This press release was provided by Sandia National Labs:
In an effort to shed light on the wide spectrum of thought regarding the causes and extent of changes in Earth’s climate, Sandia National Laboratories has invited experts from a wide variety of perspectives to present their views in the Climate Change and National Security Speaker Series.
Predictions by climate models are flawed, says invited speaker at Sandia
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, a global warming skeptic, told about 70 Sandia researchers in June that too much is being made of climate change by researchers seeking government funding. He said their data and their methods did not support their claims.
“Despite concerns over the last decades with the greenhouse process, they oversimplify the effect,” he said. “Simply cranking up CO2 [carbon dioxide] (as the culprit) is not the answer” to what causes climate change.
Lindzen, the ninth speaker in Sandia’s Climate Change and National Security Speaker Series, is Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology in MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and is the lead author of Chapter 7 (“Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks”) of the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Third Assessment Report. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.
For 30 years, climate scientists have been “locked into a simple-minded identification of climate with greenhouse-gas level. … That climate should be the function of a single parameter (like CO2) has always seemed implausible. Yet an obsessive focus on such an obvious oversimplification has likely set back progress by decades,” Lindzen said.
For major climates of the past, other factors were more important than carbon dioxide. Orbital variations have been shown to quantitatively account for the cycles of glaciations of the past 700,000 years, he said, and the elimination of the arctic inversion, when the polar caps were ice-free, “is likely to have been more important than CO2 for the warm episode during the Eocene 50 million years ago.”
There is little evidence that changes in climate are producing extreme weather events, he said. “Even the IPCC says there is little if any evidence of this. In fact, there are important physical reasons for doubting such anticipations.”
Lindzen’s views run counter to those of almost all major professional societies. For example, the American Physical Society statement of Nov. 18, 2007, read, “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.” But he doesn’t feel they are necessarily right. “Why did the American Physical Society take a position?” he asked his audience. “Why did they find it compelling? They never answered.”
Speaking methodically with flashes of humor — “I always feel that when the conversation turns to weather, people are bored.” — he said a basic problem with current computer climate models that show disastrous increases in temperature is that relatively small increases in atmospheric gases lead to large changes in temperatures in the models.
But, he said, “predictions based on high (climate) sensitivity ran well ahead of observations.”
Real-world observations do not support IPCC models, he said: “We’ve already seen almost the equivalent of a doubling of CO2 (in radiative forcing) and that has produced very little warming.”
He disparaged proving the worth of models by applying their criteria to the prediction of past climatic events, saying, “The models are no more valuable than answering a test when you have the questions in advance.”
Modelers, he said, merely have used aerosols as a kind of fudge factor to make their models come out right. (Aerosols are tiny particles that reflect sunlight. They are put in the air by industrial or volcanic processes and are considered a possible cause of temperature change at Earth’s surface.)
Then there is the practical question of what can be done about temperature increases even if they are occurring, he said. “China, India, Korea are not going to go along with IPCC recommendations, so … the only countries punished will be those who go along with the recommendations.”
He discounted mainstream opinion that climate change could hurt national security, saying that “historically there is little evidence of natural disasters leading to war, but economic conditions have proven much more serious. Almost all proposed mitigation policies lead to reduced energy availability and higher energy costs. All studies of human benefit and national security perspectives show that increased energy is important.”
He showed a graph that demonstrated that more energy consumption leads to higher literacy rate, lower infant mortality and a lower number of children per woman.
Given that proposed policies are unlikely to significantly influence climate and that lower energy availability could be considered a significant threat to national security, to continue with a mitigation policy that reduces available energy “would, at the least, appear to be irresponsible,” he argued.
Responding to audience questions about rising temperatures, he said a 0.8 of a degree C change in temperature in 150 years is a small change. Questioned about five-, seven-, and 17-year averages that seem to show that Earth’s surface temperature is rising, he said temperatures are always fluctuating by tenths of a degree.
As for the future, “Uncertainty plays a huge role in this issue,” Lindzen said. “It’s not that we expect disaster, it’s that the uncertainty is said to offer the possibility of disaster: implausible, but high consequence. Somewhere it has to be like the possible asteroid impact: Live with it.”
