Bishop Hill Lindzen on AR5
Sep 28, 2013 Climate: IPCC Climate: Sceptics 
Mark Morano has obtained a statement from Dick Lindzen on the AR5 Summary for Policymakers. It's short, so I have taken the liberty of reproducing the whole thing here. Fair to say, Lindzen is not impressed:
I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence. They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.
Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans. However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability. Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified.
Finally, in attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there their being nothing to be alarmed about. It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.
Reader Comments (60)
All of which, those in power do not want to hear!
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-scientists-take-on-Richard-Lindzen.html
'Lindzen's view that the threat of substantial climate change is minimal runs "completely counter to the view of almost all who work actively in the field." '
And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is that! I shall be emailing that to my MP.
"consistent with their being nothing to be alarmed about"
Sigh. Yet again. The incorrect use of "their" ruins his piece.
@ Martin A, 0853.
The warmist scam is worth US$ 20 BILLION a year. That's a lot of interest motivating "those who work actively in the field", though I imagine that they need to shower quite often, trying to wash the unclean feeling away. Those deeply committed to the warming religion have also lost few opportunities to make independent spirits inactive.
Why doesn't Lindzen and the 1000s of scientists who agree with the growing sceptical movement, develop an equivalent to the IPCC. Surely there is enough backing.
The miracle that is transubstantiation. The high priest Patchouri has raised the flat disc of earth to the heavens and has uttered the voodoo incantation.:-
"Temperature here in hiding, whom I do adore,
Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more."
Apologies to Aquinas.
> Surely there is enough backing.
I don't know if anybody has done any figures on how much creating the IPCC report costs but it will be significant.
Flying hundreds of people to remote locations for multi-day conferences on multiple occasions, paying for the time of all the authors, having all the backend infrastructure (PR, admin etc) will cost many millions of $$. The only ones with enough money to do this type of thing are governments and our "Big Oil" financial backers.
The last time I heard from my "Big Oil" financial backer was when they gave me a £15 Argos voucher for my loyalty card. I'm not sure how many loyalty cards will buy a report on the scale of the IPCC one but I could always ask.
' It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.'
But not at all surprising, for without 'climate doom' and its all the fault of man , there would be no IPCC , no need for all for meetings and a much reduced and de-funded climate 'science' profession . In other words keeping it going was very much in the interest of those involved. No grand conspiracy just a mixture of various normal human self interests, which oddly sceptics get attacked for having all the time . And those whose political outlook were looking to use 'the cause ' to further an agenda they knew otherwise would stand no chance .
As ever this is not about the science, its not been for a long time , so you need to think not of data or facts or being right/wrong , but of the way politics or religion for some 'the cause' has become , which never really dies no matter what the reality .
It was never going to die quick , far to many people with their wallets or ideologues involved for that , so a slow death by 'ignored' was always on the cards. And the signs of this are simple , after the PR and marketing from the usual suspects, ask yourself were this story is now on the news lists a mere 24 hours after it came out ?
As noted by others and as known for some time the IPCC is predominantly a political organisation. It seems to have taken a strategic decision to brazen it out presumably in the hope that nature will help it out on the temperature front. The 95% confidence in a less threatening but still existential AGW bogeyman is just political manoeuvring in may ways similar to the Cook 97% charade.
Their hope is that the MSM will support this misrepresentation of the science without question. Newsnight last night certainly played along as we were told effectively that the science was settled and now the only question is the correct policy response. That the BBC should fall in line was a given. However, I do not expect this to be universal. I think the IPCC has misjudged the situation and will ultimately pay a heavy price. 'Ultimately' is some way down the road.
That Lindzen should emphasise that it is heat transport that is key in understanding surface temperatures is one of those obvious facts that the simpletons who tell us CO2 is a greenhouse gas and greenhouse gasses cause warming (hereafter Chucklebrothers) fail to grasp. Radiative physics plays a minuscule part in heat transport processes and this is where the bloated vessel of the Chucklebrothers founders on the shores of reality.
