Lindzen: "Earth is never in equilibrium"

Offsets and indulgences. Yesterday a loan was approved for south Africa to ramp up production of electricity from coal. Yes, dirty coal. The cardinals and bishops at Siemens and GE will make money selling new gen sets and turbines. In that we see the redemption. America lent Brazil 2 billion for offshore drilling, but of course Brizil is a holy state in that they make ethanol for fuel for cars.
We also honor President George Bush. he gave us CAFE standards for autos and Obama is so excited about the move by Bush and Bush’s EPA he can’t wait. he is so pumped about the move by Bush he asjked to have them begin 4 years earlier.

This is my point of view too! What are the AGW arguments for equilbrium?
The weather of one year differs from that of another year, the weather of one decade from that of another decade ; why should not the climate of one century differ from that of another century ?

Great article, thanks Richard.
I admit I was a bit despondent about the fact that the UAH has risen slightlly recently. We HAVE become quite obsessive about such statistical pinhead angels. Would I prefer that the world’s temperature plunge and billions die? No, never.

What a great essay. It sums it all up in a few well crafted sentences. Fantastic. I’m sending it to all my friends. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

“However, current climate models do predict that a doubling of carbon dioxide might produce more warming: from 3.6 degrees F to 9 degrees F or more.” Something is puzzling me over the effects that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will bring. If the following question is nonsense, please feel free to correct any assumptions.
CO2 is an IR-reactive molecule, converting incoming radiant daytime IR energy to kinetic temperature energy thereby heating the surrounding N2/O2 (non-IR reactive) atmospheric gases. Does CO2 also cool those same N2/O2 gases by emitting IR at night, when there is no incoming IR from the Earth’s surface?
If this is true, then is there a balancing equilibrium, more CO2 means more heat absorbed by day, but (equally?) more lost at night?
Ed

In geek town Dr Lindzen is a mere rock star.
Which is why you don’t find geeks and nerds jumping up and down and screaming like crazy.
We, of course know how to treat a scientific rock star…. with proper respect.
So don’t turn him into a comic book hero!

Professor Lindzen,
Thank you for the excellent essay. While there are many golden nuggets in there, two resonate with me. The first is, “The sale of indulgences is already in full swing…” Certainly AGW is a belief system for some percentage of researchers and for a rather larger percentage of the members of political activist groups. Once, when having Thanksgiving with my cousin and her activist friends, they started the meal with a round of prayers. Several guests prayed to Mother Gaia for forgiveness. I was in a rather agnostic period of my life, but when it was my turn I prayed in thankfulness to my own (rather more traditional) God. Most of the dinner guests were fine with my traditionalist approach, but others were clearly offended and glared at me.
The second is, “For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed.” There are fortunes to be made (or shifted to rent-seekers) from efforts to fight AGW. Success depends on a pliable public, great success on a terrified public.
Your essay shifts the focus from the presumably honest researchers who are presenting findings on how AGW can be seen in their otherwise obscure field (insect larvae development, frog vocalizations, swimming patterns of left-finned narwhal whales, whatever), to the folks who are using the situation for their personal or political gain.
Keep it coming!

“there is substantial evidence that the feedbacks may actually be negative rather than positive.”
I’ve seen plenty of evidence indicating feedbacks are negative. Where is the evidence that they are positive ?

Great read —
I would add — Shouldn’t we at least test computer models before making claims about computer models and their prediction power? Like why not initialize them at year 0 and run them for 2000 years and see how they do. Models without testing is nothing more than an interesting software exercise.
Now how about those initial conditions, don’t they need to be very accurate? The start point is important to the conclusion, when you have so short a time frame you are predicting. After all, we are dealing with 1/10ths of a degree accuracy. Who decides where time 0 is chosen.
And finally, is the MWP sufficiently hidden from sight to not cause any future complications …

“”” A generally accepted answer is that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (it turns out that one gets the same value for a doubling regardless of what value one starts from) would perturb the energy balance of Earth about 2 percent, and this would produce about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming in the absence of feedbacks. The observed warming over the past century, even if it were all due to increases in carbon dioxide, would not imply any greater warming. “””
Well I agree with Professor Lindzen that this is a “generally accepted answer”.
I’m disturbed by this part:- “” (it turns out that one gets the same value for a doubling regardless of what value one starts from) “”
That’s very interesting; particularly since in human experimental terms; we haven’t yet obseved even one half of one such doubling (in logarithmic terms); and we have only one set of data that starts at one specific place.
so how do we test that we get the saem answer for s doubling starting anywhere; when we only have less than 1/2 of one such double of observed data.
so i agree with the Professor that this answer is generally accepted; That doesn’t cause me to accept that answer.
And how can he talk about feedbacks without talking about cloud feedback.
Nobody ever observed the temperature to warm up, when a cloud passes in front of the sun. (in the shadow zone of course, since other wise the cloud would not be in front of the sun).
In that surface warming causes more evaporation; which produces more atmospheric warming and ultimately more clouds; which block sun from the surface; which produces more cooling. Why is the climatology community so reticent to consider that the whole thing is self regulating; and has virtually nothing to do with CO2.
Which is not to deny the atmospheric warming that cO2 can do.

1) Lindzen’s right. There’s no equilibrium – that’s why climate has always been changing.
2) I wonder whether the modeling groups get better or worse while continuing refining their algorithms (probably most of this is done by pre-grad students).

Another bad pictue

Dr A Burns (16:03:07) :

I’ve seen plenty of evidence indicating feedbacks are negative. Where is the evidence that they are positive ?

In the models stoopid! 😉
DaveE

“”” Docmartyn (16:02:56) :
The Earth is a steady state biotic planet and is never at equilibrium.
I have done a basic steady state model of atmospheric CO2, based on the known amounts of human released atmospheric carbon:-
Marland, G., T.A. Boden, and R. J. Andres. 2003. “Global, Regional, and National CO2 Emissions.” In Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy,
and the Keeling curve.
The fit between Anthropogenic carbon and Keeling shows that the natural rate of CO2 influx into the atmosphere is about 22 Gt carbon and the ‘natural’ steady state level of [CO2] is about 280 ppm.
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/AnthropogenicCarbonvsKeelingCO2.jpg
Knowing that the total atmospheric carbon level is about 750 Gt, we can calculate the residency time of CO2 in the atmosphere, before it falls into a non-biotic sink.
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/SteaystateCO2fittedtoKeelingCurve.jpg
This fit gives me a half-life of CO2 of 26 years and a natural rate of CO2 influx into the atmosphere of 14.3 Gt. The fit has a correlation coefficient of 0.997; but in reality sucks as my model assumes that CO2 efflux is first order with respect to CO2, where in fact it is probably closer to second order. “””
So Docmartyn; lets take your steady state CO2 level of 280 ppm; and lets assume we now have 380 ppm; heck lets be generous and make it 390 ppm, so we have a perturbation of 110 ppm; and you say your relaxation process has a half life of 26 years.
Now the decay curve isn’t linear but not too non-linear, so one might guess that 55 ppm of our excess, will disappear in 13 years; well a little less than 55 ppm maybe its only 50; I’m too lazy to do the exact calculation.
Well if we can get rid of 50 ppm in 13 years, perhaps we will get rid of 25 ppm in 6.5 years, say 78 months. Well again 25 might be atad high; perhaps 22 ppm is more likely because of the non-linearity.
So that would mean something like 11 ppm would vanish in 39 months; well heck it might only be 9 ppm because of that non-linearity; we’ll take 9 ppm in 39 months; or how about saying about 6 ppm in 26 months; a tad over two years.
So with 110 ppm excess over the base value, and a 26 year half life, we can expect to see 6 ppm drop in 26 months due to natural decay.
Well now we have a seriosu problem; because if you look up the Mauna Lowa data on the NOAA web site; you will see that every year, ML sees a 6 ppm drop in CO2 in just 5 months; not 26 months; and it is even worse at the arctic regions; becuase in the same five months the CO2 declisne 18 ppm; three times the ML rate, and 15 times the rate dictated by your 26 year half life for natural decay.
I would say that your 26 year half life is way too long; at least by a factor of five, and maybe much more than five.

