Posted on 07/02/2006 8:35:11 AM PDT by maine-iac7
Editor's note: Global warming is unlikely to be a dangerous future problem, with or without the implementation of such programs as the Kyoto Protocol, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...alarmist media claims to the contrary are fueled more by politics than by science...
The global mean temperature is never constant, and it has no choice but to increase or decrease--both of which it does on all known time scales. That this quantity has increased about 0.6ºC (or about 1ºF) over the past century is likely. A relevant question is whether this is anything to be concerned about....
It doesn't even matter whether recent global mean temperatures are "record breakers" or even whether current temperatures are "unprecedented." All that matters is that the change over the past century has been small....
Kyoto, itself, will have no discernable impact on global warming regardless of what one believes about climate change...
The scientific community is committed to the maintenance of the notion that alarm may be warranted. Alarm is felt to be essential to the maintenance of funding. The argument is no longer over whether the models are correct (they are not), but rather whether their results are at all possible. One can rarely prove something to be impossible...
The main victims of any proactive policies are likely to be consumers, and they have little concentrated influence. As usual, they have long been co-opted by organizations like Consumers Union that now actively support Kyoto.
(Excerpt) Read more at heartland.org ...
What a blind, doctrinaire, intolerant fool you are. What a despicable human being.
The thing is, I'm a pragmatist to the best of my ability. Most things are on the table. If Warren Buffett says the market system has failed the poor I pay attention.
Thanks for the ping, but Lindzen hasn't changed his tune much over a decade.
From a layman's perspective it helps to look at the claims of the environmentalists from the perspective of whether or not they can substantiate their claims. The Hockey stick theory is instructive in this regard because it reveals how quickly the greens adopted it untested. It has since been substantially discredited. It also helps to recognize the political motivations behind their sky is falling rhetoric. They've made it plain if you bother to read their speeches (another poster here put up some eye opening quotes) that environmental protection isn't their aim. The destruction of Democratic Capitalism is.
I've been in the LA basin in the 80's. It sucked. If I played a round of golf I was wheezing and unable to catch my breath for an hour. But as you point out LA is a micro climate with the smog trapped by the mountains. Judging the impact of cars and industrialization on the planet based on your experience in LA will lead you to grossly exaggerate the impact. If you are familiar with the writings of some of the earlier explorers in that area you will find that they commented on the concentration of smoke and haze even then.
As for Lindzen's claims, I'm familiar with the tactics of the left in silencing critics. I don't discredit him on the basis that he claims dissenters are being silenced. You'll notice that dissenters in the illegal immigration debate are branded as racist and guilty of hate speech. That's an example of such tactics in action.
What a blind, doctrinaire, intolerant fool you are. What a despicable human being.
LOL! I just call it like I see it. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. You sir, are a duck (socialist).
That's the trouble. You're too blind to see and too dumb to know it.
Well, then, if CO2 is a pollutant, we should all just quit breathing.
That's the problem here - getting all the smoke screens out of this debate.
Snicker. See ya.
Hey, I thought I'd be hearing from you. Why did you wait so long? :)
Here's what I mean by a pollutant. The co2 we're throwing into the atmosphere is an unwanted by-product of desireable industial processes. It's put into the air for the same reason people dump used motor oil into the storm drains; because it's the cheapest way to dispose of it. Whether it's harmful or not is not much of a consideration.
True, it might turn out to be beneficial. Such things happen. But that's not why it's being emitted and that's not why people are fighting for the right to keep on emitting.
First, Lindzen is willing to agree that the co2 levels have risen in recent years due to human activity. How much? Well, it seems they've risen by at least 25% over maximums established over the last 500,000 years and will continue to rise for the next half-century.
Yep and its effect on climate is negligible to say the least.
"the direct radiative effects of doubled CO2 can cause a maximum surface warming [at the equator] of about 0.2 K, and hence roughly 90% of the 2.0-2.5 K surface warming obtained by the GCM is caused by atmospheric feedback processes described above."
--- "Increased Atmospheric CO2: Zonal and Seasonal Estimates of the Effect on the Radiation Energy Balance and Surface Temperature" (V. Ramanathan and M. S. Lian), J. Geophys. Res., Vol. 84, p. 4949, 1979.
