Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted.
A commentary by Richard S. Lindzen in the WSJ
Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.
Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.
The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%.
The defining characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun but can absorb portions of thermal radiation. In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming.
That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth’s atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let’s refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called “climate forcing.”
The full article may be found here.
mikey (00:17:05) :
Be specific. If you’ve got something, spit it out. If not, don’t pretend you do.
D.King;
Actually I was asking the questions for real.
I understand full well that it is not Global Warming that is in dispute, rather it is the pseudo-science that people somehow are the cause or that CO2 is a pre-cursor.
Where I live it was once a few miles thick of ice. It has become much warmer than that now, it will get warmer still. It will melt the ice caps, the ocean currents will change. Then it will start too cool down, the ice caps will freeze and North America will again be covered with mile thick layers of ice all the way down to Wisconsin. Then it will all happen again, and again and again until the Sun envelopes the Earth and collapses back into a dark star.
There is noting that we can do to prevent it, it would happen with or without humans on the planet.
At any point of time we are either leaving an ice age or moving into one. Right now it looks like we are still leaving the last one.
It is normal, OK?
I’m not a climatologist.
I just thought that someone here might have a simple explanation.
Here’s my taske on the situation:
Anthropogenic Global Warming Virus Alert.
http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s5i64103
Keith G (00:03:54) :
UPDATE – I see now that the English is a very expanded version of the German, so it contains a lot more, and some parts of the German aren’t there, others rearranged.
I am also having trouble following some of what they are saying. I understand what they mean, but am not clear on how they got there. I also need to go trough it more thoroughly.
“Y’all contribute verses, now, y’hear?”
In a cavern, in a canyon
Resting on the rocky floor
Lots of lost and hidden emails
And the missing data raw
Refrain !
Y’all contribute a verse, now, y’hear?
Dr Phil he’s
Very silly,
Says the data
He can hide,
But a dude with clout
Let the data out,
Now it’s spreading
Far and wide!
Yonason,
Yes I’ll be specific. I’m referring to his sceptism on the link between tobacco and cancer. He has consistently cliamed the link is very weak, which i dont agree with (even though i am a smoker myself:).
Perhaps he has been taken out of context on this issue, but it is worrying from a pr perspective.
Boudu (00:45:20) :
OK, I’ll play, sort of.
“To save the planet
Will cost plenty
It will take a gold mine
But I need all I’ve got
So we’ll just all of thine”
oops, should have been
. . .
“So we’ll just take all of thine”
Y’all contribute a verse, now, y’hear?
It’s not unusual to be warmed, by the sun
It’s not unusual to hide, the decline
but when I see you hanging about with WUWT
It’s not unusual to see me cry,
oh I wanna’ die
It’s not unusual it happens every day no matter what you say
you find it happens all the time
CAGW will never do what you want it to
why can’t this crazy theory be divine
Unstoppable Global Warming — every 12 hours!
(apologies to Mr Jones — Tom, not Phil)
Climate Science IS settled. There is now sufficient evidence to conclude that no climate catastrophe will occur as the result of human CO2 emissions. The climate does not need to be “saved”. Why, then, even think of costly measures to “save” it?
You raise some very important fundamental questions that are commonly ignored by the media and the general public.
The global temperature anomaly is a semantic issue.
I personally think that choice of words was an intentional effort at spin to make the variance from the average sound as if it was bad, or unusual. It should be referred to in more neutral language, like the “Delta T with respect to the 30 year mean temperature” or some such. But that raises an even more important question.
Is there a meaningful average temperature of the earth and how do we measure it if it exists?
Lets look at an analogy of the average body temperature of a human. It is commonly assumed to be “about” 98.6 deg F or 37 deg C., but that is only approximate, as each persons body temperature differs through out the day. Your body temperature at 04:00 am is typically lower than at 4:00 pm. There are also differences in how you measure the body temperature, is it measured rectally, orally, at the ear canal etc. On top of that there are slight variations due to exercise level, and even due to hormonal cycles. It is a useful number only in the sense that it is a useful reference point to compare to, but you have to use the concept of body temperature with those other considerations accounted for, or you are talking nonsense.
Many years ago, I took a winter survival course and our instructor had us take and chart our body temperature through out the day for a week so we understood the normal circadian rhythms in our body temperature. After doing that exercise, it was clear that no two people in the class had that mythical normal body temperature but during a brief window through out the day. The folks that bumbled around half awake until noon but were wide awake at 1:00 am had a body temperature curve that matched that profile, being relatively cool in the morning hours and not rising to “normal” until late in the day and staying up late into the night. Early risers showed a tendency to have body temperature profiles that quickly spiked up to near normal temperature shortly after they woke up and stayed near normal through out the day but fell off in the evening (about the time they wanted to go to bed).
