MIT Prof. Richard Lindzen (retired) has published a very interesting new paper

Not as far as Washington- but they have sea level problems ;

The Maldives is threatened by rising seas, but coastal development is causing even more pressing environmental issues

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-maldives-threatened-seas-coastal-environmental.html


be afraid.....be very afraid......
fter a period of approximately 2,000 years of little change (not shown here), global average sea level rose throughout the 20th century, and the rate of change has accelerated in recent years. When averaged over all of the world’s oceans, absolute sea level has risen at an average rate of 0.06 inches per year from 1880 to 2013 (see Figure 1). Since 1993, however, average sea level has risen at a rate of 0.12 to 0.14 inches per year—roughly twice as fast as the long-term trend.

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-sea-level
 
Heatwaves put classic Alpine hiking routes off-limits
Routes that are usually safe at this time of year now face hazards as a result of warmer temperatures


Little snow cover and glaciers melting at an alarming rate in Europe’s heatwaves have put some classic Alpine hiking routes off-limits.

Usually at the height of summer tourists flock to the Alps and seek out well-trodden paths up to some of its peaks. But with warmer temperatures – which scientists say are driven by climate change – speeding up glacier melt and thawing permafrost, routes that are usually safe at this time of year now face hazards such as falling rocks released from the ice.

“Currently in the Alps, there are warnings for around a dozen peaks, including emblematic ones like Matterhorn and Mont Blanc,” said Pierre Mathey, the head of the Swiss mountain guide association.

He said this was happening far earlier in the season than normal. “Usually we see such closures in August, but now they have started at the end of June and are continuing in July.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/31/heatwaves-put-classic-alpine-hiking-routes-off-limits


The Brit maggot will be desperately scrolling for an article on ' Ski-friction heat generation since 1835 '


Haw, haw, haw, haw, haw............................haw.
 
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I have great admiration for Dick Lindzen, he is an intellectual powerhouse no wonder he is feared by climate alarmists.

I will try to get a non-paywalled copy of this paper.

The article is written in very easy terms, at least concerning the first 3 chapters and the conclusion in chapter 5. I read it carefully several times and will try to summarize as best I can.

Introduction
In the introduction Lindzen recall’s that greenhouse warming is a recent element in climate literature, and even if known and mentioned, played a minor role in climate science before 1980. He also repeats a mostly ignored argument, i.e. that even if there is some global warming now (from whatever causes) the claim that this must be catastrophic should be seen with suspicion.

2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is titled “The climate system” and on these less than 1.5 pages Lindzen excels in clarity. He writes nothing that could be controversial, but many of these facts are constantly ignored in the media: the uneven solar heating between the equator and the poles drives the motions of heat in the air and the oceans; in the latter there are changes in timescales ranging from years (e.g. El-Nino, PDO and AMO) to millenia, and these changes are present even if the composition of the atmosphere would be unchanging.

The surface of the oceans is never in equilibrium with space, and the complicated air flow over geographic landscapes causes regional variations in climate (not well described by climate models). Not CO2, but water vapor and clouds are the two most important greenhouse substances; doubling the atmospheric CO2 content would increase the energy budget by less than 2%.

He writes that the political/scientific consensus is that changes in global radiative forcing are the unique cause of changes of global temperatures, and these changes are predominantly caused by increasing CO2 emissions. This simplified picture of one global cause (global radiative forcing) and one global effect (global temperature) to describe the climate is mistaken.

It is water vapor that essentially blocks outgoing IR radiation which causes the surface and adjacent air to warm and so triggers convection. Convection and radiative processes result in temperature decreasing with height, up to level where there is so little water vapor left that radiation escapes unhindered to space. It is at this altitude where the radiative equilibrium between incoming solar energy and outgoing IR energy happens, and the temperature there is 255 K. As the temperature has decreased with height, level zero (i.e. the surface) must be warmer. Adding other greenhouse gases (like CO2) increases the equilibrium height, and as a consequence the temperature of the surface. The radiative budget is constantly changed by other factors, as varying cloud cover and height, snow, ocean circulations etc. These changes have an effect that is comparable to that of doubling the CO2 content of the atmosphere. And most important, even if the solar forcing (i.e. the engine driving the climate) would be constant, the climate would still vary, as the system has autonomous variability!

The problem of the “consensus” climatology (IPCC and politics) is that they ignore the many variables at work and simplify the perturbation of energy budget of a complex system to the perturbing effect of a single variable (CO2).

