This is an essay professor Richard Lindzen of MIT sent to the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va for their Opinion Page in March, and was recently republished in the Janesville, WI Gazette Extra where it got notice from many WUWT readers. It is well worth the read. – Anthony
To a significant extent, the issue of climate change revolves around the elevation of the commonplace to the ancient level of ominous omen. In a world where climate change has always been the norm, climate change is now taken as punishment for sinful levels of consumption. In a world where we experience temperature changes of tens of degrees in a single day, we treat changes of a few tenths of a degree in some statistical residue, known as the global mean temperature anomaly (GATA), as portents of disaster.
Earth has had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a 100,000-year cycle for the last 700,000 years, and there have been previous interglacials that appear to have been warmer than the present despite lower carbon-dioxide levels. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th century, these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat, and, indeed, some alpine glaciers are advancing again.
For small changes in GATA, there is no need for any external cause. Earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. 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. To be sure, man’s emissions of carbon dioxide must have some impact. The question of importance, however, is how much.
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.
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. They do so because within these models the far more important radiative substances, water vapor and clouds, act to greatly amplify whatever an increase in carbon dioxide might do. This is known as positive feedback. Thus, if adding carbon dioxide reduces the ability of the earth system to cool by emitting thermal radiation to space, the positive feedbacks will further reduce this ability.
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. Citing but one example, 2.5 billion years ago the sun’s brightness was 20 percent to 30 percent less than it is today (compared to the 2 percent change in energy balance associated with a doubling of carbon-dioxide levels) yet the oceans were unfrozen and the temperatures appear to have been similar to today’s.
This was referred to by Carl Sagan as the Early Faint Sun Paradox. For 30 years, there has been an unsuccessful search for a greenhouse gas resolution of the paradox, but it turns out that a modest negative feedback from clouds is entirely adequate. With the positive feedback in current models, the resolution would be essentially impossible. [Note: readers, see this recent story on WUWT from Stanford that shows Greenhouse theory isn’t needed in the faint young sun paradox at all – Anthony]
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.
The IPCC claim that most of the recent warming (since the 1950s) is due to man assumed that current models adequately accounted for natural internal variability. The failure of these models to anticipate the fact that there has been no statistically significant warming for the past 14 years or so contradicts this assumption. This has been acknowledged by major modeling groups in England and Germany.
However, the modelers chose not to stress this. Rather they suggested that the models could be further corrected, and that warming would resume by 2009, 2013, or even 2030.
Global warming enthusiasts have responded to the absence of warming in recent years by arguing that the past decade has been the warmest on record. We are still speaking of tenths of a degree, and the records themselves have come into question. Since we are, according to these records, in a relatively warm period, 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.
Given that the evidence (and I have noted only a few of many pieces of evidence) suggests that anthropogenic warming has been greatly exaggerated, so too is the basis for alarm. However, the case for alarm would still be weak even if anthropogenic global warming were significant. Polar bears, arctic summer sea ice, regional droughts and floods, coral bleaching, hurricanes, alpine glaciers, malaria, etc., all depend not on GATA but on a huge number of regional variables including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, and direction and magnitude of wind and the state of the ocean.
The fact that some models suggest changes in alarming phenomena will accompany global warming does not logically imply that changes in these phenomena imply global warming. This is not to say that disasters will not occur; they always have occurred, and this will not change in the future. Fighting global warming with symbolic gestures will certainly not change this. However, history tells us that greater wealth and development can profoundly increase our resilience.
One may ask why there has been the astounding upsurge in alarmism in the past four years. When an issue like global warming is around for more than 20 years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence and donations are reasonably clear. So, too, are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of carbon dioxide is a dream come true. After all, carbon dioxide is a product of breathing itself.
Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted to save Earth. Nations see how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. So do private firms. The case of Enron (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, Enron was one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon-emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to trillions of dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions.
It is probably no accident that Al Gore himself is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense.
Finally, there are the well-meaning individuals who believe that in accepting the alarmist view of climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue. For them, psychic welfare is at stake.