“”” Edward Bancroft (15:44:45) :
“However, current climate models do predict that a doubling of carbon dioxide might produce more warming: from 3.6 degrees F to 9 degrees F or more.” Something is puzzling me over the effects that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will bring. If the following question is nonsense, please feel free to correct any assumptions.
CO2 is an IR-reactive molecule, converting incoming radiant daytime IR energy to kinetic temperature energy thereby heating the surrounding N2/O2 (non-IR reactive) atmospheric gases. Does CO2 also cool those same N2/O2 gases by emitting IR at night, when there is no incoming IR from the Earth’s surface?
If this is true, then is there a balancing equilibrium, more CO2 means more heat absorbed by day, but (equally?) more lost at night? “””
Well Edward, you have things scramble up a bit.
CO2 has very little (but not zero) interraction with incoming sunlight. The effect is small enough to ignore relative to more important effects. Water vapor on the other hand interracts significantly with incoming sunlight, and may absorb as much as 20% of it; and that WILL warm the atmosphere (N2 and O2) by collisions (conduction).
CO2 has its main influence in that it absorbs well over parts of the spectrum of long wave Infra-red thermal radiation emitted from the earth’s surfaces, and from the lower atmosphere. It is the interference with the exit of that radiation that caises a resulting atmospheric warming.
Once again water vapor (H2O) does exactly the same thing; only moreso than carbon dioxide; and it is also much more abundant in the atmosphere; even over the most arid deserts.
You shouldn’t be looking at things happening in daylight and different things happening at night.
The sun strongly heats the desert ground during the mid-day , in tropical areas. But those surfaces do NOT wait till after sunset and then somehow switch to radiators that emit energy at night. In fact they emit far more energy in the middle of the day that they do at night; so those hot surfaces in the daytime, are the most efficient radiation coolers on the planet. At night when they are cooler (from loss of energy) they are far less effective as radiators so do much less cooling at night than in the day time.

A great article. With Ian Plimer’s “Heaven and Earth” and Lindzens logical explanations I became a sceptic.
I tried to thank him via e-mail but the address given at the end of the article is not valid. Correction please.

Of course, with all those other earlier warmer natural variability episodes, we didn’t have 6.6B people squatting on the planet either. I’m personally not comforted by the thought of mass misery being okay because we can say “eh, probably just natural variability anyway”.
We do need to understand what’s going on (I don’t think we do yet) and how it is liable to progress from here, and then we can decide what to do about it.

“Well now we have a serious problem; because if you look up the Mauna Loa data on the NOAA web site; you will see that every year, ML sees a 6 ppm drop in CO2 in just 5 months; not 26 months”
Indeed we do, that is because the biotic fixing of CO2 is dependent on the season of the year, giving you the classical saw-tooth pattern in every years slow increase in overall CO2.
It is for this reason that one does a steady state analysis over the whole year.

Beautiful. Apparent sound science, reason and logic. All in one article!!!!
And the zingers are sure to grate on alarmists for even extra bonus points!!!
“ancient level of ominous omen.”, “some statistical residue,”, “chagrin of overrun villages.”, “for 30 years, there has been an unsuccessful search “, “does not logically imply”, “the sale of indulgences” ……those lines were all great, but the summation sentence, IMO was the most pointed……”Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever-present climate change is no substitute for prudence.” That one has got to hurt the alarmists. How’s that for a turn about? I’m going to use that one over and over again!!!

Question; following climategate how can we restore faith in scientists?
Answer; Richard Lindzen.

Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever-present climate change is no substitute for prudence
The prudent man test: One should always look deeper before they leap.
The Fad of Climate Change was catchy, but the propect of it being a zig when one should have zagged is growing. And it was no different in the 70’s.
The prudent man would never jump to a hasty conclusion and fall for a Global Enron. Make ’em sweat, then judge the proponents of Climate Change schemes by their reaction. Backpeddling, damage control, moving goalposts, half-truths, labeling, subject changing etc.
Gotcha.

Good and clear as usual Richard.
Thank you for your realistic view.

At Thomas: I find that note of total air heat content interesting, because if that was so then Wichita beats the stuffing out of the desert southwest in the heat content of the air for a good chunk of the year. No wonder it feels hot when it’s sunny out and 70, but in addition to the 60-70 percent humidity, though I do note I do tend to sweat easily O.o

brc (16:41:41) :
“….I guess nobody gets sacrificed anymore to appease the earthquake or volcano gods, so *some* progress has been made through the ages.”
Actually you are wrong about that. Today we sacrifice children in other countries to starvation so we can convert US corn to ethanol and burn it in our gas tanks.
“…by 2006, biofuel production reached about 1 million barrels/day,…the corn in a gallon of ethanol represents a shade over two weeks worth of food (again, all corn). A 15 gallon fuel tank of ethanol is thus 7 months worth of corn calories for one person….” http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2431
The net result was a major hike in food prices, food shortages and starvation. The next “sacrifice” that I know of is when the UK takes their coal plants off line as a blogger here mentioned.
The supporters of the Green/CAGW movement never bother to mention the potential cost in human lives that their agenda requires but the cost is there just the same. People in the USA complain about the illegals from Mexico but trade treaties caused 75% of the Mexican farmers to lose their farms. They come to the USA to survive, often working in corporate agriculture while Smithfield & friends grabs their land.

Anu (16:51:16) :
“….It’s no secret that meteorologists and geologists are the scientists that least agree with climate scientists about global warming:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html
In analyzing responses by sub-groups, Doran found that climatologists who are active in research showed the strongest consensus on the causes of global warming, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role. Petroleum geologists and meteorologists were among the biggest doubters, with only 47 and 64 percent respectively believing in human involvement. Doran compared their responses to a recent poll showing only 58 percent of the public thinks human activity contributes to global warming.
“The petroleum geologist response is not too surprising, but the meteorologists’ is very interesting,” he said. “Most members of the public think meteorologists know climate, but most of them actually study very short-term phenomenon.”
He was not surprised, however, by the near-unanimous agreement by climatologists.
“They’re the ones who study and publish on climate science. So I guess the take-home message is, the more you know about the field of climate science, the more you’re likely to believe in global warming and humankind’s contribution to it.”
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
REPLY:
I disagree with the “take home message.” A relative and a friend started studying in the field and became so disgusted with the bias and down right lies they quit and finished their education in another field. Would you expect Catholic priests to publicly embrace Islam?? You are not going to make it to graduation in climate science unless you can walk the walk and talk the talk. You certainly are NOT going to find many skeptics in “the ones who study and publish on climate science.” and the leaked e-mails showed why.

@ Anu (16:51:16) :
Are you serious? Did you even continue reading past the heading, or were you counting on no one else doing so?
Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability. His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity.
Doh! Turns out we can read. Strike one.
“The petroleum geologist response is not too surprising, but the meteorologists’ is very interesting,” he said.
Is it only petroleum geologists? No, it is not. See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/07/faint-sun-paradox-explained-by-stanford-greenhouse-effect-not-involved/
Strike two.
Climatology: the study of climates and investigations of its phenomena and causes
Climates? What is the definition of climate? See: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/climate
cli·mate (klmt)
n.
1. The meteorological conditions, including temperature, precipitation, and wind, that characteristically prevail in a particular region.
Strike three. Better luck next time, back to the bench.

tarpon (16:05:31) :
Great read —
I would add — Shouldn’t we at least test computer models before making claims about computer models and their prediction power? Like why not initialize them at year 0 and run them for 2000 years and see how they do. Models without testing is nothing more than an interesting software exercise.

Do you know the initial conditions for year zero? All the volcanic eruptions? All the meteor and comet impacts? All the solar activity? All the tectonic activity?

bubbagyro(16:24:45)
Your comment on models resonated with me. I graduated in Math and Physics from Rice University in 1962. My intention was to segue into Biophysics but marriage to a medical student led me to Physiology and then into Biostatistics. My Master’s thesis was on a physiological model and several of my student friends developed biophysics models for their dissertations in Biostat. The problem we recognized early on was that the models quite often became defunct when new data became available. I subsequently worked for many years in the environmental epidemiology of pesticides. The lack of understanding of the life cycle of chemical residues was daunting. It is clear that mathematical or computer models of such complex systems as human beings, environmental chemistry, or world climate normally have a short shelf life.

“To be sure, man’s emissions of carbon dioxide must have some impact. The question of importance, however, is how much”
This is what AGWers refuse to recognize about most sceptics.

Lindzen’s column appeared in the student newspaper where I teach. Two letters to the Editor where published in response. The first is mine.
http://dailyegyptian.com/2010/04/06/letter-climate-info-should-come-from-legitimate-sources/
http://dailyegyptian.com/2010/04/06/letter-lindzen-promotes-agw-skepticism/

@ Dave Wendt (17:57:01) :’Instead we have seen research money flowing into this field that totals more than the inflation adjusted cost of the Manhattan and Apollo projects combined.”
My research say those combined costs in 2005 dollars were 22+132= $154 billion dollars. How much are you assuming has been spent on climate research?