3. History

In this short chapter Lindzen enumerates the many scientists that disagreed up into the eighties with the consensus view. But between 1988 and 1994, climate funding in the USA for example increased by a factor of 15! And all the “new” climate scientists understood very well that the reason for this extraordinary increase in funding was the global warming alarm, which became a self-fulfilling cause.

Let me here repeat as an aside what the German physicist Dr. Gerd Weber wrote 1992 in his book “Der Treibhauseffekt”:

4. Chapter 4

This is the longest chapter in Lindzen’s paper, also one that demands a few lectures to understand it correctly. Lindzen wants to show that the thermal difference between equatorial and polar region has an influence on global temperature, and that this difference is independent from the CO2 content of the atmosphere. He recalls the Milankovitch cycles and the important messages that variations in arctic (summer) insolation cause the fluctuations in ice cover. The arctic inversion (i.e. temperature increasing with height) makes the surface difference between equator and polar temperatures greater than they are at the polar tropopause ( 6 km). So one does not have to introduce a mysterious “polar amplification” (as does the IPCC) for this temperature differential.

Lindzen establishes a very simple formula which gives the change in global temperature as the sum of the changes of the tropical temperature (mostly caused by greenhouse radiative forcing) and that of the changes of the equator-to-pole temperature difference (which is independent of the greenhouse effect). This means that even in the absence of greenhouse gas forcings (what is the aim of the actual climate policies) there will be changes in global temperature.

5. Conclusion

The conclusion is that the basic premise of the conventional (consensus or not) climate picture that all changes in global (mean) temperature are due to radiative forcing is mistaken.

My personal remarks:

Will this paper by one of the most important atmospheric scientists be read by the people deciding on extremely costly and radical climate policies? Will it be mentioned in the media?

I doubt it. The climate train like the “Snowpiercer” in the Netflix series is launched full steam ahead, and political decisions become more and more the result of quasi religious emotions than that of scientific reasoning. But reality and physics are stubborn… and so as the Snowpiercer is vulnerable to avalanches and rockfall, the actual simplistic climate view could well change during the next decades, long before the predicted climate catastrophe in 2100 will occur.

https://meteolcd.wordpress.com/2020/06/23/lindzens-new-paper-an-oversimplified-picture/

.
 
.
I have great admiration for Dick Lindzen, he is an intellectual powerhouse no wonder he is feared by climate alarmists.

I will try to get a non-paywalled copy of this paper.

The article is written in very easy terms, at least concerning the first 3 chapters and the conclusion in chapter 5. I read it carefully several times and will try to summarize as best I can.

Introduction
In the introduction Lindzen recall’s that greenhouse warming is a recent element in climate literature, and even if known and mentioned, played a minor role in climate science before 1980. He also repeats a mostly ignored argument, i.e. that even if there is some global warming now (from whatever causes) the claim that this must be catastrophic should be seen with suspicion.

2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is titled “The climate system” and on these less than 1.5 pages Lindzen excels in clarity. He writes nothing that could be controversial, but many of these facts are constantly ignored in the media: the uneven solar heating between the equator and the poles drives the motions of heat in the air and the oceans; in the latter there are changes in timescales ranging from years (e.g. El-Nino, PDO and AMO) to millenia, and these changes are present even if the composition of the atmosphere would be unchanging.

The surface of the oceans is never in equilibrium with space, and the complicated air flow over geographic landscapes causes regional variations in climate (not well described by climate models). Not CO2, but water vapor and clouds are the two most important greenhouse substances; doubling the atmospheric CO2 content would increase the energy budget by less than 2%.

He writes that the political/scientific consensus is that changes in global radiative forcing are the unique cause of changes of global temperatures, and these changes are predominantly caused by increasing CO2 emissions. This simplified picture of one global cause (global radiative forcing) and one global effect (global temperature) to describe the climate is mistaken.

It is water vapor that essentially blocks outgoing IR radiation which causes the surface and adjacent air to warm and so triggers convection. Convection and radiative processes result in temperature decreasing with height, up to level where there is so little water vapor left that radiation escapes unhindered to space. It is at this altitude where the radiative equilibrium between incoming solar energy and outgoing IR energy happens, and the temperature there is 255 K. As the temperature has decreased with height, level zero (i.e. the surface) must be warmer. Adding other greenhouse gases (like CO2) increases the equilibrium height, and as a consequence the temperature of the surface. The radiative budget is constantly changed by other factors, as varying cloud cover and height, snow, ocean circulations etc. These changes have an effect that is comparable to that of doubling the CO2 content of the atmosphere. And most important, even if the solar forcing (i.e. the engine driving the climate) would be constant, the climate would still vary, as the system has autonomous variability!

