At the ICCC4 conference yesterday, I had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Richard Lindzen give his keynote address at the luncheon. As always, he made some very salient points.
I took this photo from my Blackberry and just moments later emailed Dr. Lindzen to ask for a copy of the presentation while he was still speaking. He graciously provided it. and you’ll find the link to it below.
Lindzen_Heartland_2010 (PDF)
Live web streaming coverage at Pajamas Media here for today’s speeches.
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Calm, reasonable, authoritative and scientifically sound. Prof. Lindzen convinced me years ago and I am flabbergasted, jaw-droppingly amazed that he has been ignored by the politicians and the MSM. Is Monckton correct with his world government theories?
The bias of the BBC was explained by Richard North at Euroreferendum when he exposed the heavy investment of their pension funds in carbon trading. I bitterly resent the compulsory licence fee one is forced to pay for endless repeats and mindless competitions. Lord Reith must turn endlessly in his grave.
The head of the UN’s climate change panel has defended the use of unproven science to justify climate change by saying the “grey literature” cannot be ignored.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/7725266/Climate-body-chief-defends-use-of-grey-literature.html
Taking up a collection to buy McIntyre a spine, and if we can afford it, a set of cajones. C’mon Steve, you cannot show how manipulative they are and then not be able to look them in the eye. Figuratively speaking. How many times do they have to be caught making “mistakes” that are always in the direction of their agenda. If the mistakes occasioanlly fell to the other side, I can see how you might be uncertain. This is not the case. You do not have to come out and say it, but at least look them in the eye and let them know that you know what they are up to.
Roy UK,
Have you ever heard anything by Harrabin that questions the environmentalist position?
Years ago he did a R4 programme on depleted uranium. I contacted him with a detailed critique, for which he thanked me and said he would respond. After a while I contacted him again. He said my letter was on his desk as he wrote. That was the last I heard. Of course, no response was ever forthcoming.
A few years back the BBC decided that the debate about AGW was over. Its reporting of the issue cannot now be taken seriously.
Perhaps you ought to re-evaluate your assumptions about its former impartiality. I think it’s much more likely that they were equally far from the truth in the past, but now thanks to the wonders of the Internet we can see the distortions clearly.
CLIMATEGATE
THE LEBENSRAUM FALLACY
The Lebensraum doctrine of Green activists rests on three tenets they accept with an act of faith:
· We are running out of space. World population is already excessive on a limited planet and grows exponentially.
· We are running out of means. The planet’s non-renewable resources are being depleted by consumption at a rate that renders economic expansion unsustainable.
· We shall fry. Carbon dioxide emitted by human economic activity causes global warming that shall make the planet uninhabitable.
When such tenets are quantified, the contrast between true and false stands out sharply.
Is overpopulation a grave problem? The sum of urban areas of the United States is equivalent to 2% of the area of the country, and to 6% in densely inhabited countries such as England and Holland. And there is plenty of green in urban areas. If comparison is limited to land covered by buildings and pavements the occupied land in the whole world amounts to 0,04% of the terrestrial area of the planet. With 99.96% unoccupied the idea of an overcrowded planet is an exaggeration. Population forecasts are uncertain but the most accepted ones foresee stability of world population to be reached in the 21st century. According to some, world population may begin to decline at the end of this century. With so much elbowroom it is untenable that world population is excessive or shall ever become so.
Strictly speaking, no natural resource is non-renewable in a universe ruled by the Law of Conservation of Mass. In popular form it holds that “Nothing is created, nothing is lost, all is transformed.” Human usage is not subtracted from the mass of the planet, and in theory all material used may be recycled. The possibility of doing so depends on availability and low cost of energy. When fusion energy becomes operative it will be available in practically unlimited quantities. The source is deuterium, a hydrogen isotope found in water, in a proportion of 0.03%. One cubic kilometer of seawater contains more energy than can be obtained from combustion of all known petroleum reserves of the world. Since oceans hold 3 billion cubic kilometers of water, energy will last longer than the human species.
