Warming by carbon dioxide is logarithmic due to ‘saturation’ within the infrared spectrum, and any future doubling of the gas in the atmosphere will be associated with the same warming of around 1°C. This result is not considered controversial, argues atmospheric scientist and Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT – although it might be noted that it is, since it fatally undermines the political ‘settled’ science concept of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Professor Lindzen notes that the present “absurd ‘scientific’ narrative” leaves us with a quasi-religious movement – atop of all this has been the ”constant Goebellian repetition by the media of climate alarm”.
In a paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), Lindzen warns that unless we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, “this is only likely to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the current irrational demonisation of CO2”. These disasters, of course, include the “hobbling” of Western energy systems, leading to a reduced ability to oppose Russian aggression.
Lindzen has been a long time critic of the political global warming narrative. In his GWPF paper, he notes the 1961 words of the late U.S. President Eisenhower:
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Lindzen has long warned about the dangers of politicised science, noting recently that the UN-backed IPCC is “government-controlled and only issues government-dictated findings”. Along with fellow atmospheric scientist Professor William Happer of Princeton, he told a recent U.S. Government inquiry that current climate science literature was “a joke”. It was “pal review, not peer review”, they added. Of course, the links between climate science and grant-providing politicians are well known. In 2013, the then-head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, told the Guardian: “We are an intergovernmental body and we do what the governments of the world want us to do. If the governments decide we should do things differently and come up with a vastly different set of products we would be at their beck and call.”
Scientists like Lindzen, and as we have seen they are growing in number, have an intellectual problem in blaming all or most changes in global temperature on the properties of just one trace atmospheric gas. Lindzen is unhappy with what he calls the “one dimensional” view of the world’s climate, and the way the ‘greenhouse’ effect and the role of CO2 dominates the warming narrative. He notes that the Earth has many climate regimes, and there have been “profound” changes in temperature between the tropics and the polar regions over millennia. During these times, the temperature at the tropics has remained little changed, a situation we observe in the current climate record.
Lindzen is very much of the climate science school of thought that argues the temperature changes are caused by dynamic heat flows in the atmosphere and the oceans caused by latitudinal differences in temperatures, or ‘baroclinic instability’ to give it a scientific term. Changes in average temperature “are primarily due to changes in the tropic-to-pole difference, and not to changes in the greenhouse effect”, he suggests.
For Lindzen, it is “absurd” to assume that the controlling factor for temperature changes in the complex three-dimensional climate is the small contribution of CO2. He notes the evidence from the Antarctica Vostok ice core that showed cooling preceded decreases in CO2 during the glaciation cycles of the last 700,000 years. For the paleoclimatic record going back 600 million years, “there is no suggestion of any correlation with carbon dioxide at all”, he added.
Carbon dioxide is noted to be a “particularly ridiculous” choice as a pollutant. Its primary role is as a fertiliser for plants and currently, he adds, “almost all plants are starved of CO2”. Moreover, if we were to remove a bit more than 60% of CO2, the consequences would be dire, “namely death by starvation for all animal life”. Not that such a drop would have much effect on the global temperature, according to Lindzen, with less than a couple of percentage point changes in the radiation budget, leading to a 1°C drop. After all, he concludes, a 30% reduction of solar radiation about 2.5 billion years ago did not lead to an Earth much colder than it is today.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I don’t suppose Skidmore will avail himself of this information.
Brilliant as ever. Richard Lindzen’s cajones have their own atmosphere and climate. Long may this guy live!
Prof Lindzen and others say that a lot of the young “climate scientists” are afraid to speak out against the group think lest they lose their funding. Some are true believers, although how many there really are is a question in light of the fact that “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it”.
In principle I agree with him. Single issue tactics are evidently convenient in politics, and measuring carbon dioxide output from certain equipment is relatively easy, and has been used as a roundabout way of encouraging one thing or another, E.g. a few years ago I bought a car that had zero road tax on account of its carbon dioxide measurement under test (it was a Honda Civic in 2013).
It’s just astonishing that eminently qualified people like Richard Lindzen continue to speak truth but continue to be ignored by the governments and mainstream media.
There is another technical route into this issue which destroys the fundamental premise – that manmade C02 emissions are the sole cause for any recent global temperature rises.
