From Globalwarming.org
Yesterday the Cooler Heads Coalition hosted Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Video of Dr. Lindzen’s presentation, “Deconstructing Global Warming,” will be available shortly, but his power point presentation is online now. (see below)
His presentation is both technical and entertaining at the same time.It is well worth your time to read.
Here is the Dr. Lindzen’s preface:
Why do we need to deconstruct global warming? Simply because it has been an issue that has been routinely treated with misinformation and sophistry abetted by constant repetition, institutional endorsements, and widespread ignorance even (perhaps especially) among the educated. Because of the increasingly dangerous and expensive approaches being promoted to deal with this alleged problem, it is, I think, important to understand what is being said as well as to understand how climate actually works.
I will begin with a few items that illustrate how this issue has been manipulated, and how, to a great extent, global warming has been merely a device for implementing broader agendas. I will then continue with an emphasis on the science.
From the 1970’s, there was a general feeling that ‘climate change’ would be an excellent vehicle for a variety of agendas. People openly espousing this included Bert Bolin, who was an adviser to the Swedish prime minister, and later the first head of the IPCC.
Once the global issue emerged on the public scene, two cooperating institutions were formed in the 1990’s with interlocking leadership: The Tyndall Centre for Climate Studies at the University of East Anglia, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The latter is headed by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and the former by Michael Hulme. These institutions epitomize the exploitation of the climate issue. Their members constitute numerous participants in the IPCC.
Recently, Hulme came out with an interesting book.
Read Dr. Lindzen’s entire presentation here (PDF)
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Phillip Bratby (00:42:08) :
I assume “in due course” coincides with the end of the Copenhagen love in?
Had this been a sexually or other wise unacceptable commercial it would have been yanked within a week or day… but you get the political BS run around.
O_o you are in trouble, because this correspondence was to be treated as confidential… what’s the betting they go after you instead of the Government?
Patrick Davis (22:43:33)
There are a few caveats in that article – even as to question whether there is a tipping point for the Arctic, or whether the temperature is going to increase, and even whether the Arctic sea responds uniformly to climate change.
elsewhere on their site, they make an awful lot of uncertainties, more so than what they think is certain.
Despite what we hear, there is a lot of world class talent in the Met Office.
Anyway a special thanks to Dr Lindzen
O, my bad. SW reflection actually lowers when SST hightens.
Dr. Lindzen’s paper is now uploaded in our website, http://www.minimalgovernment.net. My 2 papers on AGW and Global cooling are also posted there. Many of the charts that I showed in my 2 papers are taken from WUWT, source properly quoted and cited. The charts are very useful in mesmerizing my audience, some of whom would otherwise insist that AGW is correct. Keep up the good work!
I love this part of the presentation:
“THE ARCTIC OCEAN IS WARMING UP, ICEBERGS ARE GROWING SCARCER AND IN SOME PLACES THE SEALS ARE FINDING THE WATER TOO HOT. REPORTS ALL POINT TO A RADICAL CHANGE IN CLIMATE CONDITIONS AND HITHERTO UNHEARD-OF TEMPERATURES IN THE ARCTIC ZONE. EXPEDITIONS REPORT THAT SCARCELY ANY ICE HAS BEEN MET WITH AS FAR NORTH AS 81 DEGREES 29 MINUTES. GREAT MASSES OF ICE HAVE BEEN REPLACED BY MORAINES OF EARTH AND STONES, WHILE AT MANY POINTS WELL KNOWN GLACIERS HAVE ENTIRELY DISAPPEARED.”
—US WEATHER BUREAU, 1922
Looks like the Arctic will be ice free by 1930.
Sandy (02:57:28) :
“The idea of ‘positive feedback’ from the human-produced 100ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere should appear farcical to any reasonably rational person.”
—————————————————————–
Atmospheric water vapour increased since 1988, cannot this be seen as evidence of feedback starting to occur?