The problem of the “consensus” climatology (IPCC and politics) is that they ignore the many variables at work and simplify the perturbation of energy budget of a complex system to the perturbing effect of a single variable (CO2).

3. History

In this short chapter Lindzen enumerates the many scientists that disagreed up into the eighties with the consensus view. But between 1988 and 1994, climate funding in the USA for example increased by a factor of 15! And all the “new” climate scientists understood very well that the reason for this extraordinary increase in funding was the global warming alarm, which became a self-fulfilling cause.

Let me here repeat as an aside what the German physicist Dr. Gerd Weber wrote 1992 in his book “Der Treibhauseffekt”:

4. Chapter 4

This is the longest chapter in Lindzen’s paper, also one that demands a few lectures to understand it correctly. Lindzen wants to show that the thermal difference between equatorial and polar region has an influence on global temperature, and that this difference is independent from the CO2 content of the atmosphere. He recalls the Milankovitch cycles and the important messages that variations in arctic (summer) insolation cause the fluctuations in ice cover. The arctic inversion (i.e. temperature increasing with height) makes the surface difference between equator and polar temperatures greater than they are at the polar tropopause ( 6 km). So one does not have to introduce a mysterious “polar amplification” (as does the IPCC) for this temperature differential.

Lindzen establishes a very simple formula which gives the change in global temperature as the sum of the changes of the tropical temperature (mostly caused by greenhouse radiative forcing) and that of the changes of the equator-to-pole temperature difference (which is independent of the greenhouse effect). This means that even in the absence of greenhouse gas forcings (what is the aim of the actual climate policies) there will be changes in global temperature.

5. Conclusion

The conclusion is that the basic premise of the conventional (consensus or not) climate picture that all changes in global (mean) temperature are due to radiative forcing is mistaken.

My personal remarks:

Will this paper by one of the most important atmospheric scientists be read by the people deciding on extremely costly and radical climate policies? Will it be mentioned in the media?

I doubt it. The climate train like the “Snowpiercer” in the Netflix series is launched full steam ahead, and political decisions become more and more the result of quasi religious emotions than that of scientific reasoning. But reality and physics are stubborn… and so as the Snowpiercer is vulnerable to avalanches and rockfall, the actual simplistic climate view could well change during the next decades, long before the predicted climate catastrophe in 2100 will occur.

https://meteolcd.wordpress.com/2020/06/23/lindzens-new-paper-an-oversimplified-picture/

Everybody with an asshole has their own theory on Climate CHANGES and Climate Control.

The thing is, Dick Lindzen is just one MIT professor! There are many others who do not believe Dick Linzen's theories on the subject!
 
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Here is another article by the great man on the subject of China, no wonder they are running rings around the West when fools like Biden actively aid and abet them.

China Warming

The CCP is by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet. Is that a problem?

Many of the world's leaders appear to believe that emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) constitute an existential threat whose impact is already severe and will become impossible to deal with within a very few years. This has resulted in a number of international agreements, beginning with the Rio Pact of 1992 and continuing up through the 2016 Paris Accords. Despite these agreements, the increase in the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere continues unabated (see Figure 1). In surveying the underlying science, it becomes clear that the role played by China in this story is indicative of a more general cynicism inherent in many of the supposed “solutions” to climate change.

From a minimum in temperature around 1960 (basically the end of a modest cooling trend beginning around 1939, which led to concerns over global cooling) until 1998, the global mean temperature anomaly (the index used to describe the Earth’s temperature) did increase by about 0.5 degrees Celsius. That’s a small change compared to the typical change between breakfast and lunch, though the net increase since then has been relatively insignificant (except for a major El Niño in 2014-16) and appreciably less than predicted by all climate models. It should be noted that the increase was small compared to what was happening in any given region, and temperatures at any given location were almost as likely to be cooling as warming. Despite the fact that increases of CO₂ thus far have been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history, and despite the fact that there have been large increases in the Earth’s vegetated area largely due to increases in CO₂’s role in photosynthesis, governments seem to have concluded that another 0.5 C will spell doom.