There is no growing shortfall of resources signaled by rising prices. Since the middle of the 19th century The Economist publishes consistent indices of values of commodities and they have all declined, over the period, due to technological advances. The decline has been benign. The cost of feeding a human being was 8 times greater in 1850 than it is today. In 1950, less than half of a world population of 2 billion had an adequate diet, above 2000 calories per day. Today, 80% have the diet, and world population is three times greater.
There is a problem with the alleged global warming. It stopped in 1995, after having risen in the 20 previous years, and unleashing a scare over its effects. Since 1998 it has been followed by 12 years of declining temperatures, in a portent of a cold 21st century. This shows that there are natural forces shaping climate, more powerful than manmade carbon dioxide and anything mankind can do for or against world climate. The natural forces include cyclical oscillation of ocean temperatures, sunspot activity and the effect of magnetic activity of the sun on cosmic rays. All such cycles are foreseeable, but there is no general theory of climate with predictive capacity. What knowledge exists comes from one hundred fields, such as meteorology, oceanography, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, paleontology, biology, etc. with partial contributions to the understanding of climate.
Devoid of support of solid theory and empirical data, the mathematical models that underpin alarmist forecasts amount to speculative thought that reflects the assumptions fed into the models. Such computer simulations offer no rational basis for public policy that inhibits economic activity “to save the planet”. And carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is the nutrient needed for photosynthesis that supports the food chain of all living beings of the planet.
Stories of doom circulate daily. Anything that happens on earth has been blamed on global warming: an Australian dust storm, a Himalayan earthquake, a volcanic eruption, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, tribal wars in Africa, heat wave in Paris, recent severe winters in North America, the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico, known for five centuries, the collapse of a bridge in Minnesota. Evo Morales blames Americans for the summer floods in Bolivia. Hugo Chavez received a standing ovation in Copenhagen when he blamed global warming on capitalism. He has the support of the Castro brothers,, Mungabe and all such dictators, With friends like these does the cause need enemies?
Global warming is not a physical phenomenon; it is a political and journalistic phenomenon that finds parallel in the totalitarian doctrines that inebriated masses deceived by demagogues. As Chris Patten put it: “Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off”. In the view of Professor Aaron Wildavsky global warming is the mother of all environmental scares. “Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realizing the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population’s eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.” Their dream is the hippies’ lifestyle of idleness, penury, long hair, unshaven face, blue jeans, sandals and vegetarian diet, imposed on the world by decree of Big Brother, and justified by the Lebensraum fallacy.
Bad media turnout?
Bad media coverage?
If you had the big people come out, algore, Pelosi, Obama etc. the turnout would have been better.
Copenhagen set the standard.
Ladies of the night
Booze
Big parties
Expensive suites
Looooong limos
Based on the party, even the heavy snow can’t keep the players at home.
HankHenry,
I understand behaving professionally and respecting fellow scientists but Mann and the team have personally ridiculed McIntyre repeatedly, they have never offered him any respect and here we have a clear case of fraud with confirmed intent thanks to the climategate emails and McIntyre sounds like their biggest apologist. Enough is enough.
I also was taken back by his refusal to question government authority. Maybe he has spent too much time in the socialized state of Canada.
To those people who believe Stephen McIntyre should have said more, I say he has already done most of the hard work. He doesn’t need to draw more criticism from the AGW establishment. Why would he want an expensive lawsuit to fight against government organisations with deep pockets full of taxpayers money.
It’s now up to us, the public, to pick up on the issues and convince all of our elected officials that they need to question the AGW science.
@Bob Kutz (May 18, 2010 at 7:48 am),
For the record:
Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1616 as a result of Galileo’s advocacy of heliocentrism. However, it was not proscribed; it was listed as “needing corrections.” It was taken off the Index in 1758.
Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1633, immediately after the (in)famous “trial of Galileo”. (It was taken off the Index in 1824, if I remember correctly.) Today, that book would not be called a work of science, but rather an exercise in hypothesis mongering. Moreover, it made fun of the Church (which had been Galileo’s staunch promoter) and the Pope. The trial was arguably more about “getting even” and lèse-majesté based on what was then an unproven hypothesis than it was about science. That may explain why Galileo remained on the Index more than 60 years after Copernicus was taken off. Galileo produced most of what is today remembered as his scientific work after his condemnation (and he did so, again, with the support of the Church, whose nominal prisoner he was).
By 1632, the Church had lost a sizable part of Europe to protestantism. It had no means to enforce the Index, either directly or indirectly via the intervention of a handful of remaining Catholic rulers. In contrast, the present “AGW orthodoxy” is political dogma for most governments and public mass media.
Joel Shore says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:49 am
“Which makes one wonder why so many “skeptics” spend lots of time arguing such silly things as … the rise in atmospheric CO2 not being due to burning of fossil fuels,… and so on. All such arguments do is reduce their credibility.”
You’re probably right, because intricate concepts cannot be grasped by lay people, and even experts in other fields, who have not spent a lifetime of study in these specific milieux. But, the word “credibility” is derived from Latin crēdibilis, to believe. And, belief is a matter of faith, not of science.
The AGW faith has a simple message:
A) We release CO2 through combustion, which we have been doing on a major scale in the last century
Nobody on the planet is unaware of this, even if they understand nothing else, and they are easily persuaded that bad things must come of it. The remaining planks are almost unnecessary.
B) The measured CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, hence post hoc ergo propter hoc it is our fault
C) CO2 traps significant heat on the planet because the “experts” say it does
Hence, we are on the verge of worldwide catastrophe, and can only be saved by repenting our sins of recent and relative prosperity, and flailing ourselves in abject penance, renouncing our worldly goods and comforts, and donating our wealth and surrendering our freedoms to the priesthood which has interceded with wroth Holy Nature on our behalf. It is very difficult to counter that kind of medieval, superstition laden message with rationality and facts which only a very few people have the background and acumen to comprehend.
Dr T G Watkins says:
May 18, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Is Monckton correct with his world government theories?
———–
This global ‘crisis’ demands a global solution with global governance, doesn’t it?
Given that this ‘crisis’ is a well orchestrated invention with a UN front, that does seem to be the most logical explanation.
I’m shocked: I read that Lindzen said that cancer and cigarettes are weakly linked. Is that true? Is it true that he’s changed his arguments against global warming several times as they have been been proved false? Did he really only agree to bet on his predictions if offered 50-1 odds? Can someone please de-bunk this website for me?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_S._Lindzen
Joel Shore says;
“On this, I think we should all be able to agree…Which makes one wonder why so many “skeptics” spend lots of time arguing such silly things as the greenhouse effect violating the 2nd Law, the rise in atmospheric CO2 not being due to burning of fossil fuels, the radiative effect of CO2 being saturated, and so on. All such arguments do is reduce their credibility.”
Sure, silly just like the AGW your faith demands.
Social Antisocialist said:
Sure. First, it starts out with the Wikipedia template, attempting to obtain authority through a false front.
Next, it conflates travel expenses with “funding,” which has a specific meaning. They are not the same. Funding is provided in the form of of grants, which pay salaries. Grants are normally given to study a specific question. Had Prof Lindzen received grants from oil companies, it would certainly have been reported.
But they only report – with no verifiable documentation provided, but only uncorroborated second hand comments – that some twenty years ago Lindzen had received consulting and expert witness fees. Expert witness fees are normally paid during a legal action, which energy companies are always embroiled in, and Lindzen certainly qualifies as an expert witness.
It is also not mentioned in the article that paying academics to be expert witnesses is a a very common practice. Likewise with consulting services. And the only specific date mentioned is 1991; the article admits that since Dr Lindzen was paid to be an expert witness, he “has taken none of their money since.”