George E. Smith (16:11:36) : “”” A generally accepted answer is that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (it turns out that one gets the same value for a doubling regardless of what value one starts from) would perturb the energy balance of Earth about 2 percent, and this would produce about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming in the absence of feedbacks. The observed warming over the past century, even if it were all due to increases in carbon dioxide, would not imply any greater warming. “”” I’m disturbed by this part:- “” (it turns out that one gets the same value for a doubling regardless of what value one starts from) “”
This comes from the generally agreed change in degrees C without feedbacks (based on spectroscopy data and physical derivation):
°C=1.2 ln (ending CO2/starting CO2)
thus no matter what the starting CO2 is, a doubling will always result in a value of 2 for the logarithmic term of the equation.
Nevermind that instead of using 1.2 in the equation, GISS uses 5.3 and IPCC uses ~4.7 because they arbitrarily assume CO2 has huge unproven (actually disproven) positive feedbacks.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/04/nasas-gavin-schmidts-lies-damned-lies.html

George E. Smith (16:11:36) : “”” A generally accepted answer is that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (it turns out that one gets the same value for a doubling regardless of what value one starts from) would perturb the energy balance of Earth about 2 percent, and this would produce about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming in the absence of feedbacks. The observed warming over the past century, even if it were all due to increases in carbon dioxide, would not imply any greater warming. “””I’m disturbed by this part:- “” (it turns out that one gets the same value for a doubling regardless of what value one starts from) “”
This is due to the formula for CO2 greenhouse effect based on spectroscopy and physical derivation without feedbacks:
°C = 1.2 ln (ending CO2/starting CO2)
The doubling from any starting point results in the same value for the logarithmic term. The real controversy comes from the magical positive feedback amplification multiplier. Instead of the no feedback 1.2 number, Hansen/GISS use 5.35 and IPCC ~4.7, even though the satellite data indicates the number should be 1.2 or less due to negative feedbacks.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/04/nasas-gavin-schmidts-lies-damned-lies.html

Ethanol Vindicated in U.K. Report on Food Price Spike:
The ultimate reasons for the spike in food prices, according to the report, were rapidly declining global wheat stocks caused by ongoing drought, exacerbated by countries imposing export restrictions on grains, combined with the simultaneous spike in crude oil prices to record levels.
The report also made clear that oil prices played a significant role in driving agricultural costs up.
http://corncommentary.com/2010/04/02/ethanol-vindicated-in-uk-report-on-food-crisis/

Dave F (19:18:53) :
Are you serious? Did you even continue reading past the heading, or were you counting on no one else doing so?
Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability. His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity.
Doh! Turns out we can read. Strike one.
Yes, I expect everyone here can read.
Read this:
http://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/person.asp?position=Faculty&who=lindzen
Again, Prof. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology.
If the article above had not changed that to Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric science at MIT for some reason, I wouldn’t have commented.
By the way, Professors are allowed to have wide ranging interests – I once knew a cosmologist who was interested in analyzing junk DNA, and collaborated with a geneticist to publish on it – turns out some of his mathematical techniques for analyzing galaxy distribution were helpful.
This, of course, did not make him an expert on genetics, but collaboration is often fruitful, and fun.
Ball one.

“The petroleum geologist response is not too surprising, but the meteorologists’ is very interesting,” he said.
Is it only petroleum geologists? No, it is not. See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/07/faint-sun-paradox-explained-by-stanford-greenhouse-effect-not-involved/
Strike two.
Did you even read the study results ?
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
You realize it’s about the current climate change being caused by human actions, right ? It had nothing to do with paleoclimate or some mistaken belief of yours that CO2 is the only factor in determining climate, in all situations.
Ball two.

Climatology: the study of climates and investigations of its phenomena and causes
Climates? What is the definition of climate? See: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/climate
cli·mate (klmt)
n.
1. The meteorological conditions, including temperature, precipitation, and wind, that characteristically prevail in a particular region.
Strike three. Better luck next time, back to the bench.
Your definition forgot the “over long periods of time” part.
So, your understanding of the concept of “climate” is limited to a one line “free dictionary” entry ? That would explain a lot.
Here’s two sentences to get you started:
Climate encompasses the statistics of temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, rainfall, atmospheric particle count and numerous other meteorological elements in a given region over long periods of time. Climate can be contrasted to weather, which is the present condition of these same elements over periods up to two weeks.”
It’s the time element that is the crucial difference with meteorology, and makes it a separate field with its own concepts, techniques and expertise.
Here, feast on some “free” non-dictionary knowledge:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorology
Try to get a sense of why climatology is a separate field of study.
Ball three and four.
Hit the showers, rookie.

@ Smokey (20:51:05) :”DCC (19:58:24) :
“My research say those combined costs in 2005 dollars were 22+132= $154 billion dollars. How much are you assuming has been spent on climate research?”
Answer: way too much.
Here’s a chart that shows the relative cost of Cap & Trade: click”
The question was how much already has been spent on research, not how much cap and trade might cost in the future.

@ Anu (21:15:11) :
Are you Joe West? The strike zone is very small and changes frequently.
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/cv/cv.html
What is Mann’s current job? Is it… drumroll please… Professor of Meteorology? What is the big deal about that? Well, Lindzen may in fact teach the ‘Dynamics of the Atmosphere’ course at MIT, which would make him a professor of atmospheric science. MIT’s class schedules don’t have professors listed, so I can’t say for sure, but do you think Michael Mann teaches meteorology?
So, yeah, no cookies for you.

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/ArmstrongGreenSoon08-Anatomy-d/EssexMcKitrickAndresen07-globalT_JNET2007.pdf
“Moreover, it hardly needs stating that
the Earth does not have just one temperature. It is not in global thermodynamic
equilibrium – neither within itself nor with its surroundings.”
“Statistics cannot stand in
as a replacement for the missing physics because data alone are context-free.”
“The problem can be (and has been) happily
ignored in the name of the empirical study of climate. But nature is not
obliged to respect our statistical conventions and conceptual shortcuts.”

@ Mike (19:53:31) :”Lindzen’s column appeared in the student newspaper where I teach. Two letters to the Editor where published in response. The first is mine.”
But Mike, those comments add absolutely zero to the discussion. Yours simply appeals to authority, asserts that science is determined by consensus, and proceeds with foolish ad hominem claims. As a math professor, have you even bothered to verify McIntyre’s work? If so, does it give you any pause? You end by telling students to read realclimate.org. May I translate? “Close your mind to new ideas and take the word of the anointed.”
Professor Gray’s letter simply shows a complete failure to understand the debate. In fact, he doesn’t seem to understand what Lindzen said. He should probably review his notes on speech communication. He first accuses Lindzen of falsely accusing AGW scientists of venal motives, then accuses Lindzen of being a shill for the oil inustry! After one final ad hominem, he makes a really ludicrous statement: “And I call upon the DE and the SIUC community to make our Voices page a place for OUR voices — not reprints of shills for the fossil fuel industry.” May I translate? “There is no room for dissenting opinions on this campus. Just read and regurgitate what you are being taught”
If your arguments were not so ludicrous, I might feel sorry for you both. Please do not tell us what school or university you people inhabit. It would be very bad publicity for the campus.

@ Smokey (22:00:40) : to “DCC (21:45:07),
Smokey said “Don’t you understand the meaning of “relative”?
Being an apologist for the enormous waste of taxpayer dollars being thrown away on “global warming” is a major factor in our country’s slide into bankruptcy.”
Smokey, do you understand the concept of discussion? I asserted nothing about the value of research. Nor did I in any way act as an apologist for anything or anybody. I simply asked Dave Wendt what figure he was using for the amount of money spent so far on climate research. You jumped in with an off-topic answer about cap and trade and I pointed that out. Where did you come up with this new ridiculous question?
My original question remains unanswered. You may now return you to your home planet.

@ davidmhoffer (23:21:51) :
I am sorry, but, huh?
I think I understand what you are trying to say, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth. You are saying that because we have hit 86% of the predicted warming for a doubling in CO2, the Keeling curve is exhausted, and we should expect no more warming from added CO2?
I was saying it is possible that the feedbacks are worse than anticipated, which I also doubt, but the fact that we have experienced 86% of calculated effects proves nothing one way or another.