One sees frequent references to the agreement of 97% of the world’s scientists. However, as pointed out by Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer (and myself), this claim is specious. One also sees references to increases in things like sea level, hurricanes, and other weather extremes, but as been widely noted, these claims are based on the illegitimate cherry picking of starting dates for the trends. There is also the important question of what exactly constitutes an existential threat. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if we continue along the present path, using the current models that seem to overestimate warming, there would be in 2100 a reduction of global gross domestic product of less than 4% (of a total GDP that would be much higher than what we have today). It is hard to call this an existential threat.

Let us ignore the above problems for the moment, and ask why emissions that presumably have led to the observed increase in CO₂ have continued to increase. Increasing emissions from China, India, and the rest of the developing world swamp the small reductions in the Anglosphere and the European Union. Indeed, if emissions from the Anglosphere and the EU were to cease (which is of course an impossibility), it would make little difference. According to the Global Energy Monitor, China is planning the addition of 200 GW of coal-fired generating capacity by 2025. If we assume this is a four-year period and that a large-scale power plant is 1 GW, that would be about one plant per week over the next four years. Why would China intentionally pursue the presumed destruction of the Earth? Moreover, why are the Anglosphere and the EU pursuing hugely disruptive, destructive, and expensive policies intended to reduce their already largely irrelevant emissions?

The answer to the first question is likely to be that China sees the threat of climate change as readily manageable regardless of what one believes about the underlying physics (remember that China’s leaders, as opposed to ours, tend to have technical backgrounds). But they also recognize that climate hysteria in the West leads to policies that clearly benefit China. Indeed, China is actually promoting activities like the Sino-American Youth Dialogue on climate change to promote climate alarm among young American activists. In a recent announcement sent to students at MIT, the Youth Dialogue’s Committee stated:

With rapid growth of the global population and the continuous expansion of the world economy, carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere have surged. Extreme disasters induced by global warming keep popping up. The world is undergoing irreversible climate change. It is in everyone’s stake to protect the planet we call home. We must confront the problems brought to mother nature by climate change and seek solutions in cooperation, sharing responsibility as two major countries and collectively building ‘a community with a shared future for mankind.’
The letter went on to offer modest cash rewards to those making the most “compelling” arguments. At the same time, the Chinese, unlike the World Bank, have been happy to fund coal projects in developing countries. (It will be interesting to see how the Communist Party implements Chairman Xi’s recent pledge to cease this practice.)

The second question is more worrisome because of the patent illogic of proposals claiming to address climate change. Confronted with natural disasters, it is obvious that richer societies are more resilient than poorer societies. For example, earthquakes in Haiti can result in thousands of deaths. Similar earthquakes in California result in orders of magnitude fewer deaths. Thus, it would seem that confronted with what is claimed is an existential threat over which we, in fact, have almost no influence, it seems obvious that the correct policy would be to increase resilience against disasters. Instead, the West is proposing to do the very opposite. It is hard to think of good or virtuous reasons for such a policy. Perhaps our policymakers have a pseudo-religious wish to expiate the sin of letting ordinary people reach comfortable middle-class standards of living. The encouragement of such policies by China is undoubtedly one of the reasons; certainly, many of the proposed Western responses (electric cars, windmills, and solar panels) will involve heavy investments in China, which dominates the global solar industry and is already the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles.

But I doubt that this is the main reason. To be sure, the common response of politicians to any purported problem is to do “something.” These “somethings” often involve some short-term benefits to the politicians and institutions that support such policies. But in the case of climate alarm, one has to wonder if those politicians who are investing in waterfront property are really concerned about the climate. Nor is the rejection of nuclear power indicative of seriousness.

Debate over this issue has been avoided and even actively suppressed under the fatuous claim that the science is “settled.” Indeed by 1988 Newsweek had already claimed that all scientists were agreed on the subject, even though nothing could have been further from the truth. And the truth has been buried ever since. As former Energy Undersecretary for Science in the Obama administration Steven Koonin compellingly illustrates in Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, the issue remains far from actually being settled. The book relies entirely on the science from the official assessments of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and from similar official U.S. assessment reports. The vicious attacks on Koonin since the book’s release in May indicate the absence of almost any level of discourse. Yet, given what is at issue, the need for an open debate over both our assessment of climate science and the proposed policies is, indeed, desperately needed.

Richard S. Lindzen is Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
 
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Everybody with an asshole has their own theory on Climate CHANGES and Climate Control.

The thing is, Dick Lindzen is just one MIT professor! There are many others who do not believe Dick Linzen's theories on the subject!

