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

Primavera said:
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In a new paper, atmospheric physicist Dr. Richard Lindzen summarizes the “implausible” claims today’s proponents of dangerous anthropogenic global warming espouse.

Dr. Richard Lindzen retired several years ago, and yet his immense contribution to the atmospheric sciences lives on. His research is still cited about 600 times per year.

Lindzen recently published another scientific paper (Lindzen, 2020) in The European Physical Journal criticizing the current alarmism in climate science. Here are a few of the highlights.

1. Doubling the atmospheric CO2 concentration from 280 ppm to 560 ppm results in just a 1-2% perturbation to the Earth’s 240 W/m² energy budget. This doubled-CO2 effect has less than 1/5th of the impact that the net cloud effect has. And yet we are asked to accept the “implausible” claim that change in one variable, CO2, is predominantly responsible for altering global temperatures.

2. A causal role for CO2 “cannot be claimed” for the glacial-to-interglacial warming events because CO2 variations follow rather than lead the temperature changes in paleoclimate records and the 100 ppm total increase over thousands of years produce “about 1 W/m²” of total radiative impact.

3. Climate science didn’t used to be alarmist prior to the late 1980s. Scientists were instead sufficiently skeptical about claims of climatically-induced planetary doom. That changed during the years 1988-1994, when climate research centered on CO2 and global warming received a 15-fold increase in funding in the US alone. Suddenly there was a great financial incentive to propel alarming global warming scenarios.

4. Concepts like “polar amplification” are “imaginary”.

“The change in equator-to-pole temperature difference was attributed to some imaginary ‘polar amplification,’ whereby the equator-pole temperature automatically followed the mean temperature. Although the analogy is hardly exact, this is not so different from assuming that flow in a pipe depends on the mean pressure rather than the pressure gradient.”

https://notrickszone.com/2020/06/15...reasoning-that-1-factor-co2-controls-climate/
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This requires a well deserved reprise.

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/...ified-picture/
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moon said:
An outdated phrase, maggot. You are still wearing the wallet and stove-pipe hat of the industrial revolution.

Do the environment a great service. Retire.
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The last National Climate Assessment issued by the Obama admin was full of references to RCP8.5 even though climate realists pointed out it was hopelessly outdated and impossible. IPCC AR6 published last year came to the same conclusion and removed all references to it. That's a concrete example, shit for brains.

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).
 
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moon said:
The Maldives are Sinking, What Can be Done About It?

Simple. Just get somebody to write a paper stating that they're not.
Nothing to see here, go to your homes.
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Buy land that is more inland. And have beachfront property. Problem solved.
 
ExpressLame said:
Well no one ever accused you of being quick.
Haw, haw................................haw.
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It's a compliment, not an accusation, dumbass.

Are you getting the notion that trolling me was not a good idea ?
Even on a wet Sunday in Palookaville.


Haw, haw................................haw.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
That this Save The planet Cult insanity is winning is one more symptom of the West dying. The Chinese will be in charge soon, they will decide the road forward.

We increasingly cant do the basics of civilization anymore , often stuff that our ancestors mastered, because this society is so rotted out, the people are so shit.

We are going to save the planet...we have the capacity to do that?

Pull the other leg, it plays Jiggle Bells.
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Help! The sky is falling. The sky is falling. We're all gonna die. We're all gonna die.

Oh, just shove your Chicken Little Scare Tactics up your ass, FawkEwe10. You sound like the Love Child of Alex Jones and Fucker Carlson.

chicken-little-the-sky-is-falling-gif.gif
 
serendipity said:
The last National Climate Assessment issued by the Obama admin was full of references to RCP8.5 even though climate realists pointed out it was hopelessly outdated and impossible. IPCC AR6 published last year came to the same conclusion and removed all references to it. That's a concrete example of climate alarmism, shit for brains.

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).
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‘Few’ scientists would say climate change is an ‘existential threat’:
March 21, 2023 - 9:26PM

Atmospheric Physicist Richard Lindzen says “relatively few” scientists would say climate change is an “existential threat”.

“A large number of scientists are saying yes indeed it’s warming and they might even add that perhaps there’s a matter of concern,” he told Sky News host Andrew Bolt.

“Relatively few, that I know of, who even support the narrative would ever say that this is involving an existential threat.”

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/...indzen/video/767f4c094de09c2a97c1f2398919f292
 
moon said:
The Maldives are Sinking, What Can be Done About It?

Simple. Just get somebody to write a paper stating that they're not.
Nothing to see here, go to your homes.
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Or write one that says you can stop it and bankrupt every fucking economy in the world trying to accomplish it. Fucking dicks
 
Yakuda said:
Or write one that says you can stop it and bankrupt every fucking economy in the world trying to accomplish it. Fucking dicks
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The Maldives are inestimably more significant than any economy. Degrowth is the way forward.
 
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