As far as how much CO2 is project to rise in reality, well the basis of those projections are rather thin at the very least.
http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/cap/2003/cap_03-02-20.html
"The Economist, which provides the best environmental reporting of any major news source, carried a small story last week about a simple methodological error in the latest U.N. global warming report that has huge implications. The article, "Hot Potato: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Had Better Check Its Calculations" (February 15 print edition), reviews the work of two Australian statisticians who note an anomaly in the way the IPCC estimated world carbon dioxide emissions for the 21st century."
......
"The IPCC's method has the effect of vastly overestimating future economic growth (and, therefore, CO2 emissions) by developing nations. The fine print of the IPCC's projections, for example, calls for the real per-capita incomes of Argentina, South Africa, Algeria, Turkey, and even North Korea to surpass real per-capita income in the United States by the end of the century. Algeria? North Korea? The IPCC must be inhaling its own emissions to believe this."
Not to mention:
Anthropogenic (man-made) Contribution to the "Greenhouse
Effect," expressed as % of Total (water vapor INCLUDED)
Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics % of All Greenhouse Gases % Natural
% Man-made
Water vapor 95.000% 94.999%
0.001% Carbon Dioxide (CO2) 3.618% 3.502%
0.117% Methane (CH4) 0.360% 0.294%
0.066% Nitrous Oxide (N2O) 0.950% 0.903%
0.047% Misc. gases ( CFC's, etc.) 0.072% 0.025%
0.047% Total 100.00% 99.72
0.28%
Second, Lindzen thinks this is no cause for concern because his calculations lead him to believe that the rise in temperatures due to this build-up are very small. Most of the graphs and arguments posted on this thread are in support of this position.
Absolutely.
Third, in the last 500,000 years co2 concentrations have followed temperature changes. In other words, temperatures changed due to solar energy fluctuations or wobbles in the earth's orbit and these temperature changes affected plant life which affected the carbon cycle.
Yep.
In earlier periods, vulcanism was more important and co2 levels were closely related to volcanic activity.
Actually that depends on the geological period, in the last half million years or so it has been more due to increases in bio activity and release of from solution from ocean and ice as global temperatures warm.
Earlier, say 500 million years ago +++ the original CO2 was from volcanizm from the formation processes of earth. Those levels. that exeeded 7000 ppm, were locked up into fossil fuels and carbonate formation in the oceans drawing the high concentrations of CO2 down at an exponential decay rate to approximately the current levels the earth now enjoys. By the way these processes have not ended, they continue today in scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere, increasing in rate with temperature.
And the Co2 that you are emitting is an unwanted by-product of living? CO2 is a vital atmospheric component.
The problem with most global warming "science" is that global warming is often used as a front for other agendas, such as concepts of sustainable development, curtailing western economies, or out-and-out anti-industrialism. I do not put you into those categories - I think you are genuinely concerned about the possible impacts - but too much of the science is based upon modelling. Modelling is too prone to have preconceptions or agendas put into the assumptions - which is how you end up the hockey-stick graph that sought to pretend that clear climatological history such as the Little Ice Age did not exist - but that yields the same shape with random data.
When you have that kind of dishonest science, you have to seriously examine the underlying motives of those promoting such. And when you also have global warming on Mars and clear evidence of increased solar output, you have to give serious credibility to natural explanations for any warming we have seen over recent decades, unless neutral scientists can present much more compelling evidence than we have seen to date.
The veracity of an argument is based on whether or not they bend to your line of thought?
Neat.
Yep. It's possible that the exhilations of 7 billion human beings together with deforestation are alone - discounting industrialization - enough to change the percent of atmospheric c02. Balance is everything.
The problem with most global warming "science" is that global warming is often used as a front for other agendas
Yep. It's a problem anytime science of any kind directly impacts peoples' lives and fortunes. It's a problem anytime any sort of ideas do. Can't be helped. Human nature. One has to learn to filter out the noise.
which is how you end up the hockey-stick graph that sought to pretend that clear climatological history such as the Little Ice Age did not exist - but that yields the same shape with random data.
In an earlier post someone pointed out that the IPCC posted graphs clearly showing the Little Ice Age and preceding Medieval Warm period but then replaced them with the hockey stick. Clearly, every climatologist is aware of these periods and proponents of global warming must have had good reasons for preferring the hockey stick. I never did get around to finding out what they were. Ditto the random data.