Thank you for such a valuable and profound insight, your intellectual rigour and profound analysis is a lesson to us all!
 
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Here is another article by the great man on the subject of China, no wonder they are running rings around the West when fools like Biden actively aid and abet them.

China Warming

The CCP is by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet. Is that a problem?

Many of the world's leaders appear to believe that emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) constitute an existential threat whose impact is already severe and will become impossible to deal with within a very few years. This has resulted in a number of international agreements, beginning with the Rio Pact of 1992 and continuing up through the 2016 Paris Accords. Despite these agreements, the increase in the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere continues unabated (see Figure 1). In surveying the underlying science, it becomes clear that the role played by China in this story is indicative of a more general cynicism inherent in many of the supposed “solutions” to climate change.

From a minimum in temperature around 1960 (basically the end of a modest cooling trend beginning around 1939, which led to concerns over global cooling) until 1998, the global mean temperature anomaly (the index used to describe the Earth’s temperature) did increase by about 0.5 degrees Celsius. That’s a small change compared to the typical change between breakfast and lunch, though the net increase since then has been relatively insignificant (except for a major El Niño in 2014-16) and appreciably less than predicted by all climate models. It should be noted that the increase was small compared to what was happening in any given region, and temperatures at any given location were almost as likely to be cooling as warming. Despite the fact that increases of CO₂ thus far have been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history, and despite the fact that there have been large increases in the Earth’s vegetated area largely due to increases in CO₂’s role in photosynthesis, governments seem to have concluded that another 0.5 C will spell doom.

One sees frequent references to the agreement of 97% of the world’s scientists. However, as pointed out by Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer (and myself), this claim is specious. One also sees references to increases in things like sea level, hurricanes, and other weather extremes, but as been widely noted, these claims are based on the illegitimate cherry picking of starting dates for the trends. There is also the important question of what exactly constitutes an existential threat. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if we continue along the present path, using the current models that seem to overestimate warming, there would be in 2100 a reduction of global gross domestic product of less than 4% (of a total GDP that would be much higher than what we have today). It is hard to call this an existential threat.

Let us ignore the above problems for the moment, and ask why emissions that presumably have led to the observed increase in CO₂ have continued to increase. Increasing emissions from China, India, and the rest of the developing world swamp the small reductions in the Anglosphere and the European Union. Indeed, if emissions from the Anglosphere and the EU were to cease (which is of course an impossibility), it would make little difference. According to the Global Energy Monitor, China is planning the addition of 200 GW of coal-fired generating capacity by 2025. If we assume this is a four-year period and that a large-scale power plant is 1 GW, that would be about one plant per week over the next four years. Why would China intentionally pursue the presumed destruction of the Earth? Moreover, why are the Anglosphere and the EU pursuing hugely disruptive, destructive, and expensive policies intended to reduce their already largely irrelevant emissions?

The answer to the first question is likely to be that China sees the threat of climate change as readily manageable regardless of what one believes about the underlying physics (remember that China’s leaders, as opposed to ours, tend to have technical backgrounds). But they also recognize that climate hysteria in the West leads to policies that clearly benefit China. Indeed, China is actually promoting activities like the Sino-American Youth Dialogue on climate change to promote climate alarm among young American activists. In a recent announcement sent to students at MIT, the Youth Dialogue’s Committee stated:

With rapid growth of the global population and the continuous expansion of the world economy, carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere have surged. Extreme disasters induced by global warming keep popping up. The world is undergoing irreversible climate change. It is in everyone’s stake to protect the planet we call home. We must confront the problems brought to mother nature by climate change and seek solutions in cooperation, sharing responsibility as two major countries and collectively building ‘a community with a shared future for mankind.’
The letter went on to offer modest cash rewards to those making the most “compelling” arguments. At the same time, the Chinese, unlike the World Bank, have been happy to fund coal projects in developing countries. (It will be interesting to see how the Communist Party implements Chairman Xi’s recent pledge to cease this practice.)

The second question is more worrisome because of the patent illogic of proposals claiming to address climate change. Confronted with natural disasters, it is obvious that richer societies are more resilient than poorer societies. For example, earthquakes in Haiti can result in thousands of deaths. Similar earthquakes in California result in orders of magnitude fewer deaths. Thus, it would seem that confronted with what is claimed is an existential threat over which we, in fact, have almost no influence, it seems obvious that the correct policy would be to increase resilience against disasters. Instead, the West is proposing to do the very opposite. It is hard to think of good or virtuous reasons for such a policy. Perhaps our policymakers have a pseudo-religious wish to expiate the sin of letting ordinary people reach comfortable middle-class standards of living. The encouragement of such policies by China is undoubtedly one of the reasons; certainly, many of the proposed Western responses (electric cars, windmills, and solar panels) will involve heavy investments in China, which dominates the global solar industry and is already the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles.