David
It does exist the Heartland Institute NIPCC report
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/
View past reports and many videos by top scientist e.g. Nir Shaviv. Fred Singer etc.
More wisdom and maturity of judgement in a few sentences from Lindzen than in the entire IPCC opus! Well done him, and many thanks to Morano for encouraging and publishing it. (pity about the 'their' - it is also in the Climate Depot version).
The SPM does the IPCC no credit. But then what could? A melodramatic admission that their zeal over trumpeting CO2 as a colossal threat was unfounded, that their campaigning and scheming have been misguided and harmful, and that they are really very sorry for all the trouble they have caused? Is that to be expected from the delinquent teenager who has failed to grow up?
DNFTT
The Bish will zap it and any follow-ups toot-sweet.
Various O/T comments snipped
If you want a simple explanation of how the IPCC creates the "greenhouse effect" by incorrectly conserving energy flux instead of energy, read Jo Postma.
http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/09/25/fraud-aghe-18-conserving-wattage-not-physics-rant-free/
OOPS. I'll copy this to unthreaded.
Me too.
After a summary for policymakers, the next logical step is a summary for the policy-makers line managers, which is ultimately the voters (where they get any say at all in the matter):
The alarmist condemn the Heartland Institute for its sponsors but accept the sponsorship of WWF, Green Peace. etc.
What hypocrites !
In what other branch of science does empirical contradictory date verify, not falsify a theory? And in what other branch of science do so many establishment scientists defend the argument?
1. The failure of IPCC models to deal with land surface temperatures since 1998, a 15 year period, proves that the models are inadequate.
2. The continuing heating of the ocean since 1998 is simply due to the slow transfer of heat into the oceans: water has the highest specific heat capacity (energy storage) of any common natural substance yet only the top 100 metres of the ocean constitutes the "mixing layer" (above the thermocline), and so the transfer of heat into the ocean depths is very slow. The oceans continue to accept heat from the air temperature rise prior to 1998, by gradual mixing. The thin water layer above the thermocline is buoyant and "floats" on the colder, denser water, with only very slow downward mixing.
3. The IPCC report and its publicity statements deliberately distort the continued ocean temperature rise by conflating it with "global warming" when it is merely the transfer of air heat into the oceans from the temperature rise prior to 1998, not CO2 induced air warming since 1998.
4. The IPCC report uses the old propaganda trick of passing off percentage probabilities that represent consensus as being science. "95% certain" is meaningless for objective science. If 95% of scientists believe a theory that has been falsified by the last 15 years of data, that doesn't prove they are 95% right, it just proves 95% corruption.
5. It ignores the role of negative feedback from H2O cloud cover as thermostat, which explains the lack of temperature rise in the surface air since 1998: http://vixra.org/pdf/1302.0044v2.pdf
**************
I recommend Professor H. G. Barnett's book "Innovation: the Basis of Cultural Change", where he deals the problems in innovating against a scientific dogma that is backed up by paying professional scientists to gain their vote, the prime example being eugenics in 1930s Germany. Barnett page 65:
"When individuals are taught to revere and fear authority as the ultimate source of the good, the true, and the proper, they cannot be expected to have variant notions."
Barnett page 66:
"... socialization as such is an authoritarian device ..."
Barnett pages 69-70:
"...important new ideas of so recent a date were almost without exception ignored or rejected by the scientific fraternity itself because they did not conform to one or another of the accepted doctrines or the leaders of opinion. The observations and discoveries of Jenner, Simpson, Lyell, Pasteur, Darwin, Lister, Helmholtz, Metchnikoff, and scores of lesser contributors were greeted with disdain or increduity. Repeatedly their critics even refused to be shown. ... Most illuminating of all is the fact that one dogma fell only to be replaced by another. [Echos of George Orwell's Animal Farm.] The upstart view of one generation became the inviolable creed of the next ... It would be unrealistic to believe that dogmatism in science ended ... flagrant examples as the Nazi doctrine [eugenics] of Aryan racial supremacy and the Communist credo of dialectic materialism ... less publicized instances ... are known in every discipline in small or large degree. Every area of knowledge at the present time has its 'big names' whose opinions in science ... prevail over the views of lesser lights just because they are recognised ... Dogmatism is a frequent concomitant of a systematized creed and a well-institutionalized priestly hierarchy ... unified control with a discipline that is dedicated to its unquestioning support. This condition directly parallels the requirement for authoritative secular administration. ... there be only one source of truth ... the source be afforded enough power to enforce its dictates. ... exclusionist faiths ... Heretical views may not be tolerated ... because they threaten the economic and the ideological commitment ..."