DCC (23:14:27) :
I simply asked Dave Wendt what figure he was using for the amount of money spent so far on climate research. ..My original question remains unanswered.
Sorry for the delay, I was on Pokerstars playing a tournament. When I first did the calculation over a year ago, I came up with a slightly smaller number than you did, about 130 billion as I recall. I was working from an article that suggested the US alone had spent $80-100 billion on climate related research. Admittedly a good portion of that was alternative energy money ratholed on mostly useless windmills and such, but given the apparently small number of actual climatologists involved, the remainder still left enough for a great deal of cash to provide lucrative incentives to support the prevailing catastrophe meme. I don’t know what share of these people are actually working in good faith versus those that are in it for personal, professional, or financial aggrandizement, but the way this topic has been argued and propagandized leads me to suspect that the latter outnumber the former.

anon (19:35:50) :
:Isn’t Dr Michael Mann a Professor of Meteorology at Penn State in the Earth and Mineral Science Administrative Area of the Meteorology Department? Can we now safely ignore his blathering since he’s merely a meteorologist?
Maybe S.M. thinks Mann ain’t to good in the Statistics field either!

Prof Lindzen’s excellent discussion touches on some of the fascinating reasons that the AGW due to CO2 in particular has become such a popular mantra for individuals and policy makers.
The analogy between buying indulgences to get to heaven and to save the world is very relevant because most people are happy to pay because they think they are helping to save the world. When you ask AGW enthusiasts many I have spoken too are much less interested in the science and in fact do not want to question it
I think it will take a long time to dampen this enthusiasm.
Even if the planet fails to warm significantly carbon taxing has to be good if we are paying to help the planet?.. I think the guilt Lindzen describes needs to be shifted to the enviromental destruction we wreak on the world and awareness the millions who suffer from starvation disease
Meanwhile the USA threatens to withdraw aid from Bolivia and Equador for not complying with Copenhagen!

Anu (16:51:16) :
Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric science at MIT.
Well, that sounds much more appropriate for climatology than
“Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology”
Which he is.
So, that makes him a less-credible authority on climate than an engineer, an economist or a statistician — how?

Roy Spencer on his new soon published article!
What I find fascinating is that, after outright rejection of the paper by reviewers, we had to go back to the very basics in order to convince reviewers of what we were saying, and take them through the whole issue of forcing-versus-feedback one step at a time. For instance, too many researchers have been misled by the simple, hypothetical example of an instantaneous doubling of atmospheric CO2, the warming that results, and the estimation of feedback from that forcing and temperature response. We show why this simple example offers NO USEFUL GUIDANCE for estimating feedbacks in the real climate system, and will seriously mislead us if we do try to use it.

I’ve posted this many times before but I think it is very apt for Lindzen’s article.

“Modellers have an inbuilt bias towards forced climate change because the causes and effect are clear.”
“General circulation modelling of Holocene climate variability”,
by Gavin Schmidt, Drew Shindell, Ron Miller, Michael Mann and David Rind, published in Quaternary Science Review in 2004.)

[PDF]
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/Schmidtetal-QSR04.pdf
See also:
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/why-climate-models-lie
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/global-warming-predictions-invalidated
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;326/5953/716

thank you Prof Lindzen – one day you’ll be appreciated for all your work, once we get rid of all the pretenders. 😉

Fascinating and insightful essay! Thankyou.

“In a world where climate change has always been the norm, climate change is now taken as punishment for sinful levels of consumption.”
Not really. Consumption doesn’t imply emission of CO2. “Sinful” is a very strange choice of word. All we need to do to avoid the possibility of triggering disastrous climate change is emit less CO2.
“there have been previous interglacials that appear to have been warmer than the present despite lower carbon-dioxide levels.”
This should make you more worried about the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today, not less.
“Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat, and, indeed, some alpine glaciers are advancing again.”
We understand the advance and retreat of glaciers rather well, actually. Even in times of warming, some glaciers may advance. It’s the global mass balance that tells the important story. The WGMS reports continuing negative change in mass balance in its latest data.
“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. Examples include El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, etc. Recent work suggests that this variability is enough to account for all change in the globally averaged temperature anomaly since the 19th century.”
No study worth the paper it is printed on has suggested such a thing. Recent work has found, in fact, that natural influences cannot explain recent global warming, and that it is vanishingly unlikely to be a statistical fluke. This is all well summarised by the IPCC’s last report.
“The observed warming over the past century, even if it were all due to increases in carbon dioxide, would not imply any greater warming.”
Why not? That would only be true if the entire climate system responded instantaneously to forcings.
“It is again acknowledged that such processes are poorly handled in current models, and there is substantial evidence that the feedbacks may actually be negative rather than positive.”
No, there isn’t. There are one or two researchers who keep on claiming this, but their work is generally seen as flawed and unrealistic.
“Interestingly, according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the greenhouse forcing from manmade gases is already about 86 percent of what one expects from a doubling of carbon dioxide (with about half coming from methane, nitrous oxide, freons, and ozone). Thus, these models should show much more warming than has been observed. The reason they don’t is that they have arbitrarily removed the difference and attributed this to essentially unknown aerosols.”
This is entirely inaccurate. There are many cooling influences which counteract the warming due to greenhouse gases. Volcanoes erupt. Solar activity has been declining for 30 years. Aerosols, indeed, play a role. Nothing has been done “arbitrarily”.
“The failure of these models to anticipate the fact that there has been no statistically significant warming for the past 14 years or so”
I don’t think there is any period of 14 years in the instrumental record which shows statistically significant anything. According to the logic of the deniers, this must mean that the climate has never changed. The logic is flawed; the distinction being missed, yet again, is the distinction between weather and climate. There is a reason that “climate” is generally defined using a 30 year base line.
“…it is not surprising that the past decade was the warmest on record. This in no way contradicts the absence of increasing temperatures for over a decade.”
This is perhaps the most weirdly confused sentence I’ve seen on this blog. In fact, observed warming does quite obviously contradict claims that there is no warming.
“Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted to save Earth.”
Cheerfully accepted? By whom? On what planet?

the issue of climate change revolves around the elevation of the commonplace to the ancient level of ominous omen.
Thank you Dr. Lindzen for a clear perspective on the climate debate. I find this early sentence to be the basis for what is wrong with this field of science. It seems regardless of technology, whether we’re knapping obsidian or fiddling with ions implanted in silicon, people are the same superstitious lot as long as they expect to be punished for flourishing. I find it amusing that so many intellectually ‘enlightened’ souls see religion as superstition, and also worship at the First Church of Carbon. It appears there is a political movement afoot to resurrect pantheism, under the guise of science. Fearful masses are easier to manipulate, especially if they were manipulated into accepting the original premise of fear.

Anu,
““….It’s no secret that meteorologists and geologists are the scientists that least agree with climate scientists about global warming.”
Your attempt to appear impartial and objective is risible. You wring your hands and inform us that [paraphrased] “Well you see, Lindzen is only a professor of meteorology, he’s not a REAL climate scientist. You know, you can play around with a subject you’re not an expect in just for fun. Did I tell you about a cosmologist who studied DNA? . . . drone, drone, drone.”
Then you offer up some wiki definitions of climate science and meteorolgy to make your case that Lindzen “knows nothing about climate.” But Lindzen’s area of meteorology happens to be in studying earth’s radiation budget. So he examines satellite data and finds that the radiation doesn’t conform to model predictions. As radiation budget is fundamental to the theory of man made warming by radiative forcing, Lindzen is indeed expert in climate. To argue otherwise would be like dismissing M&M’s debunking of the hockey stick as irrelevant because they aren’t “climate scientists.”
Your whole argument is a thinly disguised ad hominem attack on Lindzen. Why don’t you explain to us, in your own words,where Lindzen’s science is in error?

“Simon Filiatrault (04:39:50) :
[…]
Looking at this graph
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.png
I don’t see any drop, just increase?”
The red curve is the non-averaged one;it drops each year during the growing season of the northern hemisphere.

Actually Sloan Professor MIT Linzen did not use computer models he used computers to examine existing data. The best data available.
The theory of CO2 cataclysim is debunked by study measurement not theory or modelling
No one says the trace gas CO2, is not an effect. The proof is, that it is not axiomatically an event horizon of any sort, just part of a system.
No one says it is not an effect, the proof axiomatically, is that it is not discernible at any level as a runaway or accelerant or even mathematically and scientifically a doomsday scenario.
It either does or doesn’t.
Semantics and PNS dont cut it. CO2 does what the theory says it does or it does not.

rw (05:22:03) :
“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. Examples include El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, etc. Recent work suggests that this variability is enough to account for all change in the globally averaged temperature anomaly since the 19th century.”
No study worth the paper it is printed on has suggested such a thing. Recent work has found, in fact, that natural influences cannot explain recent global warming, and that it is vanishingly unlikely to be a statistical fluke. This is all well summarised by the IPCC’s last report.
Would that be the report that the IPCC said it would have to “do-over” because it was so riddled with unjustified assumptions and disproven claims that it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny?