But I doubt that this is the main reason. To be sure, the common response of politicians to any purported problem is to do “something.” These “somethings” often involve some short-term benefits to the politicians and institutions that support such policies. But in the case of climate alarm, one has to wonder if those politicians who are investing in waterfront property are really concerned about the climate. Nor is the rejection of nuclear power indicative of seriousness.

Debate over this issue has been avoided and even actively suppressed under the fatuous claim that the science is “settled.” Indeed by 1988 Newsweek had already claimed that all scientists were agreed on the subject, even though nothing could have been further from the truth. And the truth has been buried ever since. As former Energy Undersecretary for Science in the Obama administration Steven Koonin compellingly illustrates in Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, the issue remains far from actually being settled. The book relies entirely on the science from the official assessments of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and from similar official U.S. assessment reports. The vicious attacks on Koonin since the book’s release in May indicate the absence of almost any level of discourse. Yet, given what is at issue, the need for an open debate over both our assessment of climate science and the proposed policies is, indeed, desperately needed.

Richard S. Lindzen is Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

.
 
wherever you are in the world, you are in over your head......

No- but you're going to be, sooner or later.


th
 
Last edited:
.
Here is another article by the great man on the subject of China, no wonder they are running rings around the West when fools like Biden actively aid and abet them.

China Warming

The CCP is by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet. Is that a problem?

Many of the world's leaders appear to believe that emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) constitute an existential threat whose impact is already severe and will become impossible to deal with within a very few years. This has resulted in a number of international agreements, beginning with the Rio Pact of 1992 and continuing up through the 2016 Paris Accords. Despite these agreements, the increase in the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere continues unabated (see Figure 1). In surveying the underlying science, it becomes clear that the role played by China in this story is indicative of a more general cynicism inherent in many of the supposed “solutions” to climate change.

From a minimum in temperature around 1960 (basically the end of a modest cooling trend beginning around 1939, which led to concerns over global cooling) until 1998, the global mean temperature anomaly (the index used to describe the Earth’s temperature) did increase by about 0.5 degrees Celsius. That’s a small change compared to the typical change between breakfast and lunch, though the net increase since then has been relatively insignificant (except for a major El Niño in 2014-16) and appreciably less than predicted by all climate models. It should be noted that the increase was small compared to what was happening in any given region, and temperatures at any given location were almost as likely to be cooling as warming. Despite the fact that increases of CO₂ thus far have been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history, and despite the fact that there have been large increases in the Earth’s vegetated area largely due to increases in CO₂’s role in photosynthesis, governments seem to have concluded that another 0.5 C will spell doom.

One sees frequent references to the agreement of 97% of the world’s scientists. However, as pointed out by Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer (and myself), this claim is specious. One also sees references to increases in things like sea level, hurricanes, and other weather extremes, but as been widely noted, these claims are based on the illegitimate cherry picking of starting dates for the trends. There is also the important question of what exactly constitutes an existential threat. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if we continue along the present path, using the current models that seem to overestimate warming, there would be in 2100 a reduction of global gross domestic product of less than 4% (of a total GDP that would be much higher than what we have today). It is hard to call this an existential threat.

Let us ignore the above problems for the moment, and ask why emissions that presumably have led to the observed increase in CO₂ have continued to increase. Increasing emissions from China, India, and the rest of the developing world swamp the small reductions in the Anglosphere and the European Union. Indeed, if emissions from the Anglosphere and the EU were to cease (which is of course an impossibility), it would make little difference. According to the Global Energy Monitor, China is planning the addition of 200 GW of coal-fired generating capacity by 2025. If we assume this is a four-year period and that a large-scale power plant is 1 GW, that would be about one plant per week over the next four years. Why would China intentionally pursue the presumed destruction of the Earth? Moreover, why are the Anglosphere and the EU pursuing hugely disruptive, destructive, and expensive policies intended to reduce their already largely irrelevant emissions?