“Data from the satellite-based Special Sensor Microwave Imager
(SSM/I) show that the total atmospheric moisture content over
oceans has increased by 0.41 kg/m2 per decade since 1988. Results
from current climate models indicate that water vapor increases of
this magnitude cannot be explained by climate noise alone”
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/39/15248.full.pdf
John Barrett (02:52:06) :
In the “news story” linked by Gregg E (22:09) there is a quote :
“To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford.
I am stunned into disbelieving silence. Who is this guy ?
————————————————-
The main source for the chapter on climate change in the new book superfreakanomics.
🙂 glad to help.
Wow, unless he can be caught out on the calculations somehow, that report looks pretty damning for the AGW cause, particularly considering that this is observed data, not modelled. And so simple, even I can understand it, energy of light in – energy of heat out = what is retained (trapped).
Were starting to get some media play here in Australia – interviews with Monckton on the radio, Lindzen mentione din the interview, opinion articles in the mainline press. Have linked all here;
http://twawki.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/one-faith-to-rule-them-all/
What’s more scary?
1) Global warming
or
2) You are a monkey and you live on a planet.
or
3) You are a monkey and you live on a planet with other monkeys
2 + 3 are far too scary, so the educated classes choose 1
“Phillip Bratby (00:42:08) : ”
Phillip, that appears to be a standard response from the ASA I’ve seen in other bloggers posts, but the volume of complaints seem to have caught their ear.
anna v (22:42:48) : “Then the east and west coast intelligencia will be left without scientist support for its delusions.”
That never stopped them before.
Rob Vermeulen (00:31:19) : ” I really, really can’t see how it disproves the rest and especially the existence of a globally positive feedback…”
It seems to me that Dr Lindzen was demonstrating that the models do not match real world results and are therefore not an acceptable basis for a theory yet that theory is treated as proven fact.
4 billion (03:55:40) :
“The idea of ‘positive feedback’ from the human-produced 100ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere should appear farcical to any reasonably rational person.”
I think sandy was correct 10 ppm man made co2 3% of co2 not 30% 100ppm
Sandy (02:57:28) : “The idea of ‘positive feedback’ from the human-produced 100ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere should appear farcical to any reasonably rational person.”
4 billion (03:55:40) : Atmospheric water vapour increased since 1988, cannot this be seen as evidence of feedback starting to occur?
Atmospheric water content has been going down for at least 60 years:
http://i38.tinypic.com/30bedtg.jpg
peeke: there MIGHT be such a form of feedback, but we actually haave no idea, do we? At least, Lindzen shows no sign of such type of regulation neither does he even mention it.
Sandy: I beg to differ on this one. The effects of a positive feedback can only be observed typiically after some treshlod has been exceeded.
Many thanks for posting this. I look forward to seeing him in the video.
I heard him not too long ago on the Howie Carr Show here in Boston. The nice thing about Lindzen is that he has a great sense of humor which is an enormously pleasant change from the dour humorlessness of the hand wringing, sanctimonious, left liberal chicken littles that seem to gather in large numbers on the East and West Coasts.
In the general public’s mind this whole thing has degenerated into a playground shoving match: “Yes it is, No it isn’t, ………”
The problem is that such shoving matches tend to evolve into gang fights with guns, knives, etc.
I fully expect to see the argument turn violent in the not too distant future, and not just between individuals, but between and within countries. The politically powerful alarmists (not the man on the street alarmist), as evidenced by their commitment to use climate for political agendas, will not “go quietly into the night”. They are far too invested in their political goals to give up now.
They WILL force the issue.
The only question is the level of commitment to the fight by those who value freedom.
The most committed will win.
4 billion
” Results from current climate models indicate that water vapor increases of
this magnitude cannot be explained by climate noise alone”
Where to start?
Climate noise is an unknown quantity since we can’t even measure global temperature now merely concentrating on convenient continents and ignoring the rest.
The assumption that the result is significant relies on the idea that their model is right (because they understand ALL the interactions in our real system).