Concise, precise and totally destructive BUT it will make no difference what so ever. These clowns backed by the members of each countries met services will just carry on as usual.
Sep 28, 2013 at 10:18 AM | Unregistered Commenter
nigel bryan cook
NICE !!
David
The videos for their most recent report NIPPC8 are not out yet but to save you searching the videos for their NIPPC7 are here
http://climateconferences.heartland.org/iccc7/
I recommend Fred Singer, Nir Shaviv and Bob Carter. enjoy.
AlecM,
I think you do Lindzen a disservice. He has stated that additional CO2 should have a small effect on temperatures but I have not heard of him endorsing the illogical idea of 'back radiation' (to which I believe you refer) as a warming process in the atmosphere.
That's conflating groupthink professional science/media's scholarly censorship of the truth with the search by some for factual evidence and reliable climate models. If you climb a new mountain yet the media chooses not to report it because they're in bed with your competitor, then that's their problem to some extent. The media's respectful worship of inspirational bad science best-sellers (e.g. "Mein Kampf's" eugenics pesudoscience) is based on the book's corruption to "change human affairs", which is precisely Dale Carnegie's template for inspirational speech making, and is so well suited to the conceited like climate reality denier Al Gore), deliberately "oversimplifies" and deceives to motivate the masses against an exaggerated immediate peril (requiring gas chambers for eugenics, unilateral nuclear disarmament, or CO2 taxation). If you debunk any exaggeration, the debunking has no news value because it fails to motivate and inspire people. You can only kick out one king by imposing another. You need a new peril, like CO2 taxation induced starvation, to outweigh the previous one, before people want to know.
I'm optimistic and pray that at some point the evidence will become so obvious to even the most gullible that violence will be break out against the taxation based on AGW during this recession, and there will be a proper revolution, hopefully along the civilized lines of the French Revolution (complete with guillotine to save money and prevent victims paying tax to keep their tormentors living in luxury hotels or prisons), so that bad heads will literally roll. A pleasant dream.
"That Lindzen should emphasise that it is heat transport that is key in understanding surface temperatures is one of those obvious facts that the simpletons who tell us CO2 is a greenhouse gas and greenhouse gasses cause warming (hereafter Chucklebrothers) fail to grasp. Radiative physics plays a minuscule part in heat transport processes and this is where the bloated vessel of the Chucklebrothers founders on the shores of reality."
Nicely put Dolphinhead.
nigel bryan cook,
There will be large scale civil unrest fomented by inequity, democratic unaccountability, public sector profligacy - the wanton greed, troughing of our political elite and administration and crass political policy, in the UK. Civil disobedience - it is coming, I dearly hope it is peaceable, though I am forced to temper my optimism on that score. However, although domestic energy bills are one more barb in an ocean of pain - the scurrilous imposition of the green madness by the political elite will be a reason but not the actual trigger to widespread civil mutiny against authority.
The IPCC along with its friends, allies,and useful idiots is reasonably adept at PR (well, perhaps not the IPCC but most of the others).
We, on the other hand, are reasonably adept at shooting ourselves in the foot.
For example ...
It may well be that there has been no warming since 1998 but why pick the one date that gives the warmist PR clan the perfect instant rebuttal? Just because it represents some magic "15 years" figure is no reason to offer yourself up as a sacrifice.
That's just the first top-of-the-head example from this morning.