The answer to the first question is likely to be that China sees the threat of climate change as readily manageable regardless of what one believes about the underlying physics (remember that China’s leaders, as opposed to ours, tend to have technical backgrounds). But they also recognize that climate hysteria in the West leads to policies that clearly benefit China. Indeed, China is actually promoting activities like the Sino-American Youth Dialogue on climate change to promote climate alarm among young American activists. In a recent announcement sent to students at MIT, the Youth Dialogue’s Committee stated:

With rapid growth of the global population and the continuous expansion of the world economy, carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere have surged. Extreme disasters induced by global warming keep popping up. The world is undergoing irreversible climate change. It is in everyone’s stake to protect the planet we call home. We must confront the problems brought to mother nature by climate change and seek solutions in cooperation, sharing responsibility as two major countries and collectively building ‘a community with a shared future for mankind.’
The letter went on to offer modest cash rewards to those making the most “compelling” arguments. At the same time, the Chinese, unlike the World Bank, have been happy to fund coal projects in developing countries. (It will be interesting to see how the Communist Party implements Chairman Xi’s recent pledge to cease this practice.)

The second question is more worrisome because of the patent illogic of proposals claiming to address climate change. Confronted with natural disasters, it is obvious that richer societies are more resilient than poorer societies. For example, earthquakes in Haiti can result in thousands of deaths. Similar earthquakes in California result in orders of magnitude fewer deaths. Thus, it would seem that confronted with what is claimed is an existential threat over which we, in fact, have almost no influence, it seems obvious that the correct policy would be to increase resilience against disasters. Instead, the West is proposing to do the very opposite. It is hard to think of good or virtuous reasons for such a policy. Perhaps our policymakers have a pseudo-religious wish to expiate the sin of letting ordinary people reach comfortable middle-class standards of living. The encouragement of such policies by China is undoubtedly one of the reasons; certainly, many of the proposed Western responses (electric cars, windmills, and solar panels) will involve heavy investments in China, which dominates the global solar industry and is already the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles.

But I doubt that this is the main reason. To be sure, the common response of politicians to any purported problem is to do “something.” These “somethings” often involve some short-term benefits to the politicians and institutions that support such policies. But in the case of climate alarm, one has to wonder if those politicians who are investing in waterfront property are really concerned about the climate. Nor is the rejection of nuclear power indicative of seriousness.

Debate over this issue has been avoided and even actively suppressed under the fatuous claim that the science is “settled.” Indeed by 1988 Newsweek had already claimed that all scientists were agreed on the subject, even though nothing could have been further from the truth. And the truth has been buried ever since. As former Energy Undersecretary for Science in the Obama administration Steven Koonin compellingly illustrates in Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, the issue remains far from actually being settled. The book relies entirely on the science from the official assessments of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and from similar official U.S. assessment reports. The vicious attacks on Koonin since the book’s release in May indicate the absence of almost any level of discourse. Yet, given what is at issue, the need for an open debate over both our assessment of climate science and the proposed policies is, indeed, desperately needed.

Richard S. Lindzen is Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Here is another article by the great man on the subject of China, no wonder they are running rings around the West when fools like Biden actively aid and abet them.

China Warming

The CCP is by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet. Is that a problem?

Many of the world's leaders appear to believe that emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) constitute an existential threat whose impact is already severe and will become impossible to deal with within a very few years. This has resulted in a number of international agreements, beginning with the Rio Pact of 1992 and continuing up through the 2016 Paris Accords. Despite these agreements, the increase in the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere continues unabated (see Figure 1). In surveying the underlying science, it becomes clear that the role played by China in this story is indicative of a more general cynicism inherent in many of the supposed “solutions” to climate change.

From a minimum in temperature around 1960 (basically the end of a modest cooling trend beginning around 1939, which led to concerns over global cooling) until 1998, the global mean temperature anomaly (the index used to describe the Earth’s temperature) did increase by about 0.5 degrees Celsius. That’s a small change compared to the typical change between breakfast and lunch, though the net increase since then has been relatively insignificant (except for a major El Niño in 2014-16) and appreciably less than predicted by all climate models. It should be noted that the increase was small compared to what was happening in any given region, and temperatures at any given location were almost as likely to be cooling as warming. Despite the fact that increases of CO₂ thus far have been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history, and despite the fact that there have been large increases in the Earth’s vegetated area largely due to increases in CO₂’s role in photosynthesis, governments seem to have concluded that another 0.5 C will spell doom.