Transferring that discussion to the earth, we simply do not know how to measure the earths “normal temperature”. They are guessing how to do it and then presuming that their guess is right and accurate to a fraction of a degree C to boot.
Just like the body temperature example, after they have monitored the earths temperatures with high precision for a couple hundred years, and then settled on an international agreement that the average temperature of the earth is measured using x method, using stations at y locations, and processed with z formula, their assertions that they “know” the earths average temperature, or for that matter even can measure the average temperature is flat out hubris.
Right now, they are in a position comparable to a person calling the doctor, and saying they think they have a fever, but the doctor does not really know how they measured their temperature.
My personal opinion is that until (if) there is a standardized method and process of measurement established for monitoring the earths temperature, it is unmeasurable, and unknowable to the precision needed for the type of monitoring implied by the AGW proponents.
By the same token, their assertion that they can measure the earths average temperature to a fraction of a degree C, and detect variations of a hundredth of a degree C as implied by some of their publications is a figment of their imagination.
It would help of they did no use false precision in their statements regarding the earths temperature, and obscure their error limits that apply.
If that is the case (ie that the average temperature of the earth is currently unknowable and unmeasurable to that precision), then the output of their climate models is meaningless, only being a academic exercise with no real world application.
Once you add in considerations about observational errors, instrumental errors and all the other error factors that exist even if you had a perfect temperature monitoring network/method, it is absurd to think that they can squeeze 0.1 deg C precision out of historical temperature reconstructions based on proxies, and instrumental measurements of unknown quality and precision.
I think we spend too much time assuming that the basic concept of an average global temperature measurement is in fact a real and measurable value.
Measurement precision and appropriate significant digits in measurements is the hidden failure in AGW.
If you put 10 digital thermometers in your house, you will get 10 different temperatures just in that small volume. Due to circulation differences and insulation differences you can have 1.5 – 2 deg C variation in temperature from one end of the house to the other. Given that fact, what makes them think that they can interpolate the temperature in one city based on a temperature taken in another city 10’s or 100’s of km away with the sort of precision implied by their calculations. There can be a 28 deg C difference in temperature between two cities 100 miles apart due to warm and cold fronts, not to mention altitude, and proximity to moderating influences like oceans or lakes. Due to frontal passage a single location can change 10’s of degrees in a hours time.
A global average temperature is an arbitrary mathematical construct usable in models, but has no meaning in the real world in my view.
Larry
mikey (01:51:01) :
Then man is a climate scientist, not a Dr. His statements in his area of expertise have nothing to do with his being a smoker, nor with offhand comments he may have made to an interviewer about his habit. The rumor, innuendo and false accusations that the Left spins to try to silence him are underhanded, but par for the course for them, and have no bearing whatever on what he says about climate.
If that’s all you’ve got, it ain’t much.
Trey:
“(Still O/T) Craig, the G&T paper was published early this year. It created a little stir. I skimmed it. I’m not sure what to make of it. (I’m a skeptic by default.) ”
In a word, nonsense!
Even Lindzen doesn’t argue that the greenhouse theory violates laws of thermodynamics. These guys (G&T) are pulling a prank. It’s a wind up, to see how many gullible skeptics will fall for it.
The theory of radiative forcing by greenhouse gases does not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It is OT to go into details here, but if you want to pursue it, I sugget searching the internet.
The G&T paper: so far I’ve read only to the end of the section where they demolish the school-boy version of how greenhouses work. They are right; but as they admit, this knowledge is at least a century old. (I used it years ago, when I was an expert witness in a court case.) It’s not clear to me (yet) that it matters scientifically that Global Warming has been named using a dud metaphor. But it’s certainly amusing that so many people who seem to know little elementary physics are prepared to use that dud metaphor as if it were valid.
@ur momisugly hotrod (02:24:20) : RE: your comments on precision, error, etc. are spot on. I spent many years wrestling those very factors in an industrial setting (aerospace ), where one of the biggest issues was maintaining comparability between (supposedly) identical instruments and tools. Gage Reproducibility and Repeatability (GRR) was a ongoing major activity of our calibration lab, and very often the source of a manufacturing problem could be traced to simply the GRR difference between tools such as torque wrenches , as well as the measurement devices used to verify all manufacturing actions. Engineering takes this into account when developing tolerances.
