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To: Sdgla who wrote (844938)	3/25/2015 1:27:41 AM
From: Wharf Rat	1 Recommendation Recommended By Eric Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574417

"MIT profs have debunked your hysteria rat." LOL. Did you get that from one of Klavan's mysteries? The Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) at MIT was founded in January 1990 to address fundamental questions about climate processes with a multidisciplinary approach. In July 2006 the CGCS became an independent Center in the School of Science. The Center’s goal is to improve the ability to accurately predict changes in the global environment. CGCS seeks to better understand the natural mechanisms in ocean, atmosphere and land systems that together control the Earth’s climate, and to apply improved knowledge to problems of predicting climate changes. The Center utilizes theory, observations, and numerical models to investigate climate phenomena, the linkages among them, and their potential feedbacks in a changing climate. The Center builds on existing programs of research and education in the Schools of Science and Engineering at MIT. The interdisciplinary organization fosters studies on topics as varied as, for example, oceanography, meteorology, hydrology, atmospheric chemistry, ecology, biogeochemical cycling, paleoclimatology, applied math, data assimilation, computer science, and satellite remote sensing. CGCS sustains a program of basic scientific research on the natural processes controlling global climate, with a concentration on the cycles, circulations and interactions of water, air, energy, and nutrients in the Earth system. Parallel CGCS activities incorporate the insight gained from research into climate prediction models, and climate policy analysis, and provide it in a useful way to decision-makers in domestic and international climate policy-making arenas. The CGCS also interacts closely with complimentary MIT activities in the Earth System Initiative, the Energy Initiative, and the Earth Resources Laboratory. cgcs.mit.edu News & Events IN THE NEWS: Top hurricane expert: Climate change influenced Tropical Cyclone Pam The Washington Post speaks to MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel, who dissects the climate science behind a recent tropical cyclone. CLIMATE AT MIT: How can MIT be a game-changer on climate? MIT Climate Change Conversation gets underway with brainstorming session on how to catalyze change. cgcs.mit.edu

To: Sdgla who wrote (844938)	3/25/2015 2:07:29 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574417

"MIT profs have debunked your hysteria rat.." Chapter 2 "MIT profs vow to out-green California". CLIMATE AT MIT: How can MIT be a game-changer on climate?Friday, March 13, 2015 MIT News David L. Chandler \| MIT News Office A gathering of MIT students, faculty, staff, and alumni took part Thursday in series of talks, polling questions, and brainstorming sessions aimed at spurring the whole MIT community to engage in the process of making the Institute a world leader, role model, and catalyst for how campuses around the world can work to reduce their carbon footprint and create a more sustainable environment. The event, billed as “Creating the Roadmap: Envisioning/Reducing MIT's Carbon Footprint,” began with talks outlining the MIT campus’ current energy usage and emissions, and the presentation of plans for new buildings and renovations that could have an impact on energy use. During the talks, participants had a chance to register their responses to questions about both factual information on campus energy use and opinions about priorities for improving things. Then, the group broke into small teams for brainstorming about suggestions on specific measures to reduce campus greenhouse-gas emissions. “We’re here to engage you all in renewing the campus in a sustainable manner,” said Israel Ruiz, MIT’s executive vice president and treasurer, who initiated MIT’s creation two years ago of an Office of Sustainability. “It’s an issue I care a lot about,” he said, “how we’re actually going to change the world through what we do here.” Ruiz pointed out that the campus already faces the need to carry out about $2 billion worth of renovations on its existing buildings over the next five to 10 years, but that need also presents a great opportunity for improving the overall energy efficiency of the campus. In addition, he said, MIT has “a lot of great research where we can use the campus for experiments,” and potentially find innovations that other institutions can emulate. Introducing the event, Christoph Reinhart, a professor of architecture, said the idea was to “seek broad input and see how MIT can respond” to the challenge of climate change, “and what we can do as a community” to address our own energy usage. “Based on this input, we will write a final report,” he said, and over the next few months all members of the MIT community are encouraged to submit suggestions and comments online, which need not be fully thought out or detailed. MIT has 171 buildings totaling 12 million square feet of space, he said. Though that’s a minuscule footprint by global standards, how MIT manages its own facilities could have a disproportionate impact, he said: “We see ourselves as a catalyst for change, and there are a lot of people in the world looking at what we do.” If the Institute can find solutions on campus that are scalable and replicable, he said, “we can have an influence.” Henry “Jake” Jacoby, professor emeritus of management, underscored that point, saying “MIT is really small, but in terms of demonstrating what can be done, it’s really important.” He suggested that one critical step would be to change the way accounting is done so that different departments and labs would explicitly have to account for their energy use in their own budgets, giving them a direct incentive to find more efficient approaches. It’s essential, Jacoby added, given MIT’s reputation in the world, that “we don’t do things that are symbolic but don’t have a real effect.” It’s important to “not just do it, but do it right.” In moving toward innovative solutions, one key aspect for a data-driven place like MIT is to improve the ability to collect detailed energy use data at a building-by-building level or better, and that process is already well underway, said Sarah Bylinsky, a program manager in the sustainability office. “We can’t manage what we can’t measure,” she said. In making MIT into a world-leading example of how to maximize efficiency and minimize its impact on climate, Ruiz said that “the willingness is there, and there’s a full menu of opportunities.” Now, he said, it’s up to all the members of the MIT family to “help us choose what’s most effective for our community.” In looking for innovative solutions, Bylinsky said, “we have to embolden ourselves. We shouldn’t be afraid to think big, beyond our current capacity, and to do as much as we can.” cgcs.mit.edu