Nothing in the article mentions the fact that Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Caspar Amman and numerous other climate alarmist scientists are receiving ongoing funding from outside entities such as the Joyce Foundation, several Soros foundations, the Heinz Foundation, the Grantham Foundation, the WWF, etc.
These outside entities all have one thing in common: they are pushing a CAGW agenda. But as the writer admits, Dr Lindzen does not take outside funding. He has received expert witness and consulting fees. Would anyone refuse compensation if they were subpoenaed to testify? The article further acknowledges, as reported by Newsweek, that Prof Lindzen “receives no funding from any energy companies.”
The comments under the heading “Lindzen’s Discarded Global Warming Arguments” is a case study in spin. It devolves into the writer arguing the state of the science, rather than simply reporting it. It is propaganda couched as a report, and it evades confronting the problem that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Further, it assumes that Prof Lindzen has never commented on his hypothesis, and then it presumes that must be taken as an admission that Lindzen’s hypothesis is incorrect. However, they did not ask Prof Lindzen for his response. Rather, this is a hit piece portrayed as a report.
Finally, the comment on the wager gives neither adequate background nor does it remain on topic, instead slyly changing its reporting to a wager between James Annan and two Russians. And it winds up with a quote by a Newsweek reporter that is in the realm of personal opinion, not factual reporting.
To summarize, that link is simply slick propaganda. The tobacco quote is so vague that it could mean a lot of things. And again, it is clear that Prof Lindzen was never asked to vet or clarify what was written about him, or what he meant by his purported comment, or even if he made the comment, which is only the unverifiable opinion of a hostile reporter. Since Lindzen was not asked to clarify what he meant, or even if the quote was accurate, it is disingenuous to cherry-pick a putative quote on the inflammatory subject of tobacco.
This is simply a Media Matters-style hit piece, camouflaged to look unbiased and factual. But it is filled with half truths, and as we know, a half truth is a whole lie.
Smokey vs. Smokey.
In this thread, he says:
In another thread ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/16/kerry-emanuel-and-richard-lindzen-the-climatic-odd-couple/#comment-391452 ) he says:
So, let’s see, when someone makes a statement about what Lindzen said or did, then it is simply a “unverifiable opinion” and one must make sure that Lindzen has been given a chance to fully explain what he meant. However, if someone makes a statement about Emanuel, then one must assume that Emanuel is guilty because he hasn’t yet rebutted this statement (which only appeared in print a few days ago).
The double-standard would be amusing if it wasn’t so pathetic.
Thank you for posting the .pdf file of Dr Lindzen’s presentation. I know Dr Lindzen is a widely respected ‘heavyweight’ in this area, so I began to read the presentation with interest. However, the line of argument he was following quickly became troubling to me.
Specifically, the slide following the cover slide mainly comprises two statements which Dr Lindzen characterises as “facts” and claims they are “completely agreed on by the IPCC”. The latter of these states that the forcings from aerosols and solar variability used in all the climate models are “arbitrary”. This characterisation of arbitrariness is then picked up on in the following slide as a reason to discredit the models.
I will admit that I am struggling to hold back from the suspicion that the widely respected Dr Lindzen might potentially be misrepresenting the position of the IPCC in order to falsely reinforce the point he is trying to make to begin his talk. So, just to put my mind at ease, may I ask that somebody reading this could please provide a link to a statement from the IPCC that ‘completely agrees’ those model values for the forcings are “arbitrary”? Thank you.
Thanks Smokey!
Can someone please de-bunk this website for me?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_S._Lindzen
Source Watch is a site hosted by the “Center for Media and Democracy” with
“Patricia Barden” identified as the registrant contact of record ( who.is ).
The “Center for Media and Democracy” is “progressive” organization.
From Wikipedia:
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) is a progressive nonprofit American-based media research group founded in 1993 by environmentalist writer and political activist John Stauber.