Clearly, the possibility that warming may have ceased could provoke a sense of urgency. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, the need to courageously resist hysteria is equally clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever-present climate change is no substitute for prudence.
Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric science at MIT. Readers may send him e-mail at rlindzenmit.edu. He wrote this for The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va.
Herzberg is talking about the osceans too;
http://climaterealists.com/attachments/ftp/EE20-1_Hertzberg.pdf
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!
Richard Lindzen has a nice turn of phrase sometimes. One term I enjoyed was “global warming enthusiasts”.
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?
thanks for the article another Great One
Have you seen this one?
Bonn, Germany –
Delegates to the UN Climate Conference were smiling as they entered the plenary session today holding in their hands “100 International Carbon Credits.”
The certificates bear a portrait of Nobel Prize Laureate and former Vice President Al Gore beside a portrait of the earth on fire. http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/04/free-carbon-credit-certificate.html
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.
Lindzen and other non-alarmists start of comfortingly with: don’t panic, climate is ever changing and earth is never in equilibrium. Yes, for the earth system, Gaia, any impersonal deity there is no panic. Shifting vegetation zones, droughts and storms. It would be beautiful to watch from another planet!
But, one species has taken the giant, irreversible leap. We are 6.8 billion,
suffering, poverty and death matters to us and we know that the global earth system, please include people this time, is not resilient to even moderate climate change, be it natural or caused by humans.
I am not qualified to judge the climatology/meteorology arguments. To me the middle part of Lindzens is intellectually stimulating and well written, but
I would have to read the ‘IPCC people’ arguments also.
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.
I’ve posted this many times before but I think it is very apt for Lindzen’s article.
[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
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
thank you Prof Lindzen – one day you’ll be appreciated for all your work, once we get rid of all the pretenders. 😉
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?”
Here is another post on Climate Research cost;
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/07/massive-climate-funding-exposed/
Fascinating and insightful essay! Thankyou.
Would be nice to see an article by Dr. Lindzen that reviews Dr. Meier’s points one by one. Then Dr. Meier could respond…
“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?
***************************
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.
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/
************************
Mike, thanks for giving us yet another confirmation of how politicized and closed-minded our universities have become. You and your peers should be ashamed of what you are doing to students.
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.
@ur momisugly DCC (23:02:01) : ” 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.”
Now who is being “ad hominem”?
Gray’s concern as a Communications professor about the lack of student writers is a specific local issue. I do not agree with his calling Lindzen an industry shill.
My letter was short letter and so could not give an item by item refutation of Linzden’s arguments. 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. Their site also has a lot of links to major research centers. See:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/
It takes time and effort to do serious reading. Surely you want to read both sides? Obviously I read the “skeptical literature” since I am reading this blog among many other similar ones. I have read other essays and articles by Lindzen, but then I also read critiques of him. Type “Linzden” into the realclimate search box.
@ur momisugly JER0ME (00:59:21) : “And from your [Mike (19:53:31) ] letter:
Probably the best source for legitimate information on climate change is http://www.realclimate.org, a Web site run by a group of leading climatologists.
Just goes to prove how little you see beyond a blinkered world view, or how prejudiced (as that site is) you really are (I am not sure which).”
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.
Some people will go to doctor after doctor until they hear what they want. If the first nine doctors tell you to lose weight, eat better and get more exercise but the tenth one says not to worry, it is tempting to go with the tenth doctor, but this is not wise.
Not only is earth’s climate never in equilibrium, but global climate is never the same from moment to moment and no global climate conditions have ever repeated nor will they ever repeat.
Model THAT!
Yer but he got no freebies in Copenchafen..
But he do run data.
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?
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”
In other words, the truer the message the more vituperative my attack on messenger.
Wikipedia include assertions that its openness makes it unreliable and unauthorative. Because articles don’t include bylines, authors aren’t publicly accountable for what they write. Similarly, because anyone can edit any article, the site’s entries are vulnerable to unscrupulous edits. In August 2007,
“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.
mikael pihlström (04:19:23) :
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.
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.
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.
Ain’t a debating club.
Fold or show.