One sees frequent references to the agreement of 97% of the world’s scientists. However, as pointed out by Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer (and myself), this claim is specious. One also sees references to increases in things like sea level, hurricanes, and other weather extremes, but as been widely noted, these claims are based on the illegitimate cherry picking of starting dates for the trends. There is also the important question of what exactly constitutes an existential threat. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if we continue along the present path, using the current models that seem to overestimate warming, there would be in 2100 a reduction of global gross domestic product of less than 4% (of a total GDP that would be much higher than what we have today). It is hard to call this an existential threat.

Let us ignore the above problems for the moment, and ask why emissions that presumably have led to the observed increase in CO₂ have continued to increase. Increasing emissions from China, India, and the rest of the developing world swamp the small reductions in the Anglosphere and the European Union. Indeed, if emissions from the Anglosphere and the EU were to cease (which is of course an impossibility), it would make little difference. According to the Global Energy Monitor, China is planning the addition of 200 GW of coal-fired generating capacity by 2025. If we assume this is a four-year period and that a large-scale power plant is 1 GW, that would be about one plant per week over the next four years. Why would China intentionally pursue the presumed destruction of the Earth? Moreover, why are the Anglosphere and the EU pursuing hugely disruptive, destructive, and expensive policies intended to reduce their already largely irrelevant emissions?

The answer to the first question is likely to be that China sees the threat of climate change as readily manageable regardless of what one believes about the underlying physics (remember that China’s leaders, as opposed to ours, tend to have technical backgrounds). But they also recognize that climate hysteria in the West leads to policies that clearly benefit China. Indeed, China is actually promoting activities like the Sino-American Youth Dialogue on climate change to promote climate alarm among young American activists. In a recent announcement sent to students at MIT, the Youth Dialogue’s Committee stated:

With rapid growth of the global population and the continuous expansion of the world economy, carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere have surged. Extreme disasters induced by global warming keep popping up. The world is undergoing irreversible climate change. It is in everyone’s stake to protect the planet we call home. We must confront the problems brought to mother nature by climate change and seek solutions in cooperation, sharing responsibility as two major countries and collectively building ‘a community with a shared future for mankind.’
The letter went on to offer modest cash rewards to those making the most “compelling” arguments. At the same time, the Chinese, unlike the World Bank, have been happy to fund coal projects in developing countries. (It will be interesting to see how the Communist Party implements Chairman Xi’s recent pledge to cease this practice.)

The second question is more worrisome because of the patent illogic of proposals claiming to address climate change. Confronted with natural disasters, it is obvious that richer societies are more resilient than poorer societies. For example, earthquakes in Haiti can result in thousands of deaths. Similar earthquakes in California result in orders of magnitude fewer deaths. Thus, it would seem that confronted with what is claimed is an existential threat over which we, in fact, have almost no influence, it seems obvious that the correct policy would be to increase resilience against disasters. Instead, the West is proposing to do the very opposite. It is hard to think of good or virtuous reasons for such a policy. Perhaps our policymakers have a pseudo-religious wish to expiate the sin of letting ordinary people reach comfortable middle-class standards of living. The encouragement of such policies by China is undoubtedly one of the reasons; certainly, many of the proposed Western responses (electric cars, windmills, and solar panels) will involve heavy investments in China, which dominates the global solar industry and is already the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles.

But I doubt that this is the main reason. To be sure, the common response of politicians to any purported problem is to do “something.” These “somethings” often involve some short-term benefits to the politicians and institutions that support such policies. But in the case of climate alarm, one has to wonder if those politicians who are investing in waterfront property are really concerned about the climate. Nor is the rejection of nuclear power indicative of seriousness.

Debate over this issue has been avoided and even actively suppressed under the fatuous claim that the science is “settled.” Indeed by 1988 Newsweek had already claimed that all scientists were agreed on the subject, even though nothing could have been further from the truth. And the truth has been buried ever since. As former Energy Undersecretary for Science in the Obama administration Steven Koonin compellingly illustrates in Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, the issue remains far from actually being settled. The book relies entirely on the science from the official assessments of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and from similar official U.S. assessment reports. The vicious attacks on Koonin since the book’s release in May indicate the absence of almost any level of discourse. Yet, given what is at issue, the need for an open debate over both our assessment of climate science and the proposed policies is, indeed, desperately needed.

Richard S. Lindzen is Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

.
 
.

Here is another article by the great man on the subject of China, no wonder they are running rings around the West when fools like Biden actively aid and abet them.

China Warming

The CCP is by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet. Is that a problem?

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