Human Beings are more like Lemmings than Lemmings are. When humans turn their brains off there’s just no stopping them. Perhaps, just perhaps, the voice of reason will one day prevail and people will see that there really is no difference between wanton stupidity and great causes like ‘Anthroprogenic Global Warming’. But, I really doubt that day will come. I fear the lesson we must learn will come at great cost of wealth and lives. Boy! I sure wish someone would discover the fluxcapacitor soon so we can all get out of here and back to the futrue.
Oh well, time to cut the lawn.

“Solidarity agenda”. Hmmmmm. Is it just me, or does this seem like another way to say communism? Cancel democracy until we get this climate thingy sorted out? I’m thinking NO !!

From Mike (05:42:45) :
If you want to be open to new ideas, you should read the people who are creating new ideas, that is, the people doing the actual research. That’s who is running realclimate.org.
And at this point I know I can safely stop reading as nothing worthwhile can come from continuing. I’ll stick with reading the new ideas and new research found here at WUWT, where people are actually interested in finding out about how weather and climate works (among other puzzling things) rather than concentrated on continually propping up old concepts despite evidence that shows they are flawed because they are unable to admit the foundation of their mighty CAGW edifice could ever have even a single crack.
You take realclimate, I’ll stick with Real Science.

We really need to understand if water vapour and clouds are reacting the way the theory and the climate models predict.
The feedback of water vapour makes up more than half of the total warming expected. It is a make or break factor along with clouds.
But there is no solid data regarding the trends. At this point in this important debate, it is remarkable that we are still relying on theory and a few old water vapour equations that do not consistently reflect the real world climate anyway.
The only data we do have shows declining water vapour levels (in the lower atmosphere, troposphere and stratosphere, surface is rising though) and declining overall cloudiness levels. [There is an occasional study showing water vapour changes from an ENSO but this is nothing to go on since the data is too short and contradicts some predictions of the models anyway].
Since it is warming somewhat, GHGs are likely responsible for some of that, but we need to know if the bigger-impact feedback effects are actually ocurring (and what sign they have in the real world). We can’t even answer those questions.

Richard: Nice article. I notice you had Mike Sullivan circling the wagons with a group-think defense in the Daily Egyptian. But he’s only a mathematician. (/Troll) This climate scandal has finally penetrated the non-climate scientific circle that I run in. About a year ago, people thought I was a Ron Paul supporter for questioning the climate “consensus”. Now, the scientist in them is taking over and they’re seeing the foolishness. I hope your short explanation gets a wider play than the local paper.

Dave F;
I was saying it is possible that the feedbacks are worse than anticipated, which I also doubt, but the fact that we have experienced 86% of calculated effects proves nothing one way or another>>
Right. It proves nothing one way or the other. The point is that if the theory is correct, then the next century of emissions will have a fraction of the effect of the last century. The century after that a fraction of a fraction. Any feedback loops must also fall in effect because if their driving factor is forcing from CO2, then the driving factor is dropping. So go with “worst case scenario” of 4.5 degrees for co2 doubling from 280 to 560. We’re at 380 and 86% of that so:
Last century +100ppm (380) => +3.9 degrees
next century +100ppm (480) => + 0.4
another century +100ppm (580) => +0.2
another centrury +100ppm(680) => +0.1
My math is rough guestimates but close enbough to make the point. The worst case scenario theory as presented by the IPCC, feedbacks included, shows that if they are correct, we’ve incurred +3.9 degrees from the last century of emissions. Another THREE centuries at the same rate of emissions, adds only (feedbacks included) another 0.7 degrees.
So in the WORST CASE scenario, the bulk of the damage is DONE and adding THREE TIMES as much CO2 to the atmosphere as we already have has a FRACTION of the effect of what we have already done.
By way of analogy, when you take out a mortgage on a house, your first payment might be 99% interest and 1% principal. So for your first $1000 payment, the bank gets $990 and you get to build up equity in your house of a whopping $10. Good deal for the bank. By the end of the mortgage, the bank is only getting $10 in interest, your equity is is going up by $990. The dollars per month hasn’t changed, but the bank isn’t making very much money any more because their profitability on the loan keeps diminishing over time. Triple your payments at the start of the mortgage, and you make a GIGANTIC difference to how much goes into interest. Triple your payments in the last 10% of the mortgage payments and the amount of interest you save is negligible.
What ever “harm” is coming from increased CO2, we have already “bought” most of what we are EVER going to get. We’ve paid down the morgage to the point that the monthly interest is tiny compared to the monthly payment, and increasing or decreasing the payment at this point makes diddly squat difference in comparison to the interest we have already paid.
And that’s the WORST CASE scenario.

Simon Filiatrault (04:39:50) :
“I don’t see any drop, just increase?”
You’re looking at the black line, which is annually averaged.
If you look at the red line, you’ll see a regular drop once every year.

George E. Smith (16:44:53) :
“”” Edward Bancroft (15:44:45) :
“However, current climate models do predict that a doubling of carbon dioxide might produce more warming: from 3.6 degrees F to 9 degrees F or more.” Something is puzzling me over the effects that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will bring. If the following question is nonsense, please feel free to correct any assumptions.
CO2 is an IR-reactive molecule, converting incoming radiant daytime IR energy to kinetic temperature energy thereby heating the surrounding N2/O2 (non-IR reactive) atmospheric gases. Does CO2 also cool those same N2/O2 gases by emitting IR at night, when there is no incoming IR from the Earth’s surface?
If this is true, then is there a balancing equilibrium, more CO2 means more heat absorbed by day, but (equally?) more lost at night? “””
Well Edward, you have things scramble up a bit.
CO2 has very little (but not zero) interraction with incoming sunlight. The effect is small enough to ignore relative to more important effects. Water vapor on the other hand interracts significantly with incoming sunlight, and may absorb as much as 20% of it; and that WILL warm the atmosphere (N2 and O2) by collisions (conduction).
CO2 has its main influence in that it absorbs well over parts of the spectrum of long wave Infra-red thermal radiation emitted from the earth’s surfaces, and from the lower atmosphere. It is the interference with the exit of that radiation that caises a resulting atmospheric warming.
Once again water vapor (H2O) does exactly the same thing; only moreso than carbon dioxide; and it is also much more abundant in the atmosphere; even over the most arid deserts.
You shouldn’t be looking at things happening in daylight and different things happening at night.
The sun strongly heats the desert ground during the mid-day , in tropical areas. But those surfaces do NOT wait till after sunset and then somehow switch to radiators that emit energy at night. In fact they emit far more energy in the middle of the day that they do at night; so those hot surfaces in the daytime, are the most efficient radiation coolers on the planet. At night when they are cooler (from loss of energy) they are far less effective as radiators so do much less cooling at night than in the day time.
George E Smith,
I read your reply to Edward Bancroft (not sure if you will look at this but if you do). I was thinking in similar lines as Edward but opposite. I was working on the idea that CO2 can cool the air at night by the opposite process Mr. Bancroft suggested. The CO2 will warm the air by trapping the ground IR radiation, I believe this is the established part of the AGW theory both day and night. But N2 and O2 are mostly IR inert, they neither absorb nor emit IR (based upon the electrial nature of the molecule…symetrical). Warming ground warms these inert molecules by Conduction, then they transfer a lot of heat to higher levels of the Troposphere via Convection (carries a lot more energy in air then conduction….air is a very good heat insulator). But once that warm air is at higher levels it will not drop down and once equilibrium is reached with the surrounding air then you have a warmer layer above at night. The air next to the ground at night will cool by conduction but a reverse convection will not take place (the ground cools by radiation loss). But will not the O2 and N2 in the upper Troposphere (warmed by daytime convection) bump into CO2 and Water Vapor causing them to vibrate and give off IR. The IR can go both up and down so some of this stored heat energy in the nonreactive gases will go down but the other will go up. Since they would stay warm without the CO2 and Water Vapor (only cooling very slowly via conduction) doesn’t the CO2 also have this cooling effect as well as the warming? I really do not know that it the reason for asking. Thanks to anyone with an answer!

