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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (10574)	3/19/2007 9:22:00 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36921

Richard Lindzen’s HoL testimony Filed under: Climate Science Greenhouse gases Climate modelling Aerosols— gavin @ 7:08 pm Prof. Richard Lindzen (MIT) is often described as the most respectable of the climate 'sceptics' and is frequently cited in discussions here and elsewhere. Lindzen clearly has many fundamentally important papers under his belt (work on the QBO and basic atmospheric dynamics), and a number of papers that have been much less well received by the community (the 'Iris' effect etc.). Last year, he gave evidence to and answered questions from, a UK House of Lords Committee investigating the economics of climate change, in which he discoursed freely on the science. I'll try here to sort out what he said. Firstly, it is clear that Lindzen only signs up to the first point of the basic 'consensus' as outlined here previously, that the planet has indeed warmed significantly over the 20th century. While he accepts that CO2 and other greenhouse gases have increased due to human activities, and that this should warm the planet, he does not accept that it is necessarily an important component in the 20th century rise. His preferred option (by process of elimination) appears to be intrinsic variability, but he provides no support for this contention. ...Alarmism Throughout his testimony, Lindzen refers to the global warming 'alarmists'. In my dictionary an 'alarmist' is defined as 'a person who alarms others needlessly'. However, Lindzen appears to define as 'alarmism' anything that links human activities to climate change. For instance, when discussing the statement from the NRC (2001) report (which he co-authored): The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability., he states that "To be sure, this statement is leaning over backwards to encourage the alarmists". To my mind, this statement is actually a fair assessment of both the NRC report, and IPCC report to which it was referring. To claim that this is 'alarmist' is such a gross overuse of the term as to make it useless except as a rhetorical device. Lindzen has frequently claimed that within the scientific community "alarm is felt to be essential to the maintenance of funding". I have yet to see any empirical evidence of this and a brief perusal of active NSF grants related to climate change reveals a lot of interesting projects but none that jump out as being 'alarmist'. Having sat on panels that decide on funding allocations and as a reviewer of proposals for both US and international agencies, my experience has been that these panels actually do a very good job at deciding which proposals are interesting, tractable and achievable. I have not seen even one example of where the degree of 'alarmism' was ever a criteria in whether funding was given. (NB. I don't regard my own grants (viewable here) as remotely 'alarmist' and I don't have too much trouble getting funding (fingers crossed!)). Conclusion In some ways Lindzen's thinking on the climate change issue has not changed much since 1999, as can be seen in an older rebuttal of his position by Jim Hansen (scroll down to Table 1). However, he does seem to have become convinced that the 20th Century warming is real. What is interesting about the comparison between then and now, is that Hansen made two appeals to the data gathering community to test a) whether water vapour feedbacks can be observed, and b) whether the ocean heat content is increasing in line with the model predictions. It is quite telling that both of these data analyses have since been made and they confirm Hansen's contentions, not Lindzen's. realclimate.org