To a sympathetic questioner who said, “You are like a voice crying in the wilderness. It must be hard to get published,” Lindzen said, adding that billions of dollars go into funding climate studies. “The reward for solving problems is that your funding gets cut. It’s not a good incentive structure.”
Asked whether the prudent approach to possible climate change would be to prepare a gradated series of responses, much as insurance companies do when they insure cars or houses, Lindzen did not shift from his position that no actions are needed until more data is gathered.
When another Sandia employee pointed out the large number of models by researchers around the globe that suggest increases in world temperature, Lindzen said he doubted the models were independently derived but rather might produce common results because of their common origins.
The Climate Security lecture series is funded by Sandia’s Energy, Climate and Infrastructure Security division. Rob Leland is director of Sandia’s Climate Security Program.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.
h/t to Marc Marano
Wombat says:
July 25, 2012 at 8:58 pm
Moreover, climate models run into the future also have good skill at reproducing global mean surface temperatures.
The observational data on graph you linked to ends in 2000 and the projection for the period 2000 through 2012 shows a downward spike and then a continuing upward trend.
The actual observations for that same period show a flattening followed by a downward trend —
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from
— which is not exactly evidence of “good skill”…
…unless, of course, there is some brand-new definition of “good” that I’m unaware of…
Wombat says:
July 26, 2012 at 12:54 am
For the 2-3% figure, google showed this:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.full.pdf
From the .pdf: “We compiled a database of 1,372 climate researchers based on authorship of scientific assessment reports and membership on multisignatory statements about ACC.
My bolding.
They picked 1,372 scientists who had previously stated that they agreed with the tenets of AGW. Can you say, “survey bias”?
Which is probably better than the one that I was aware of, which was Doran and Zimmerman:
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
By which you admit that your original statement *was* based on the thouroughly-debunked D&Z survey. Oh, dear…
@kr:
You’ve taken Dr. Lindzen’s comments “out of context.”
/snark
Wombats aren’t known for their critical thinking skills. How many skeptical scientist would there be if funding was distributed equally to both sides? Use your pecan size brain.
KR says:
“15 years of raw data is just not sufficient to establish a linear trend in the presence of noise and variation.”
____________________________
Goal Post Moving AGAIN???
The government seems to think 10 years with thirty points is good enough to establish a trend in monthly data with seasonal variability.
No doubt he is emeritus status in order to say these things in public. The science and NGO mullahs will not be happy with this behavior. His 200 publications are water under the bridge at this point. How many in his audience have even looked at the graphs of the multidecadal ocean temp cycles to compare them to indicators of global temps, sea ice, and sea levels? And how many have considered the implications of the first and second difference of change in these cycles? That alone is the starting point for any renaissance thinker in these dark ages of climate science and policy. The use of a simple average for these multidecal cycles is unprofessional behavior by the modelers akin to using an average for economic recessions going into the great recession without considering the underlying differences and implications therein.
Gail says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/25/lindzen-at-sandia-national-labs-climate-models-are-flawed/#comment-1043177
Henry says
sorry for late reply
been busy
the PDO and AMO definitely show 50 year cycles.
obviously those (ocean) cycles are lagging as to what happens right now in the upper atmosphere,
which is where I am looking, by concentratingon observing maxima
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
try follow the comment here
is is my comment on Steve Koahane who seems not to have responded
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/21/some-thoughts-on-radiative-transfer-and-ghgs/#comment-1043017
Wombat says, “Lindzen is 399th on this list of scientists ordered by number of citations to their papers that are on the subject of climate change”
=====================================
You Sir, are as batty as your name. Really!!! Your definition of a paper on the subject of climate change includes thousands of inane papers by scientist that know zip about atmospheric studies. They may know a little bit about how in such and such region there was a drought, or a flood, and in that region these species were harmed, be it plants, animals, etc, and they then look at some stupid climate model that says, “It worse then we thought, these events will increase in the future if we do not tax the air you breath now”. From there they project that frogs will get bigger, or frogs will get smaller, or penguins will get to warm, or polar bears will drown, or forrests will burn up ,etc,etc,etc.
