heat making lower layers warm.
So yet another property of salt water must be tunneling. Hot water tunnels through the cold layers and remains hot.
Curiousgeorge (08:01:45) :
Bill, he didn’t specify the direction. Somewhat deceptive phrasing I’ll admit. And he may have been speaking in the strict definition of “heat”, ie: “a form of energy”. It could have been made clearer, and it may be worthwhile to ask him to clarify what he said.
So possibly the sea surface gets warm and therefore the more energetic molecules (zipping around in joyous warmth) dive through the lethargic cold molecules underneath and form a splendid hyped up layer of h20 molecules feeling energetic in the depths of the ocean. Here they stay in this blissful energetic state until some time later they go for the surface delivering the energy back to the atmosphere.
So what’s the physics behind this then?
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 idea of phlogiston is even older. Doesn’t mean it is correct. There are lots of old ideas that do not match the data. There are even new ideas that do not match the data.
Maurice Garoutte (08:04:32) :
But how did the warm water get below the cold without makingthe cold warm?
hehe,
“Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for ‘saving’ the earth.”
So 97% of climatologists are part of a major government conspiracy involving all western governments. A conspiracy that has been perpetuated across several terms of office involving different parties. The single bastion of truth is a professor completely untainted by the massive amount of consultancy money he receives from oil companies.
It does seem likely.
Eric “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.”
You are not distinguishing between two separate issues here: The Greenhouse Effect, and Anthropogenic Global Warming. But you should.
The former no reasonable person would disagree with….and I’m glad you mention the BIG player in the Greenhouse Effect: water vapor!!
The latter…..well…perhaps that is best covered by your next quote:
“The other factors that determine climate are also observed and modeled to determine their impact.”
Such as the many failed climate model extrapolations….too many to count…LOL
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
“As a matter of fact, climate change has the opposite characteristics of an issue attractive to politicians.”
HUH? What planet do you live on?? May I remind you of the last American presidential election where BOTH presidential candidates made it a big-ticket item.
And to this day, the one elected into power uses it to advance HUGE political pressure [and seedy shady calculated economic gains through cap and trade].
Al Gore is the new Dick Cheney. Same —-, different administration, different content, but SAME end result:
ILL-GOTTEN $$$ for cronies at the expense of the American People.
So your comments are completely 180 degrees off base.