@Anu (16:51:16) :
Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric science at MIT.
Well, that sounds much more appropriate for climatology than
“Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology”
Which he is.
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen.htm
================
The notion that Lindzen is “only” a meteorologist and not a “real” climatologist is an amusing crock often used by warmists. James Hansen’s training is in physics and astronomy. And I wonder how many of the high priests of climate science have a PhD in climatology. When was the first time that a PhD in climatology was issued?
Atmospheric sciences, by the way, encompass both meteorology and climatology, and many departments where these things are taught, such as at MIT, are called “Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences” or just “Atmospheric Sciences”
Georgia’s state climatologist, David Stooksbury says the following:
“The difference [between meteorology and climatology] is more historical than modern. Climatology came out of geography and meteorology came out of physics, but modern climatology and modern meteorology have merged to the point that the distinction is mostly a question of time scale. […] Meteorology deals with the weather, what’s happening right now and for maybe 48 or 72 hours. Anything beyond that would be considered climatology.”
http://www.uga.edu/columns/001030/campnews1.html
Now, on Lindzen’s MIT page, which you link, we read that Lindzen’s research involves studies on, among other things:
“…the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity […] the development of the current theory for the Hadley Circulation, […] the quasi-biennial oscillation of the tropical stratosphere. […] models for the Earth’s climate with specific concern for the stability of the ice caps, the sensitivity to increases in CO2, the origin of the 100,000 year cycle in glaciation, and the maintenance of regional variations in climate.”
So the notion that Lindzen is a weatherman unfamiliar with climatology is… well, one of those robotic reflexes that “warming enthusiasts” pull when they have nothing of any substance to say, which is most of the time.

rw: “In fact, observed warming does quite obviously contradict claims that there is no warming.”
Your presupposition is that we ‘in fact’ are observing human caused warming. The ‘fact’ that we only have such short and relatively inaccurate temperature data, and that even that data we have accumulated has been shown to be specious and susceptible to tampering, means you cannot use the words ‘in fact’ accurately.
We have a very unclear picture about the long term, and much less so the theorized dramatic impact of humans on presumed GW.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html
The 2009 polling of climatologists showing that 97% believe humans ‘play a role in global warming’ proves nothing. Play how much of a role, and in what magnitude of global warming? How is this different from other generic, global trends in the past, even in the recent past (the past 500 years.)
If we can de-politicize this discussion, we will know much more in 100, 200 and 500 years – if we’re all still here – but making presumptions and stating ‘in fact’ about observations built upon specious and manipulated data proves nothing.
People that confidently assert otherwise, without addressing the facts on the ground – manipulation and political wonkery – are part and parcel with the manipulation.

1 of 9 Richard Lindzen The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming Fermilab Colloquium 2-10-2010.mp4

2 of 9 Richard Lindzen The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming Fermilab Colloquium 2-10-2010.mp4

3 of 9 Richard Lindzen The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming Fermilab Colloquium 2-10-2010.mp4

4 of 9 Richard Lindzen The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming Fermilab Colloquium 2-10-2010.mp4

5 of 9 Richard Lindzen The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming Fermilab Colloquium 2-10-2010.mp4

6 of 9 Richard Lindzen The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming Fermilab Colloquium 2-10-2010.mp4

7 of 9 Richard Lindzen The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming Fermilab Colloquium 2-10-2010.mp4

8 of 9 Richard Lindzen The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming Fermilab Colloquium 2-10-2010.mp4

9 of 9 Richard Lindzen The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming Fermilab Colloquium 2-10-2010.mp4

@ Simon Filiatrault April 9, 2010 at 3:11 pm who asked:
Could George E. Smith or Docmartyn, explain where they see this in the CO2 data?
‘ if you look up the Mauna Loa data on the NOAA web site; you will see that every year, ML sees a 6 ppm drop in CO2 in just 5 months.’
Looking at this graph
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.png
I don’t see any drop, just increase?
Please enlighten me… Thanks”
The black line is a running average, the actual measurements are the red line. There is an annual oscillation of about 6 ppm.

kwik (09:25:47) : My doctor told me I was a hypochondriac. I said ” Doc, that’s the one thing I haven’t got!!”

Mike Bryant (07:25:35) :
My take:
Geologists study earth… mostly think CAGW is bunk
Meteorologists study weather… mostly think CAGW is bunk
Climatologists study grant applications… mostly think whatever is necessary
————————
Reply:
How true.
Having worked in the coal industry as a geologist and mining engineer, I have considered some of those massive, exceptionally deep coal seams (some in the Powder River Basin get up to 80 feet thick) and I wonder how warm and luxurious it would have to be to support plantlife that would accumulate such massive amounts of carbon. Obviously I haven’t found any paleo-thermometers conveniently sticking out of said coal seams from which I could read at what temperatures they were formed (I’m sure there are geomarkers that are used as well as recent tree rings), but I currently see no such equivalent conditions on earth and I wonder how “climate scientists” (I always use quotation marks to indicate something I’ve seen printed elsewhere but don’t believe myself) can have the gumption to assume we’re currently living through the worst of times climate-wise.
And the coal seams of which I speak are not anomalies–they are found in abundance in certain time periods in the geologic column that indicate the earth was a much better greenhouse that it currently is.
Any thinking geologist worth his salt has difficulty believing the AGW theory. That’s why they’re disliked so intensely by the AGW grant chasers.

@Anu (16:51:16) :
“Doran found that climatologists *who are active in research* showed the strongest consensus on the causes of global warming, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role.”
================
Since obtaining funding for climate research is virtually impossible unless you go along with the prevailing orthodoxy on AGW, and engage in research aimed to support it, there is no surprise that 97 percent of of those “who are active on climate research” agree with it.
I am absolutely certain that at least 97% of phrenologists who were “active in phrenology research” when that science was all the rage, agreed with whatever phrenologists had to agree with.
One more thing. The word “climatologist” in the study you quote does not mean a person with an official degree in climatology (there are very few PhDs in that field, and they are too young). It means scientists “who are active on climate research.” That’s what a climatologist is.
Climatology requires knowledge of, among other things:
atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, solar physics, planetary physics, thermodynamics, geology, oceanography, vulcanology, hydrospheric science, biospheric science, vegetation science, statistics, and probably many more disciplines others can add at will
It is clear that no person exists that can possibly have an adequately specialized knowledge of all those disciplines.
We could therefore conclude (only half in jest) that climatologists cannot exist, because the human brain is incapable of such feats at the moment.
Geologists are indeed very skeptical (often sardonic) about the pronouncements of warming enthusiasts. This is not surprising either, since, unlike climate modellers, they may actually have some detailed knowledge about the history of the Earth.

I usually tend to agree with Professor Lindzen, but I think there’s something wrong with his comment about how we’ve already seen 86% of the forcing from ghg’s. Let’s see: Go to ( ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_annmean_mlo.txt ). Find 2009 average CO2 concentration. Answer: 387.35 ppmv. Open Excel. Enter formula: =ln(387.35/280)/ln(2) . Answer: 0.468211 Can someone please tell me how 46.8% translates to 86%? Maybe you can get there if you assume that N2O, CH4 and the other greenhouse gases will not increase further for the foreseeable future, but I doubt it.
DocMartyn:
Using a single time constant when there are clearly multiple reservoirs (ocean well mixed surface and deeper ocean just for two in addition to the atmosphere) with different time constants, not to mention unknown sinks, makes your model seriously oversimplified. The parameterized version of the Bern model in IPCC AR4 has its flaws (like failure to account for the unknown sink), but it still gives a better fit than yours. See my post here: http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/where-has-all-the-carbon-gone/
And again: When you have multiple reservoirs with multiple time constants that are transferring CO2 back and forth, the residence time of a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere is not the same as the time constant of the atmospheric concentration. The atmospheric concentration time constant not only can be, but is much longer than the residence time.

“The fact is, the last 10 years have been warmer than any other 10 years in the instrumental record. Claims that global temperatures are not rising are laughable”
There is nothing laughable, or hard to understand, about the fact that temperatures have not risen in the last ten years, while the last ten years may have been the warmest in the instrumental record. It really is not that hard to understand, if you try. If your nose did not grow for the last ten years, but grew before that, then your nose during the last ten years will be bigger than ever before, and that’s perfectly compatible with the fact that it hasn’t grown for ten years.
“the point is that you cannot make any statement about trends based on only 14 years of global temperature data.”
I agree. But why is 20 years so much better?
The trend on which all this is based goes from the very late 70s to 1998. And if you agree with Jones that no statistically significant warming has occured since 1995, then you have the previous 16 or 17 years to get your “significant” trend. The trend over the course of the entire 20th century is about 0.6-0.7 C, probably no greater than the expected error, and, given the secrecy and opaqueness of the methods by which the record was constructed, probably not worth paying any attention to. The only reliable global record we have is the 30-year satellite record, where the warmng trend does not go beyond 20 years.

