Common Sense and Wonder
Don Surber
Richard Siegmund Lindzen, 72, an atmospheric physicist at MIT, contributed to the IPCC reports of 1995 and 2001 and this week went to Parliament in Britain to address a seminar arranged by the Campaign To Repeal the Climate Change Act. James Delingpole of the Telegraph was delighted and praised the professor’s speech, which can be read in whole here.
From James Delingpole: “Dick Lindzen does not need to raise his voice. He does not use hyperbole. In a tone somewhere between weariness and withering disdain, he lets the facts speak for themselves. And the facts, as he understands them, are devastating.”
Delingpole highlighted this from the speech:
Stated briefly, I will simply try to clarify what the debate over climate change is really about. It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is. It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is. It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should. The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest.
I thought his conclusion of his speech (which was punctuated with charts and scientific formulations that I do not understand):
Our recent work on the early faint sun may prove particularly important. 2.5 billion years ago, when the sun was 20% less bright (compared to the 2% change in the radiative budget associated with doubling CO2), evidence suggests that the oceans were unfrozen and the temperature was not very different from today’s. No greenhouse gas solution has worked, but a negative cloud feedback does. You now have some idea of why I think that there won’t be much warming due to CO2, and without significant global warming, it is impossible to tie catastrophes to such warming. Even with significant warming it would have been extremely difficult to make this connection.
Perhaps we should stop accepting the term, ‘skeptic.’ Skepticism implies doubts about a plausible proposition. Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from climategate and other instances of overt cheating. In the meantime, while I avoid making forecasts for tenths of a degree change in globally averaged temperature anomaly, I am quite willing to state that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.
Now then, here is one man who has studied global warming alongside all these super duper experts and he has come up to the same conclusion that 1973 Nobel Physics laureate Ivar Giaever: The science is not there to support this theory.
So why are we allowing our politicians to bully us into wholesale changes in our economy? Barack Obama is using this silliness as a cover to give $35 billion in loan guarantees to “green” companies such as Solyndra, which not only went belly up but left behind a bunch of barrels of unknown goo.
This nation has never had as many college graduates — or as many intellectual sheep.
Don Surber
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| Dr. Richard Lindzen |
From James Delingpole: “Dick Lindzen does not need to raise his voice. He does not use hyperbole. In a tone somewhere between weariness and withering disdain, he lets the facts speak for themselves. And the facts, as he understands them, are devastating.”
Delingpole highlighted this from the speech:
Stated briefly, I will simply try to clarify what the debate over climate change is really about. It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is. It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is. It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should. The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest.
I thought his conclusion of his speech (which was punctuated with charts and scientific formulations that I do not understand):
Our recent work on the early faint sun may prove particularly important. 2.5 billion years ago, when the sun was 20% less bright (compared to the 2% change in the radiative budget associated with doubling CO2), evidence suggests that the oceans were unfrozen and the temperature was not very different from today’s. No greenhouse gas solution has worked, but a negative cloud feedback does. You now have some idea of why I think that there won’t be much warming due to CO2, and without significant global warming, it is impossible to tie catastrophes to such warming. Even with significant warming it would have been extremely difficult to make this connection.
Perhaps we should stop accepting the term, ‘skeptic.’ Skepticism implies doubts about a plausible proposition. Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from climategate and other instances of overt cheating. In the meantime, while I avoid making forecasts for tenths of a degree change in globally averaged temperature anomaly, I am quite willing to state that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.
Now then, here is one man who has studied global warming alongside all these super duper experts and he has come up to the same conclusion that 1973 Nobel Physics laureate Ivar Giaever: The science is not there to support this theory.
So why are we allowing our politicians to bully us into wholesale changes in our economy? Barack Obama is using this silliness as a cover to give $35 billion in loan guarantees to “green” companies such as Solyndra, which not only went belly up but left behind a bunch of barrels of unknown goo.
This nation has never had as many college graduates — or as many intellectual sheep.
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