As Professor Lindzen points out the mainstream argument builds on the ludicrous premise that trace C02 elements in the atmosphere (measured in parts per million) are the main drivers of overall climate adjustments.
It then goes on to claim that even though the human contribution to annual C02 inputs is a relatively tiny proportion (around 5%, the other 95% fully natural) that for the last several hundred thousand years C02 concentrations have been stable; therefore all the recent observed rises must represent man’s inherently evil C02 hanging around and building up (unlike the very clever natural C02 which magically dissipates in just the right amount to keep itself in perpetual equilibrium).
However here is a series of graphs which reveal that even this fundamental aspect of the Anthropogenic Climate Change pseudo-science is complete nonsense.
First of all increasing annual human C02 emissions over time:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=~OWID_WRL
Note from 1995 to 2020 the annual output increased at a pretty steady and steep rate from 23.45 billion tonnes per year to 34.81 (a dramatic change of around 50%).
Now look at atmospheric C02 concentrations:
http://www.climate.gov/media/13611
Note the essentially straight line between 1995 and 2020.
Remember that all recent C02 concentration increases are claimed to have been due to humanity’s input, so a straight line would only have been possible if our emissions had stayed constant throughout the 15 year period, ie at the 23.45 billon tonne 1995 level.
The actual steady increase to 34.81 tonnes by 2020 means that (according to the theory itself) atmospheric C02 concentrations should have increased by a greater amount each year and resulted in a marked and immediately obvious acceleration curve of this type (first graph on left):
https://www.teachpe.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/graphs-of-motion620
Again, as opposed to:
http://www.climate.gov/media/13611
It is absolutely unbelievable that schoolboy errors such as this and others have been overlooked in the quest for such an epoch changing poverty and tyranny inducing project.
In fact the most fundamental giveaway that this is a political and financially self-interested project rather than a genuinely scientific or humanitarian one is not directly technical but rather the complete lack of any form of cost-benefit analysis throughout – ie even if harmful manmade Climate Change did exist what would the costs of ameliorative measures such as heat resistant crops and sea walls be in comparison to those of complete deindustrialisation.
This oversight mirrors the complete absence of any rigorous cost-benefit analyses carried out before the introduction of the similarly catastrophic Coronavirus lockdown measures.
Brilliant. Thanks.
Thanks in return for the compliment, very decent of you after I have disagreed with you quite vehemently over other matters!
PS 1995 – 2020 is of course 25 years, not the 15 I claimed! This is an important point because the longer the time scale involved the less likely any expected acceleration curve could be obscured by short-term noise.
There are huge forest fires in the Amazon right now, said to have been started deliberately. Environmentalists are blaming the incumbent Brazilian President, Bolsonaro, who is very unpopular with globalists because he’s “far-right” (i.e., he doesn’t toe their line). The claim is he isn’t doing enough to stop these fires.
I’d bet bet this situation is the same as the Nordstream vandalism – most likely a false-flag committed by those who want world revolution – in this case, the environmentalists.
The fact that this is barely reported in the news is very unusual since the Amazon is hugely important to the world ecosystem.
Combined with America’s obvious attack on Nordstream, this is surely causing enormous environmental damage – committed by those who demand we all radically change our lives in a detrimental way to ourselves because, apparently, our lifestyle (i.e., being alive) is going to bring about the imminent destruction of the planet.
Lindzen’s view that temperature changes are caused by heat flow in the oceans and atmosphere seems remarkably similar to the views of Kinnimoth that were highlighted on daily sceptic a few days ago. I’m not qualified to say if they’re right or wrong, but there are other scientists, e.g. Willie Soon who seem to believe that most temperature change can be explained by changes in solar activity.
Having spent hundreds of hours over the past few years reading about the subject it’s my belief that climate change is a combination of changes in solar activity and ocean currents, but they affect global temperatures on different time scales. Ocean currents such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation affect temperatures on the 20-40 year timescale, whereas changes in solar activity are more likely to be seen on the 50+ year timescale, and on shorter timescales can be cancelled out by ocean cycles.
It seems a shame to me that as far as I’m aware the 2 groups of scientists have never got together to share data and ideas to see if climate change is a combination of ocean and solar cycles. Instead it seems that they continue to believe that it has to be one or the other.