During a longish journey yesterday afternoon I had time to consider what might be the most effective way of limiting the (probably temporary) damage that AR5 has so far caused.
Prof Corinne Le Quéré, the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia and one of the report’s authors.Two or three things occurred to me.
First: think twice before you write anything and if it is likely to provide unnecessary ammunition, don't write it.
Second: Why not try the Keenan Method? Those with relevant qualifications can write letters (or emails) to Walport, Stern, anyone else who appears to have no knowledge of what he is talking about on the lines of "given [this situation] how do you explain/justify/support [that conclusion]. On the lines of not shooting yourself in the foot, or making a rod for your own back, etc. I stress "relevant qualifications".
Third: The SPM is not AR5! Sometimes your enemy can be your friend. Consider:
We're not the only ones that shouldn't be let out with a firearm!
"The science" is already looking a bit shaky and has done for several years. What the SPM is for has nothing to do with science as we know, and this time it looks to me to be on some very dicey foundations. AR5 itself can probably be used to refute a number of the conclusions in the SPM.
Fourthly, in relation to the last two points, don't try fighting on every front at once but where there is a loose thread to be picked at then don't let go.
My favourite is: What does that mean? What observational data have you that lead you to that conclusion? What are you allowing for in the 5% that might affect your conclusions? What "influences" are you including? How much more than 50% of the warming is due to human influence? Is there any reason to suppose that that influence is malign or that the observed temperature increase is other than beneficial? If so, what are those reasons? And so on.
I suppose what I am really suggesting is that sceptics ought to be doing the job that journalists (and scientists) ought to be doing and aren't. Don't let the activists get away with their sloppy thinking, sloppy argument and sloppy science. Don't let the politicians get away with the deliberate impoverishment of the poor of the world so that the rich can continue to get even richer. Make sure that the fat cats like Deben and Walport and Grantham (not to mention Pachauri) are forced to account for every word they utter.
But be polite!
@ssat: in the past, Lindzen has suggested that the the in the absence of convection would be ~ 80 K. This can only have come from 'back radiation' which is taught to Meteorologists and now the rest of the climate and environmental pseudosciences. His argument was similar to Houghton's.
Almost irrespective of the outcome of this saga, the IPCC is an agent of anti-Science and scientists with integrity (and there seem to be few left) should recognise the fact - and ideally say so.
The good Prof Lindzen hits the nail so squarely on the head (and it is good to note that I am not the only pedant on here, though it may have been an honest typo – how doesn’t make thoes?). That being so, there is little chance his voice will be heard in the wilderness of the mainstream media.
Nigel bryan cook (Sep 28, 2013 at 10:56 AM): your proposals do seem a bit extreme, and use of the guillotine is a bit… well, French. We might be better using the Halifax gibbet.
Athelstan (Sep 28, 2013 at 11:21 AM): I, too, feel that the common people are being pushed a bit too far, and the results will not be pleasant for many enjoying the benefits of the tax-payer. It takes a lot to turn the English* to hate but, when they do, they express it in no uncertain terms. The riots of the disaffected scroungers will be as nothing when compared with those of the disaffected tax-payer.
* By “English”, I mean it in the old sense, for those with roots deep in all of these islands, to differentiate between those more recently atuned, whose passions may still be more volatile, and to exclude those who will not assimilate.
The ""there, their" issue is distracting and regrettable, but it does have a positive side.
It makes it quite clear that the comments were not written by a slick big oil financed denier organization that could afford proofreaders!
Rascal Rodent: I only suggested the French method to parody the need to make heads roll. The point is, violence is the final arbiter of all law. Without violence, law consists of offering free board and lodgings in return for crime, encouraging it. The whole legal system of jobsworths, as Dickens wrote, is there to make work for itself, not to abolish crime. The more crime, the more money in the pockets of lawyers. If that's "extreme", then extreme it is!