So these dweebs that write these papers , and site each other in a circle jerk of monumental porportions, know more about atmospheric science then Richard Lindzen. Go spread your BS elsewhere.
Just a followup to this comment upthread …
I don’t know if it is related but there seem to have been some outages at major websites:
Google Talk and Twitter suffer service outages
Twitter goes down again for extended period [Update ..back up]
They don’t know exactly why yet but there is talk of a DDoS hacking attack upstream but it could also be weather related (which likely caused the problems earlier this month). Now there is a major storm plowing up through the Northeast from the Midwest red-flagged on the Weather Channel. More problems could be coming.
By far the best compilation ever of the AGW story real hard evidence that thank god he has made the effort to retain all the original graphs and can now show how they were changed this is DE Facto evidence and will be used in court to bring these fraudster to Justice
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/history-of-how-this-fraud-was-perpetrated/ Its Time WUWT took a much harder stance on this issue. Although its a wonderful site however this is a scientific data driven argument and I think only Goddard is actually giving us the REAL HARD DATA goods we need (ie ther is no argument now it is fraud)
When there is a record cold spell, the AGW profiteers say “Weather is not climate. 2 to 4 C over the next 100 years.” When there is a heat wave, they say “Weather is indeed climate. Witness all the records being broken this summer. We told you so.” During the next record cold spell, they will say “We’ve said all along weather is not climate. 2 to 4 C over the next 100 years.”
Prof. Lindzen errs in his use of language. In particular, a “prediction” has a mathematical form that is not matched by the product of any of the IPCC’s climate models.
Wombat says:
July 26, 2012 at 12:54 am
==============
I would suggest math courses for you. Also learn to interpret a graph then you can debunk the PNAS paper you referenced to.
Question for you to research: How often were the CE (convinced by the evidence (CE) of anthropogenic climate change) category cited while their papers were being debunked?
The PNAS link was all I needed to read before I saw a waste of time with this.
Rogelio Diaz says:
July 26, 2012 at 1:57 pm
=================
Steve Goddard is doing a good job with the historical references. His site may very well be used as a source of historical reference when the trials begin. I check it daily.
KR says:
July 25, 2012 at 9:40 pm
15 years of raw data is just not sufficient to establish a linear trend in the presence of noise and variation. See http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47 for examples of insignificant periods.
I checked your site and this is what it says: “BEST land-only surface temperature data (green) with linear trends applied to the timeframes 1973 to 1980, 1980 to 1988, 1988 to 1995, 1995 to 2001, 1998 to 2005, 2002 to 2010 (blue)”
Your logic escapes me. You say “15 years of raw data is just not sufficient” and immediately proceed to show that there is noise in the following number of years: 7, 8, 7, 6, 7 and 8. (Or add 1 if the years were inclusive.) I was not talking about those low numbers.
Over two years ago I was talking with a ‘warmist’ about Phil Jones’ interview. He said 8 years means nothing and can be ignored, but 15 years is more significant. He was extremely upset that the news media had the headlines about 15 years of no warming without mentioning the significance. Today that would not matter.
(P.S. Thank you to all others who responded to KR. I had to teach physics and chemistry all day.)
Rogelio Diaz says:
July 26, 2012 at 1:57 pm
============
One more comment if I may. Many of the “better” blogs I visit have a niche. Steve Goddard (Real Science) has his and is doing a goob job and getting better. Anthony Watts (WUWT) has a really BIG niche and is very well established and respected. Steve McIntyre has his and leads the field by far in his niche. There are many others that deserve my recognition, but I have made my point. I think Anthony is covering as many bases as he can manage. That’s why we are here.
There is an army of independants and no centralized marching orders or talking points. Just a march for the truth from many angles. The search for the truth has no boundries or unified direction. It is coming from everywhere, is in motion, and unstoppable.
Anthony knows Watts Up With That! 😉
Moderators – I posted a reply, which I thought was quite tame, to Will Eschenbach about 10-12 hours ago (9-10AM EST?). I haven’t seen it posted.
Hopefully I haven’t been moderated – has it ended up in the bit-bucket? Or are there site issues? (Apparently a number of sites have been having problems over the last 24 hours)
Please delete this message from the thread, as it’s aimed entirely at the site admins….