Progressive, liberal, environmentalist, bigger government? Maybe?
Joel Shore knows the two situations are different. One is a second-hand comment by a reporter, and the other is a statement by a close co-worker. As pointed out, Lindzen and Emanuel both work every day in the same building, with numerous mutual co-workers. It would be incredible that either one doesn’t know what the other says about him in print. See? Apple & oranges.
Anyway, I’m getting some real enjoyment out of Joel’s fixation on my posts. He’s like a mouse watching a cobra. Not too long ago Joel wrote here that if he could permanently ban me from commenting again, he would.
Don’t be such a hater, Joel. This isn’t the RealClimatte echo chamber, where everyone
thinksbelieves the same thing.And please quit putting your quotation marks around the word skeptic. It’s disingenuous. Without scientific skeptics, which most folks on this site are and you aren’t, there wouldn’t even be a scientific method. Then where would we be? We’d be taking it on faith alone that Al Gore is right.
Alarmists hate skeptics because skeptics keep debunking the repeatedly falsified conjecture that a tiny trace gas is the primary driver of the climate, and that it will lead to a thermogeddon catastrophe. Relax, it won’t.
Joel Shore, be careful with the double standards , as they can cut both ways. Andrew Weaver and Micheal Mann are suing because people have said disparaging remarks about them. The remarks made about them are NOTHING compared to what DePropagandaBlog (among others) has been saying about my father. Example: http://www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-your-source-lies-slander-and-misleading-climate-science ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~This is but a small sample of the vilification of my father. Is this OK to you? Getting awful tired of your spinning.
Poptech,
I view McIntyre as a guy who realizes he’s not really a full participant in the debate since he’s not really (in the narrowest sense of the word) a climate academic , therefore he tries to be careful to stick those things he has focused himself on. Personally, when McIntyre turned off commentary on Cuccinnelli at his blog, I read it as McIntyre realizing that he had strayed too far and didn’t really know enough about the law and the prosecution of the law to be opining. I admire McIntyre for his dogged pursuit of this hockey stick and temperature issue. I am not going to fault him if he retreats from broader political discussion. Long term it should help keep the points he is making clean of distracting considerations.
I think somebody ought to send Dr Lindzen an updated temperature series. The data on slide nine are more than quarter a century old, conviently omitting the warmest years of the global temperature record.
Smokey says:
That makes no sense. I can’t even follow the logic. It is just a pathetic attempt to find some distinction. One might also note that Lindzen has had years to rebut the statements that he hasn’t, regarding both the bet with James Annan and his $2500 / day consulting gig (which was talked about in Harper’s in 1995). Emanuel has had a full three days to rebut what Lindzen is quoted as saying in that article.
You are right about the apples and the oranges; you’re just confused about which is which.
This is a gross distortion of what I said, but why should I expect anything different from you?
The quotation marks are because calling oneself a “skeptic” doesn’t make one a skeptic. And, you are the furthest thing in the world from a “skeptic” in the normal sense of the word.
jakers says:
As I understand Lindzen’s logic, it is this:
(1) He adds up the total positive anthropogenic contribution due to ALL the greenhouse gas forcings, including methane.
(2) He ignores the negative anthropogenic contribution due to aerosols (and any natural forcings), usually with some belittling comment such as the comment “The higher sensitivity of existing models is made consistent with observed warming by invoking unknown additional negative forcings from aerosols and solar variability as arbitrary adjustments”.
(3) He ignores the possibility that there is any “heat in the pipeline”, i.e., he assumes that the transient climate sensitivity and the equilibrium climate sensitivity are the same thing.
(4) He compares the total positive anthropogenic radiative forcings to the radiative forcing that would be due to doubling of CO2 alone and thereby arrives at a claim that we are something like 70% of the way to a doubling.
I’m not saying you got to like it (I certainly don’t), but that is his train of thought, as I understand it.