I simply couldn't belive the Sky report yesterday on the matter. Not only did they have the reporter doing his best 'We're all DOOMED' voiceover, but they had a graphic of the world getting hotter and hotter until 2100, when the impression was clearly given that the place was by then going to be uninhabitable. Plus of course trotting out the projected sea level rises (and the sea getting more acidic..!); temperature rises; oh - and that despite the current period of 'no warming' it was all going to start up again jolly soon.
Its true - tell a lie often and loudly enough and it becomes the truth...
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-scientists-take-on-Richard-Lindzen.html
'Lindzen's view that the threat of substantial climate change is minimal runs "completely counter to the view of almost all who work actively in the field." '
And ALL those who want to keep working in the field.........
....Oh - and as an addendum to my previous (which I forgot to include) - there were also videos of floods, storms and Hurricane Sandy - with the doom-laden promise that these were all 'set to increase'...
'Woe, woe, and thrice woe...!'
Aye, they'd have us back in "working in the field" [s] alright.
Because, isn't that the nth degree - an agrarian utopia and logical outcome of the green path and one way street to de-industrialization, all demanded by those green ideologues?
In the latest Nature magazine there is a profile of Ottmar Edenhoffer.Co-chair of working group III:
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/members/edenh/Nature_September2013.pdf
Among the interesting snippets are:
1. At the age of 14 he spent all of his money on Das Kapital.
2. He says; “There is a whole space of morally legitimate standpoints with a view to climate change. However...some perspectives cannot be tolerated. “Denying out-and-out that climate change is a problem to humanity, as some cynics do, is an unethical, unacceptable position.
3. The most important uncertainty, he says, concerns the reliability of economic models used to forecast the future. They rely on macroeconomic equations and assumptions that are often thwarted by real-world developments.
As usual a left-leaning, sanctimonious would-be world-improver who knows that his own economic models are inadequate but prefers to believe that the climate models, doing a far more difficult task, are somehow good enough to declare thermageddon and that to challenge that idea is unethical and hence not even worth time discussing.
Of course, like all the contributors and most of the scientists he belongs to an institute department that would be irrelevant without the scare but he no doubt fails to see the inherent bias of that position because like his fellow selectively invited IPCC contributors he is so much more moralistically superior than the rest of us that bias is not even possible.
By the standards of these holier-than-thou superbeings, Lindzen is cynically unethical just for not pointing out truths that depart from the consensus belief. No need to spend any valuable time even reading what he says.
This chap Lindzen sounds as if he knows his AR5 from his elbow
"Aye, they'd have us back in "working in the field" [s] alright.
Because, isn't that the nth degree - an agrarian utopia and logical outcome of the green path and one way street to de-industrialization, all demanded by those green ideologues?"
Didn't Pol Pot do that in Cambodia? The only difference I can see between the Khmer Rouge and the Greens is human compassion, there isn't much from either, but from what we've seen from the Greens on the DDT ban and their latest fight against Golden Rice, I think the Khmer Rouge edge them on the humanity stakes.
Pav Penna (Sep 28, 2013 at 12:44 PM):
You think the IPCC uses proof-readers?
I thought they only employed proff-readers.
"Global Warming" started as a modest confusion of hubris with incompetence, growing eventually into an impressive edifice of dishonesty. I suspect that it needs only a simple mathematical model to "backcast" that.
I have to admit that I admire the cojones of the IPCC with their strategy to just bluff it out. And maybe it will just work, especially if the BBC uncritically presents the official position - which it does. I was listening to Radio one yesterday evening and there was no doubt in the news broadcast that the IPCC is rightly sounding the alarm.
[off topic]
Q: what do you say to soothe the nerves of an upset pedant?
A: They're their
[/off topic]
"However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability."
Spot on, Lindzen. However, this point must be explained for the non-scientist and it must be presented to the public often so that it becomes a meme. The IPCC has used a remarkably generous amount of rope to hang itself.