[REPLY: I haven’t seen it and it is not any place I can see. Resubmit it. Normally, if something is out of line, we let you know what it is. If it’s out of line, I’ll tell you. Sometimes, however, stuff just happens…. and your fortitude in waitn g12 hours is admirable. -REP]
KR says:
July 25, 2012 at 8:49 pm
“As to 60 year cycles – I would consider those possible, but definitely not plausible – there’s no theoretic mechanism for storing/blocking energy for that period of time, and because the forcings we do know about over the last few hundred years match the pattern of climate change quite well without them. Why reject mechanisms we have evidence for, in favor of unsupported patterns without evidence?”
====================
You just torpedoed your ship. I was hoping to see a conversion / learning curve in your understanding of the issues being addressed to you by the other commenters.
The entire so-called “climate science” community must be aware of the 60 – 70 year climate cycle. So should you. Either you have an agenda or you need to do a little research. That is something that you must decide for yourself.
David’s post on Wombat says, “Lindzen is 399th…” was very polite but very funny and sadly also very accurate. Climate science is an interdisciplinary field similar to a field I studied (cognitive sciences) and the academics in this field are simply not all at the same level. Most academics in the field of climate science would be unable to even understand a paper by Lindzen or others working on his research topics (whether sceptical or warmist). Wombat’s arguments are of course political drivel. That is why a paper by Einstein, i.e., On the electrodynamics of moving bodies, gets 708 citations according to Google Scholar, and a paper by Andrew Wakefield, “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children” gets 1488 citations – yet this second paper was fabricated and was then retracted by The Lancet.
But according to Wombat logic, Wakefield is a better researcher than Einstein. Or… Wombat is either not very bright, or intentionally disingenuous.
eyesonu says
The entire so-called “climate science” community must be aware of the 60 – 70 year climate cycle
Henry says
According to my calculations, looking rather at the development of maximum temps, i.e. the energy input,
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
the cycle is 50 years give or take one or two years
However, because of the flatness of the curve when approaching the zero points, i.e. no GW and no GC, and when looking at the means (i.e. earth average energy output) you might easily be lulled in to thinking there is 5 years more on either side, making it a 60 year cycle at the very most.
The 50 year cycle was very important in the Jewish calendar, 7 x 7 + 1 Jubilee year, when all property went to their original owners. I suspect Moses got this information from the Egyptians, the pyramid builders who were experts on the energy we get from the sun.
BTW I strongly suspect the cycle is related to ozone which was at its lowest point in the nineties – so the ozone scare due to CFC’s also seems to have been a complete hoax.
When testifying in public fora, scientists like Lindzen need to abandon their delicate sense of “appropriate professional vocabulary.” Use phrases that communicate to their audiences, like “Crippled incompetent junk”, or “Laughably inaccurate cartoons”.
“Flawed” just doesn’t cut it, Richard.
“Modelers, he (Lindzen) said, merely have used aerosols as a kind of fudge factor to make their models come out right.”
Too true. See below, from 2009
– Allan
__________
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/12/blue-sky-research-reveals-trends-in-air-pollution-clears-way-for-new-climate-change-studies/#comments
Allan M R MacRae (17:53:04) :
Please see Douglas Hoyt’s post below. He is the same D.V. Hoyt who authored/co-authored the four papers referenced below.
Please note there is historic data available that could be of considerable use.
BUT: “There is no funding to do complete checks.”
Anyone want to take on this challenge?
Suggest tapping into the millions that Obama has allocated for climate modelling to get these modelers some real data on aerosols.
I understand they’ve been inventing aerosol data to get their models to history-match the cooling period from ~1945-1975. Hoyt says so such evidence exists in his data.
Regards, Allan
__________________
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=755
Douglas Hoyt:
July 22nd, 2006 at 5:37 am
Measurements of aerosols did not begin in the 1970s. There were measurements before then, but not so well organized. However, there were a number of pyrheliometric measurements made and it is possible to extract aerosol information from them by the method described in:
Hoyt, D. V., 1979. The apparent atmospheric transmission using the pyrheliometric ratioing techniques. Appl. Optics, 18, 2530-2531.