When you have that kind of dishonest science,
Sorry, you lose me here. I'm sure exponents of global warming have offered explanation of those two periods consistant with their thesis. You may not like them...but that's another matter.
And when you also have global warming on Mars and clear evidence of increased solar output...
Ditto. Only Dr. Mann's refusal to disclose some of his data and methodology to a congressional investigator strikes me as improper...and I don't know the whole story. His actions were defended by the scientific community and that gives me pause.
And then you sidestep specific examples I gave, rather than address those.
Clearly, every climatologist is aware of these periods and proponents of global warming must have had good reasons for preferring the hockey stick.
That's pretty simple - they were trying to get around the basic problem with their theories - that there has been tremendous natural variation in climate within documented human history.
I never did get around to finding out what they were. Ditto the random data.
Well, then, you really should educate yourself.
...But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.
But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
---------
I'm sure exponents of global warming have offered explanation of those two periods consistant with their thesis
Read the link. Do more research. The Hockey Stick was put forth to show that the Little Ice Age and Medival Warm Period did not exist. But it was designed to produce the results. And Nature refused to publish the refutation of the hockey stick, even though it was an important refutation of global warming dogma. Which shows the larger global warming community is not interested in inconvenient truths. In other words, they are being dishonest.
Yes, there are plenty of hysterical anti-capitalists on the Left who are desperate to blame their own short-comings on their betters, on the successful, on the rich, the good-looking, the lucky. So what? I can see them well enough.
As far as I can tell the hockey stick is a different matter. It still has substantial support in the scientific community. Mann is a serious scientist who was aware of the evidence when he offered his theory.
But as you point out LA is a micro climate with the smog trapped by the mountains.
That's the point. It could be a preview of things to come as the scale of pollution increases.
Judging the impact of cars and industrialization on the planet based on your experience in LA will lead you to grossly exaggerate the impact.
Again, I see it as a possible preview. I offer the caveat because the characteristics of the world's atmosphere may be substantially different than that of L.A. - disipating easily what L.A. traps. But I doubt it.
If you are familiar with the writings of some of the earlier explorers in that area you will find that they commented on the concentration of smoke and haze even then.
Exactly.
I don't discredit him on the basis that he claims dissenters are being silenced.
I don't either but it's not possible to take those claims seriously when he finds voice in the Wall St. Journal and Scientific American.
Not exactly. Lindzen thinks that cloud effects will limit the potential warming in the next century. Even when his own attempts to show how that might work have been refuted (which might be a slightly strong word, as he has tried to shore up the theory, but the original statement has been shown to have serious deficiencies), he hasn't changed that view. He can still think it, and there are certainly uncertainties about clouds, but this has been the song he sings whenever asked to perform.
I ask because I don't think any of them address my gut fear that the pollution is no good for reasons not yet addressed or barely mentioned.
Six editors recently resigned from the journal Climate Research because of this issue. Their crime: publishing the article "Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1,000 Years," by W. Soon and S. Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Without passing judgment on this particular paper, I can still point out that our journals are full of poor papers. If editors were dismissed every time they published one, they would all be out of work within a month or two. What made the Soon and Baliunas situation different is that their paper attracted enormous attention. And that's because it threw doubt on the hockey stick.
If you don't know what the hockey stick is, do a Google search, including the word "climate." You'll learn that it is the nickname for a remarkable graph that has become a poster child for the environmental movement. Published by M. Mann and colleagues in 1998 and 1999, the plot showed that the climate of the Northern Hemisphere had been remarkably constant for 900 years until it suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago-right about the time that human use of fossil fuels began to push up levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The overall shape of the curve resembled a hockey stick laying on its back-a straight part with a sudden bend upwards near the end.
The hockey stick was turned from a scientific plot into the most widely reproduced picture of the global warming discussion. The version below comes from the influential 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The hockey stick figure appears five times in just the summary volume alone.
False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction
The first thing I notice is that it's misleading to call these guys scientists, implying special expertise in the relevant field. The second thing is that I, as a layman, can't evaluate the conflicting claims. I can read them and think about what I can understand but I'm not going to bother learning the relevant mathematics, physics, and data.
They were well-qualified to evaluate a model - and it failed to pass a basic statistical test of running a random data set through it. That is my entire point - much of what passes for climatology is nothing more than programming and assumptions.
And if you insist on "scientists" criticizing the hockey stick, look up Soon and Baliunas mentioned in post #97.
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