“DeWitt Payne (10:44:39) :
DocMartyn:
Using a single time constant when there are clearly multiple reservoirs (ocean well mixed surface and deeper ocean just for two in addition to the atmosphere) with different time constants, not to mention unknown sinks, makes your model seriously oversimplified. The parameterized version of the Bern model in IPCC AR4 has its flaws (like failure to account for the unknown sink), but it still gives a better fit than yours. See my post here: http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/where-has-all-the-carbon-gone/
And again: When you have multiple reservoirs with multiple time constants that are transferring CO2 back and forth, the residence time of a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere is not the same as the time constant of the atmospheric concentration. The atmospheric concentration time constant not only can be, but is much longer than the residence time.”
Err, bullshit. I have not calculated “the residence time of a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere”, nor have I calculated the rate at which the CO2 dissolved in the ocean exchanges with the CO2 in the atmosphere. I have done a steady state analysis of the rate of CO2 influx and efflux from the atmosphere.
Do not claim that equilibrium box models are superior to steady state flux analysis. Biochemists study steady state all the time, they never use box models, but steady state analysis has been used successfully for 50 years or more.
Look at the first plot. We have an estimate for the amount of human CO2 release and we have a measure of atmospheric [CO2]. We can therefore estimate the natural level of atmospheric [CO2] and the OVERALL influx/efflux rates. Modeling the t1/2 is then trivial.
“Using a single time constant when there are clearly multiple reservoirs (ocean well mixed surface and deeper ocean just for two in addition to the atmosphere) with different time constants, not to mention unknown sinks, makes your model seriously oversimplified.”
You do know that rates are additive don’t you? So A->B = K1 and A->C = K2 then A=A0e^(-(K1+K2)t).
In 1959 Keeling had 316 ppm and in 2006 382 ppm, which equates to 620 and 750 Gt atmospheric carbon. Between 1959 and 2006 humans dumped 248 Gt of carbon in the atmosphere. So only 130 of the 250 Gt is still there, so do your own fit. The t1/2 is about 30 years. This is not the rate of exchange between the oceans and atmosphere, the 14C loss of CO2 after H-bomb testing has a t1/2 of a decade or so.
So DeWitt Payne, put up or shut up. Fit the known release of CO2 with Keelings and show that the ‘atmospheric concentration time constant’ is greater than 30 years.

“There is nothing laughable, or hard to understand, about the fact that temperatures have not risen in the last ten years”
It’s clear that you have very strong preconceptions. Please, open your eyes a little bit. You can learn this properly, if you want to. Like I said already, you CANNOT say ANYTHING about temperature trends based on only ten years. You might as well say an oak tree has stopped growing after observing it for twenty minutes. There is nothing hard to understand about this, so why have you and many other people failed to grasp it?
“…why is 20 years so much better?”
It’s not ‘so’ much better. The longer the period, the greater the chance that a trend will be clearly distinguishable from the random variation due to weather. Simple as that. 15 years is too short a period, almost always. 20 years is just about long enough. 30 years is better still.
“The trend on which all this is based goes from the very late 70s to 1998.”
Nothing changed in 1998. Warming continues.
“And if you agree with Jones that no statistically significant warming has occured since 1995, then you have the previous 16 or 17 years to get your “significant” trend.”
You miss the point, again. There was no statistically significant warming from 1978-1992, or from 1979-1993, or 1980-1994, or 1981-1995, or 1995-2009, or any of the other 14 year periods. If I say it one more time, might you get it? You CANNOT say anything about temperature trends based on only 14 years of data. Climate is a longer-term phenomenon than that.

Dewitt Payne
was wondering when you would show up 🙂
Enter formula: =ln(387.35/280)/ln(2) . Answer: 0.468211 Can someone please tell me how 46.8% translates to 86%?>>
My guess is he may have made several assumptions, the wording about other GHG gave me that impression. But I think one of the factors would be the exponential increase in radiance from the earth as temperature increases. My own rough math got me to 60% though, not 86%. Since Lindzen doesn’t seem to be the type to throw meaningless numbers around, I presume he had some logic behind that number and would be interested to know what it was.
That said, even if you used 48%, the point is that the next 100 ppm will have much less forcing effect than the first 100 ppm, and temperature increase in degrees per watt of forcing declines at the same time.

mikael pihlström (04:19:23) :
However, in the end it comes: the target of Lindzen & brothers is not mainly climate science is it? The real targets are groups, movements, politicians and public servants, who broadly speaking have a ‘Solidarity agenda’. The analysis behind is chilling, but correct; even a moderate ‘Solidarity agenda’ has difficulties, given the present dominance of cynical, conservative, non-egalitarian and national selfishness ideas. So if you are a privileged relatively affluent person who does not like taxes (dreams of bureaucrats) and on the other hand loves ‘freedom’ reigning in society as well as in nature, the worst thing now would be a surge of justified guilt feelings and then solidarity resulting from recognition of AGW.
But even if, (1) anthropogenic emissions would have little to do with climate change, (2) the climate change in the next 100 years will be moderate, we have to face the fact that our Earth system (includes people) is not resilient nor sustainable in view of resource use, and the energy question is critical.
We cannot solve this equation without a Solidarity agenda.
So now were supposed to call it the “Solidarity agenda”. Of all the euphemistic neologisms the statist collectivists have adopted for their soul killing philosophy I find this one the most egregious and offensive. I am old enough to remember when people first took to the streets under banners of “Solidarity”. They were protesting and dying to demand release from the tender mercies of a system whose philosophical descendants apparently now want to co-opt their banner to once again attempt to put fresh lipstick on the pig that is their anti-humanist creed. BTW, did you never ask yourself why, if these ideas are so wonderful for the humanity you are trying to convince to adopt them, they seem to require such frequent and obfuscatory renamings? Why they can never be called by anything that even remotely suggests their true intent?
From the tone of your comment I have to assume you are a relatively young person, who seems to suffer from the common belief of young people nowadays and perhaps always, that world snapped into existence at the moment of your birth. That everything that came before you was the primitive and ignorant ditherings of those incapable of the wisdom of your keen insights into the human condition. If you are old enough to have lived through any significant part of the last half of the 20th century and still clinging to the ideas you seem to promote, I have to assume you are an idiot. IMHO, anyone who is even remotely aware of the almost incalculable misery and death inflicted on the world by those who took your “Solidarity agenda” to its logical and inevitable conclusion i.e, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, etc.,and still clings to the possibility of a statist Utopia cannot be otherwise.
I’m sure you will argue that this current version is a much more kindly and benign form of tyranny, but it is still tyranny. If history has shown us anything, it’s that no matter how lightly the tyrant’s boot is placed upon our necks at the beginning, the pressure curve for that heel moves only one direction and tends to accelerate in a manner that makes Mann’s hockey stick look like the Nebraska plains.
You seem to be worried by a possible lack of resilience and sustainability in both humans and the planet, which makes your philosophical choices doubly curious, since the very institutions you suggest we should surrender our personal and national sovereignty too, are pretty much the pinnacle of anything humanity has ever created in terms of rigidity and unsustainablity.

Mauna Loa is an extraordinarily poor place to measure CO2, being next to an adjacent Volcano and not exactly down from the prevailing trades. It is well within the atmospheric penumbra of Kilauea.

rw (10:45:34) :
Bill Tuttle:
“Would that be the report that the IPCC said it would have to “do-over” because it was so riddled with unjustified assumptions and disproven claims that it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny?”
Which IPCC are you referring to? No IPCC that I know of has ever said such a thing.
Whooops. You’re right — the IPCC backed off on the catastrophic glacier melt and the catastrophic sea-level rise portions but remains steadfast in asserting that “anthropological influenced” atmospheric circulation is heating things up.