The pyrheliometric ratioing technique is very insensitive to any changes in calibration of the instruments and very sensitive to aerosol changes.
Here are three papers using the technique:
Hoyt, D. V. and C. Frohlich, 1983. Atmospheric transmission at Davos, Switzerland, 1909-1979. Climatic Change, 5, 61-72.
Hoyt, D. V., C. P. Turner, and R. D. Evans, 1980. Trends in atmospheric transmission at three locations in the United States from 1940 to 1977. Mon. Wea. Rev., 108, 1430-1439.
Hoyt, D. V., 1979. Pyrheliometric and circumsolar sky radiation measurements by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory from 1923 to 1954. Tellus, 31, 217-229.
In none of these studies were any long-term trends found in aerosols, although volcanic events show up quite clearly. There are other studies from Belgium, Ireland, and Hawaii that reach the same conclusions. It is significant that Davos shows no trend whereas the IPCC models show it in the area where the greatest changes in aerosols were occurring.
There are earlier aerosol studies by Hand and Marvin in Monthly Weather Review going back to the 1880s and these studies also show no trends.
So when MacRae (#321) says: “I suspect that both the climate computer models and the input assumptions are not only inadequate, but in some cases key data is completely fabricated – for example, the alleged aerosol data that forces models to show cooling from ~1940 to ~1975. Isn’t it true that there was little or no quality aerosol data collected during 1940-1975, and the modelers simply invented data to force their models to history-match; then they claimed that their models actually reproduced past climate change quite well; and then they claimed they could therefore understand climate systems well enough to confidently predict future catastrophic warming?”, he close to the truth.
_____________________________________________________________________
Douglas Hoyt:
July 22nd, 2006 at 10:37 am
Re #328
“Are you the same D.V. Hoyt who wrote the three referenced papers?” Yes.
“Can you please briefly describe the pyrheliometric technique, and how the historic data samples are obtained?”
The technique uses pyrheliometers to look at the sun on clear days. Measurements are made at air mass 5, 4, 3, and 2. The ratios 4/5, 3/4, and 2/3 are found and averaged. The number gives a relative measure of atmospheric transmission and is insensitive to water vapor amount, ozone, solar extraterrestrial irradiance changes, etc. It is also insensitive to any changes in the calibration of the instruments. The ratioing minimizes the spurious responses leaving only the responses to aerosols.
I have data for about 30 locations worldwide going back to the turn of the century.
Preliminary analysis shows no trend anywhere, except maybe Japan.
There is no funding to do complete checks.
KR wrote:
“As to 60 year cycles – I would consider those possible, but definitely not plausible – there’s no theoretic mechanism for storing/blocking energy for that period of time, and because the forcings we do know about over the last few hundred years match the pattern of climate change quite well without them. Why reject mechanisms we have evidence for, in favor of unsupported patterns without evidence?”
===============
Is PDO, AMO, et al, imaginary?
So when Michael Mann, Park and Bradley (heroes of the global warming movement) discuss these cycles in Nature and argue that they are ‘intrinsic to the natural climate system’:
http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/MPB1995.PDF
…or for that matter Google scholar brings up hundreds of articles and papers on these cycles, what does one make of KR’s opinion that such cycles are possible but ‘not plausible’ ?
It would be more interesting if KR provided links to published papers that attempt to refute these cycles rather than merely an expression of an opinion from KR that he does not believe in them. Is this because he believes CO2 explains everything so therefore other explanations are by default in ‘contest’ with his beliefs? Don’t know.
KR says:
July 26, 2012 at 6:48 pm
Moderators – I posted a reply, which I thought was quite tame, to Will Eschenbach about 10-12 hours ago (9-10AM EST?). I haven’t seen it posted.
Hopefully I haven’t been moderated – has it ended up in the bit-bucket? Or are there site issues?
Sometimes it’s just a WordPress artifact, KR. I’ve had both replies and innocuous comments disappear right after hitting “Post Comment” over the past couple of years. Not often, but it happens…
Allan MacRae says:
July 26, 2012 at 10:58 pm
Correction of typo above:
I understand they’ve been inventing aerosol data to get their models to history-match the cooling period from ~1945-1975. Hoyt says no such evidence exists in his data.