So the facts are they made an incompetent model that doesn’t fit observations, then dressed it in faulty logic.
They call themselves ‘scientists’ but I have higher standards and these people are an insult to real seekers of Nature’s Truths, like Leif says ;).
dorlomin (04:00:50),
I was going to buy Superfreakonomics yesterday, but in scanning it in the bookstore I noticed the author claims that CO2 persistence in the atmosphere is on the order of a century.
This is completely wrong, as was proved by carbon isotopes tracked following the above ground nuclear tests in the 1950’s. The actual persistence is less than 10 years. Only the IPCC claims extraordinary CO2 persistence, [and as we know the IPCC is composed entirely of political appointees].
The lower CO2 residence time indicates negative feedback, and falsifies another AGW claim. If the IPCC is so off-base regarding a basic tenet of AGW, how can anyone believe they are credible? No peer reviewed paper comes anywhere close to the IPCC’s outlandish and unsupportable claims.
So I didn’t buy the book after all. But I did notice that the author took a skeptical position regarding AGW despite the CO2 persistence error. My question now is: why don’t you regard the IPCC skeptically? They have been shown to be in error in every assessment report.
The IPCC is completely wrong regarding their claim of a high climate sensitivity number. As Prof Lindzen concludes, the climate sensitivity is about 0.5. That is a very un-alarming number because it indicates that there is nothing to worry about. With a sensitivity of only 0.5, runaway global warming is impossible because the climate has very little sensitivity to CO2.
That being the case, there are much more pressing needs for the $Trillions proposed to be spent on the AGW non-problem. Scientists in every other field should be demanding that AGW studies and mitigation must be de-funded, and the savings put into areas that produce actual benefits.
The quotes from Hulme are rather illuminating.
For him, truth and honesty are road bumps on the way to climate utopia.
For Rob Vermuelen, who wrote:
“I really, really can’t see how it disproves the rest and especially the existence of a globally positive feedback.”
Others have answered this question more technically, but let me put it in terms that make sense to me and which I think make the point easily comprehensible.
All of the claims of catastrophic climate damage are dependant on positive feedback happening throughout the climate system. Any part of this which actually operates with negative feedback will act as a damper on the entire system, thus invalidating the “tipping point” hypothesis. It isn’t necessary to prove that all of the feedback is negative; Lindzen simply needs to prove that a significant amount of the feedback is negative and he’s destroyed the alarmist’s case.
A previous poster used friction as an example of negative feedback; think “brakes”. If the system has automatic brakes, then there’s no need to worry about it turning into a runaway train.
Common sense alone would tell us this is the case – if the earth didn’t have significant negative feedback systems which function to always return it to a stable mean, it would have reached any theoretical “tipping point” long ago. On that topic, it does look like the Earth has reached a global cooling “tipping point” several times within the last 4 million years, but never a warming one.
I am bothered by the Anthropic explanation given for the measured steady increase in atmospheric CO2. I am also concerned that the argument for AGW hangs on the idea that the ‘lifetime’ of added CO2 in the atmosphere, is very long. If it were found to be shorter, then the AGW explanation is in trouble.
So
4 billion (03:55:40) :
Your comment
“Data from the satellite-based Special Sensor Microwave Imager
(SSM/I) show that the total atmospheric moisture content over
oceans has increased by 0.41 kg/m2 per decade since 1988 ” interested me.
As I understand it there is a tremendous interaction of CO2 coming in and out of solution with the cycling between the temperatures and phases that atmospheric H20 undergoes. And, I wonder whether this measured increase in atmospheric H20 co-relates in some way with the measured increase in atmospheric CO2 that we see.
Then as we know there is an annual cycle to be seen in the CO2 measurements, and we are told that this reflects the plant growth cycle. But as we knbow plants , when the growing season stoipis, don’t just decompose within weeks to re-release their sequestered Co2 straight into the atmosphere. So is there another explanation that this cycling could really be a function of changes in summer/winter atmospheric H20?