Dolphinhead gets the ball rolling:
"That Lindzen should emphasise that it is heat transport that is key in understanding surface temperatures is one of those obvious facts that the simpletons who tell us CO2 is a greenhouse gas and greenhouse gasses cause warming (hereafter Chucklebrothers) fail to grasp. Radiative physics plays a minuscule part in heat transport processes and this is where the bloated vessel of the Chucklebrothers founders on the shores of reality."
Alarmists have never encountered an empirical question that they recognize as important. Heat transport in the oceans is an empirical question. Top-down "science" employing radiative physics alone will not address the question but dismiss it.
AR4 SPM
"Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850).
I guess as the temperature is pretty much the same now as it was in 1998 they can include the years from 2006 to 2013 to the total of warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850).
Seems like a trend to me.
Theo and Alec,
To be fair, Lindzen's claim that almost all the surface heat is transported by convection relates to the moist tropics, which is of course the most important place. He cites Möller and Manabe (1961) for the statement that pure radiative equilibrium yields a temperature of about 350K. Lindzen's 1996 paper worth reading and is here: www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/178wvapbud.pdf
Sep 28, 2013 at 5:55 PM | Unregistered CommenterDavid Holland
Thank you. I wasn't thinking about Lindzen's older work. I take it that his reference to heat transport and natural variability are references to ocean mechanisms that can transport heat into the deep oceans. Please note that Lindzen's paragraph begins as follows:
"Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans."
In brief, if you are claiming that the missing heat is in the deep oceans, as Trenberth does, then you must be claiming that there are natural mechanisms that move it and that influence to some degree calculation of Earth's energy budget.
" "Global Warming" started as a modest confusion of hubris with incompetence, growing eventually into an impressive edifice of dishonesty." - dearieme
The roots are deeper than that. Svante Arrhenius came up with CO2 global warming. However, he is more famous for the real world equation, exp(-a/T), the empirical reaction rate fame which models the effect of temperature T on the rate of a chemical reaction. As the temperature rises, chemical reactions at first go faster, but eventually at very high temperatures an upper limit reached because as T becomes very large, a/T = E/(RT) ~0 becomes insignificant, so you get a constant in the large T limit, exp(0) = 1. This saturation effect is due to negative feedback at high temperatures from chemical decomposition (molecules hitting so hard they break up) or a reversed reaction process where the breakdown of the reaction products at high temperature cancels out the enhancement in production rate by temperature, and it is similar to the negative feedback from H2O on the effect of CO2 injections, see for example Figure 6 in http://vixra.org/pdf/1302.0044v2.pdf. So in reality, Arrhenius's famous equation actually disproves the simplistic temperature predictions of the IPCC!
In addition, there is the fact that the AGW scam hotted up after the "green" anti-nuclear and Communist Moscow-based World Peace Council propaganda lobby transferred its attention from exaggerating nuclear war exaggerating nuclear war and downplaying deterrence and civil defence for political support of groupthink Marxism (censoring all deviants from groupthink convention) to CO2 scare-mongering, as Delingpole explains in Watermelons.
Sep 28, 2013 at 10:56 AM | Unregistered Commenter
nigel bryan cook
We only have one guillotine left and that is at the musée national, Paris. I would be happy to oblige the world and build several new ones as long as we can start in Brussells.
David wrote:
"Why doesn't Lindzen and the 1000s of scientists who agree with the growing sceptical movement, develop an equivalent to the IPCC. Surely there is enough backing."
It exists already. It's called the NIPPC and they have just published their Summary.
www.climatechangereconsidered.org
Indeed Bob Carter, a co-editor, was interviewed on the World at One yesterday.
nbnbc (Sep 28, 2013 at 12:44 PM): my riposte was tongue-in-cheek, too – look up what the Halifax gibbet is… A precursor of the guillotine, but the same principle (though without the knitting).
Dickens was as cynical of the legal profession in his day as most sensible people are, today.
Just listened to Caroline Lucas on BBC Radio 4's 'Any Questions' complaining that some BBC news programme had given space to a 'climate skeptic' before the release of AR5. Who on earth could she be referring to?
Interesting that the Greens now feel they can dictate to the BBC who it should or shouldn't interview.