Bill Tuttle (06:38:07) :
“Malthusians make that argument. Most recently (and most famously), Paul Ehrlich claimed in 1968 that we’d all be freezing to death in the dark by 1980, and when that didn’t happen, he said he’d miscalculated, but we’d all be dying of starvation by 2000, and when that didn’t happen, he claimed he’d dropped a decimal, and we’d all be dead of the plague by 2010, and when that didn’t happen, he claimed he’d been misquoted all along”.
Malthus would have said that population is the problem, Paul Ehrlich that population+consumption
is the problem. I would say that excessive consumption is a problem, but have no issue with Lindzen on that topic.
My issue with Lindzen’s article and other non-alarmist stands is the dissemination of a complacent attitude to climate change: it is just normal variation. But, even if it was so, it would be normal variation (+ some effect from CO2 , Lindzer admits that much) in a real world of 6.8 billion people
and a global socio-ecological system with little inbuilt resilience. It is clear that moderate climate change will first affect people dependent on ecosystem-incomes; this translates into poor people in densely populated, coastal areas or drought sensitive areas.
Now, Lindzer’s ‘no cause for alarm’ message is of course directed at his opponents in the AGW debate. But, what he says has consequences beyond that, which he should have thought about.
In the latter part of his article, which is not even a necessary component,
in an article criticizing the science behind AGW, the reasons for his complacency and thoughtlessness seems to have connections to a
political agenda, which is not a solidarity agenda.
David Ball (07:18:52) :
“Solidarity agenda”. Hmmmmm. Is it just me, or does this seem like another way to say communism? Cancel democracy until we get this climate thingy sorted out? I’m thinking NO !!
David: it might be just you. Where do you find ‘cancel democracy’ in my text?
A C Osborn (07:23:46) :
mikael pihlström (04:19:23) : I think that you severely under-estimate the enginuity of man. If we could spend half the money being wasted on Climate research and Carbon Trading there would be plenty of Food and Power to maintain the world population.
‘If we spend half the money’ arguments are useful, but often need more specification: who are ‘we’ and what spending category are we talking about. For the USA it could be: if you had spent half your current deficit (12 trillion) you could certainly do something effective about energy and partly food. Then the spending to cut would have been war costs, tax cuts for the
affluent, bailing out banks.
I think any saving in research budget is contradictory to using ‘ingenuity of man’ in solving problems? If you target climate research, it is a ridiculously small sum in view of your aim: 130-150 billion globally and total over time (source: Dave Wendt (00:57:07): DCC (23:14:27) :), and the figure probably contains a lot else than pure climate change research. In one single year the USA spends ca 370 billions on research – looking at the long run, from the sixties to today the big winners are Space research gradually replaced by Health research. Energy research is a small receiver and actually diminishing lately! I doubt if climate research would even be visible in a graph!
And I do not subscribe to your view that it is wasted. Although I try to be open-minded and realize that there are many unknown factors, I do believe that the current evidence supports AGW.
For food, ingenuity is not so helpful: food production always needs space, water and a suitable climate. So, I repeat my criticism of Lindzer’s complacent attitude to climate change on the grounds given above, especially in relation to food.

@ davidmhoffer (12:04:43) :
Unless there is a time lag. You know, the extra W/m^2 is hiding in the ocean. But the assumption is made that the extra energy is used to evaporate the ocean, and hence the positive feedback.

rw (11:58:57) :
“Nothing changed in 1998. Warming continues”
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
Kevin Trenberth – 2009
To resolve this “travesty,” Trenberth, goes on to claim that, since warming is needed by the theory, but warming can’t be found, and the theory is surely right, then: “the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”
That’s cute. But your method of resolving the travesty is even cuter. The lack of warming of the last decade or so, implies (to you) that warming has continued all along. No need to check any data.
Elsewhere you declare that a 14 year trend is meaningless (if there is no warming). Ah, but a 20 year trend is pregnant with meaning, if there is warming
1. The 0.6-0.7 C of warming over the course of the 20th century is not reliable because the instrumental record prior to 1980 can only be believed on faith. It can’t be replicated because much of the data and treatment methods hve been “lost” or destroyed, or simply made up. It cannot be trusted in light of what we have learned over the last few months.
2. Even if that record were true, the amount of warming it shows is too small to be attributed to any specific cause. Any number of causes, or combination of them, could have produced it, including measurement errors.
3. Even if the record were true, and all of it could be attributed exclusively to CO2 increases, it would only show that the effect of CO2 increases over the course of the last century is much smaller on temperature than assumed, and not a cause of concern.
What we are left with is a 30-year satellite record that shows about 15-20 years of a warming trend, and 10-15 years of stasis. Whatever that means, if it means anything, is really anybody’s guess, which is why climate will continue to be an inexhaustible topic of discussion for the foreseeable future, and a goldmine for charlatans.

Dave F (16:31:10) :
I don’t think that anyone was suggesting that we ban research. I think that we are suggesting more research.
It read ‘ban research on earth system?’ Inevitably, most of that would be
climate research.

mikael pihlström (15:53:25) :
So you are a Malthus fan. So what?

DocMartyn,
I can get a really good fit to the Mauna Loa data by using an exponential function with a time constant that increases linearly with time. So what. It has no physical meaning. Does your model fit not only Mauna Loa but Law Dome as well using as input only total annual emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel, cement production and land use changes? Your model only works if you have a magical carbon sink with infinite capacity that has a rate constant of zero at ~280 ppm CO2. The real world doesn’t work that way. The 151,000 Tg of carbon that was emitted between 1959 and 2005 but isn’t in the atmosphere now went somewhere. It didn’t just go away and can’t be ignored.

Mike (05:42:45) :

I am encouraging people to read both sides. I did not argue that Linzden should not be allowed to express his views or that people should ignore him; he is a prominent climatologist. I am saying they should read the views of other climatologists too, 97% of whom believe Linzden is wrong.

Fair enough.
I completely dispute any assertion that RealClimate represents any kind of 97% majority view however. To suggest so is to demonstrate your bias or ignorance. The only reason they have any kind of majority view is the rigorous and instant squashing of any kind of dissent. They actually represent a tiny but very vocal (and self-interested) minority in the field.
That 97% figure is unfounded AFIK. Can you justify it with hard data? No ‘consensus’ has ever been proved. The rigorous exclusion of dissenting papers from peer-reviewed journals (proven to be assisted by the same authors of RealClimate) has severely skewed the perception toward a bogus consensus to date.

“DeWitt Payne (18:48:46) :
DocMartyn,
I can get a really good fit to the Mauna Loa data by using an exponential function with a time constant that increases linearly with time. So what. It has no physical meaning. Does your model fit not only Mauna Loa but Law Dome as well using as input only total annual emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel, cement production and land use changes? Your model only works if you have a magical carbon sink with infinite capacity that has a rate constant of zero at ~280 ppm CO2. The real world doesn’t work that way. The 151,000 Tg of carbon that was emitted between 1959 and 2005 but isn’t in the atmosphere now went somewhere. It didn’t just go away and can’t be ignored.
“I can get a really good fit to the Mauna Loa data by using an exponential function with a time constant that increases linearly with time.”
Where as a first order rate is the first tool used by kineticists, I used no trickery, just simple science and a simple model.
“Your model only works if you have a magical carbon sink with infinite capacity that has a rate constant of zero at ~280 ppm CO2.”
No, it is a steady state fit. The efflux has a constant rate, at steady state influx = efflux. STEADY STATE. You know, a DYNAMIC SYSTEM. Not an equilibrium, but a steady state.
At 80 ppm the t1/2 is 29 years, at 280 ppm its 29 years and at 2800 ppm its 29 years. It’s a rate. In units of time.
KINETICS; the study of rates of change.
“So what. It has no physical meaning.”
So you do not think that there are CO2 inputs into the atmosphere and fluxes from the atmosphere?
Or do I take it you believe that before burning fossil fuels there was some sort of constant level of atmospheric CO2, where each year the same amount of CO2 was added to the atmosphere as was removed? Same efflux rate as influx rate; that would be a steady state. Increase the influx and the steady state rises but the efflux rate stays the same.
“It didn’t just go away and can’t be ignored.”
You mean you want me to put it into a box?
I have a better suggesting. Do the fit yourself, all you need are the total levels of atmospheric carbon (about 750 Gt in 2006) and the human emissions since 1750 and fit the line shape of Keelings curves using as many boxes as you want. Then tell me how good you fit is.

pat (20:00:10) :
Just like it responded in the ages when coal beds were laid down. Where there is an increase in food (C02), nature will supply the organisms to consume it.
Which is probably why C02 lags Ice Ages.

“davidmhoffer (12:04:43) :
Dewitt Payne
was wondering when you would show up 🙂
Enter formula: =ln(387.35/280)/ln(2) . Answer: 0.468211 Can someone please tell me how 46.8% translates to 86%?>>…..”
I think Lindzen was saying that ln(387.35/280)/ln(2) (current concentration) is 86% of ln(560/280) (the doubling)….
I didn’t do the math though

rbateman (20:30:11) :
pat (20:00:10) :
Just like it responded in the ages when coal beds were laid down. Where there is an increase in food (C02), nature will supply the organisms to consume it.
Which is probably why C02 lags Ice Ages>>
This has always seemed obvious to me. At the end of the ice age the cold has harmed both the animal and plant masses and pushed them down to bare minunums. The oceans have cooled, causing them to injest the bulk of the CO2, a double whammy for the plants. Then the much anitcipated warming trend comes along, and the plants get a shot at both increased temperartures which promote growth, but also in creased CO2 to drive growth as well. So intially in the warming period, the increase in pant life would gobble up any CO2 released by the oceans. Co2 would not likely increase until the temperarture got to the point where CO2 emissions exceeded the growth rate of the plants. This would likely even coincide by a recovery in the animal kindom resulting in herbivores starting to limit plant life growth by eating it, and expelling Co2 at the same time. 800 years seems pretty reasonable to me on a planetary scale.