Then the idea that the ratio of C isotopes in the atmosphere will give an anthropic signature, could be complicated by the many cycles of absorbtion/release of CO2 by atmospheric H20 giving a kind of distillation effect favouring the accumulation of the lighter isotopes?
Gregg E. (22:09:04) :
Here’s the latest broadside from the cult of AGW.
http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.yahoo.com%2Fs%2Fap%2F20091026%2Fap_on_sc%2Fus_sci_global_cooling
Have at it.
Your wish is my command.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Whether the goose if frozen or fried, it makes no difference, if it is already dead. Problem is, both are still alive.
The thing works both ways. If the skeptical take is wrong, warmist selection is perilous, for it’s the latter that seek global alteration, not the skeptic. That’s the problem. The Earth was warming, and now is cooling, and it’s not precisely known why. This isn’t the 1st time the guess was wrong. It was wrong in the 70’s, and was caught looking then, too.
i.e. – until we know how the climate works, predicting it is fraught with error. There is a catch, however.
Copenhagen need do nothing more than flip a coin and prepare for the coming consequences of a warming or cooling Earth. They have an equally good chance of getting it right or wrong. They will either succeed in saving the Planet (if it is even in danger), or destroying it if it is not. Except for, perhaps, Murphy’s Law, and the frightful price they are willing to exact to force mass redistribution plus endangerment of political and military power balances. The coin at Copenhagen, however has two tails, and the odds of getting it right are now 25%.
Here’s the thing:
The world is little different today than it was 2000 years ago. Given an opportunity, what self-respecting power would not jump at the chance to seize the reins of the world while thier opponents shoot themselves in both feet and blow off both kneecaps In Search of Utopian Fantasy?
This is what tips the balance of outcome at Copenhagen. No matter the ecological outcome, the fall of the West is almost guaranteed, should they suceed in implementing both economic and political change concurrently.
Into the vacuum pours chaos.
20,000 delusionals meet across the sea.
And that is why 2 wrongs don’t make a right. It’s wrong to gamble at massive alteration of whole civilizations, and it’s wrong to do it blindfolded.
History teaches us that adaptation is the best thing humans have going for them. I see no reason to abandon it in favor of outright hysteria.
The IPCC’s argument that ‘we can’t explain the warming of the late 20th century any other way’ is similar to reasoning that brought about Greek and Roman mythology. The ancients created gods to explain the changing weather and climate that they could not explain any other way. Both the AGW argument and the ancient gods were created from ignorance, but only the AGW argument was created from willful ignorance.
Natural pattern recognition in climate change is a theory that fits the available data at all time scales, not just the late 20th century (like the CO2 argument). Not only is ‘natural pattern recognition’ a different explanation for most of the warming of the late 20th century, but it is a much more robust explanation. It is taking a tremendous effort by the mainstream science authorities to ignore it.
All of this reminds me of the pop band Devo. From Wiki: “The name “Devo” comes “from their concept of ‘de-evolution’ – the idea that instead of evolving, mankind has actually regressed, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society.” (Substitute ‘science’ for ‘American society’.)
Then whip it! Whip it good!
What a Faustian bargain Susan Hockfield, President of MIT, has made. In the past I have watched her get up on stage with Immelt, Head of GE, and discuss clean energy. Now she has chosen to completely ignore her own eminent MIT climate expert and instead to tell outright lies ostensibly in order to share the stage with the President of the United States.
Science has become completely subservient to political will and the greedy corrupt business of seeking grants and power.
A very very sad day for MIT. I feel so sorry for Susan, who at some point made the Faustian Bargain to agree to tell lies (ignoring established Science and Fact) in order to seek power for herself and no doubts with a noble cause in mind: more funding for MIT.
I am so very very glad I went to an eminent Canadian University to study Engineering Physics (including atmospheric physics) and did not go to MIT. This supression of science and fact in order to achieve political agendas and generate funding is very simply, white collar corruption.