I have always thought that if the warmists want to claim the science is settled, we shoudl call their bluff by informing them that, if such is the case, then they don’t need any additional research money – what’s the point of funding research of a topic which is already answeered definitively?
“What’s that you say? The science is settled and there CAN be no further debate? OK, good. Please return all unspent grant funds and your current grant proposal is cancelled. Thank you for your past efforts.”
Linden’s article says a 2% change in outgoing radiation due to a doubling of CO2. This totally ignores the work of Miskolczi which says that the atmosphere reached an equilibrium point as soon as there were major oceans. As CO2 is added a little water will rain out of the atmosphere to maintain a constant optical density. This has been confirmed by the drop in humidity at the 300 mbar level over the last 50 years.
The only way to increase the ‘greenhouse’ effect is to add more total gas. Venus is extremely hot because it has 90 x the total atmosphere of the earth, not because much of it is CO2.
” Craig Moore (19:48:07) :
A bit OT. However, does anyone have thoughts on the following paper that claims to demonstrate the falsification of CO2’s greenhouse effect? http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf”
Excellent link Craig!!!!!!!!!!
For the first time I see that someone has finally come to the realization that radiation is not the only mode of heat transfer at work here.
That is something I have been saying for years.
This indicates also something I have maintained for years, that simply Climate scientists do not have a good understanding of heat transfer.
Thanks!!!
George Turner (21:05:54) :
“Strangely enough, in truth, people aren’t actually concerned about the climate. Ask a hundred people in any city whether they’d consider moving to New York or Los Angeles for a new job. They’ll ask a dozen questions about salary, position, perks, housing, and other issues, but never once say that either city is as much as 0.1C too hot or too cold, even though the difference between the two is a hundred times greater than anything the IPCC warns us about.”
George, you made my day!
“Craig Moore: wrt http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf, I read an earlier draft of this paper about a year ago.”
Would someone give a layman’s explanation of this paper? I’m familiar with thermodynamics to a degree, but the author’s English makes this kind of hard to really get a hold of just what the heck it is he’s trying to say. All I can gather from this is that the mainstream assumes the climate, though complex, is at base in some sort of terminal equillibrium.
Has someone in the BBC finally realised that a balanced view is needed?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8388485.stm
Attn messrs Hansen, Mann, Jones even Gore?
If you removed all the papers cited in IPCC publications written by Mann, Jones, Briffa and the rest of the Motley CRU, then removed all the papers that cite these papers, etc., etc. recursively, how many papers would you have left?
Geoff Shorten,
Excellent point. And the papers that remained would paint a different picture.
Prof Wegman showed the interlocking clique that pretty much controls the climate peer review process with the connivance of their pals in the leading journals.
[On another thread Ole Sandberg linked to this description of what’s really going on, from a strictly scientific point of view: click]
Andrew (00:38:32) :
D.King;
Actually I was asking the questions for real.
I know you were, and a good question it is.
hotrod (02:24:20) :
“Transferring that discussion to the earth, we simply do not know how to measure the earths “normal temperature”. They are guessing how to do it and then presuming that their guess is right and accurate to a fraction of a degree C to boot.”
Did Stephen Colbert quote Lindzen?
Colbert is no doubt socially liberal but he is not completely ignorant of the other side’s arguments if for no other reason than because he has to mock them.
http://vodpod.com/watch/2612094-colbert-something-is-melting-in-denmark-dan-esty
In the video Colbert portrays his usual humour with smacks at Bush, Hanity, and Beck but this time he actually quotes the Climategate scandal without a political spin. Is this an opportunity to expose young people to the issue here that the MSM would not do?
Notice Espy’s response of “fudging of the data was not the right thing to do” and “simplifying the data because they thought the public would not get it” and “I wouldn’t fight oversimplification with oversimplification”. I can see me getting along with Espy.
But here’s the big catch. Colbert says “three times makes it true”.
Check out page 5 of the PDF: http://www.globalwarming.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/lindzen-talk-pdf.pdf
Reproducing the slide here:
As always in propaganda, repetition is an important tool. This was early recognized by Lewis Carrol (as well as by Josef Goebbels).
“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”
From Lewis Carroll’s “Hunting of the Snark.”
I’ve seen similar suggestions on the daily show and they have been noted here. Are Stewart and Colbert now as ready to mock radical environmentalist as much as they are right wing talking heads. Is Gore losing this young cool hip crowd?