To: Sdgla who wrote (844938)	3/25/2015 2:22:49 AM
From: Wharf Rat	1 Recommendation Recommended By Don Hurst Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574417

Which climate scientist has been the wrongest the longest? Hint... he's from MIT, and his initials are Richard Lindzen. theguardian.com The Weekly Standard's Lindzen puff piece exemplifies the conservative media's climate failures The Weekly Standard suggests we should gamble our future on the climate scientist who's been the wrongest, longest The Weekly Standard's Lindzen article was puffier than a drag from a cigarette – which Lindzen is also 'skeptical' cause cancer. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian Graham Turner/Guardian Dana Nuccitelli Monday 6 January 2014 09.00 EST Last modified on Thursday 22 May 2014 07.21 EDT The conservative media may currently be the single biggest roadblock to addressing the threat posed by human-caused climate change. There is virtually no support for any sort of climate policy among Republicans in US Congress, because even acknowledging the reality of global warming guarantees a wave of attacks by the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party and a probable primary election challenge. This politicization of science has been caused in large part by the conservative media like Fox News, who treat climate change like a punch line. Another conservative media outlet, The Weekly Standard has occasionally run articles encouraging the Republican Party to stop denying science and start engaging in constructive debate about the best climate solutions. Unfortunately, those types of constructive articles are the exception rather than the norm. Last week, The Weekly Standard instead ran a puff piece about contrarian climate scientist Richard Lindzen that embodied the fundamental problems in most conservative media coverage of climate change. Richard Lindzen is one of the approximately 3 percent of climate scientists who believe the human influence on global warming is relatively small (though Lindzen is now retired, no longer doing scientific research). More importantly, he's been wrong about nearly every major climate argument he's made over the past two decades. Lindzen is arguably the climate scientist who's been the wrongest, longest. The Weekly Standard devotes the first page of its piece to establishing how smart Lindzen is – and he certainly is a smart man, but as climate scientist Ray Pierrehumbert put it, "It's okay to be wrong, and [Lindzen] is a smart person, but most people don't really understand that one way of using your intelligence is to spin ever more clever ways of deceiving yourself, ever more clever ways of being wrong. And that's okay because if you are wrong in an interesting way that advances the science, I think it's great to be wrong, and he has made a career of being wrong in interesting ways about climate science." Make no mistake about it; Lindzen has made a career of being wrong about climate science. Unfortunately, while the Weekly Standard piece goes through Lindzen's many contrarian climate arguments, it misses the key point that they haven't withstood scientific scrutiny or the test of time: • Changes in water vapor will dampen global warming (also known as Lindzen's "Iris hypothesis")? Refuted by four peer-reviewed studies within a year of the publication of Lindzen's hypothesis. Measurements show that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is increasing as mainstream climate scientists expect, and as a greenhouse gas, is amplifying global warming. • Climate change over the past century has been "minimal"? In reality, the current rate of global warming is unprecedented over the past 11,000 years. • The 15-year 'pause' myth? Completely debunked – global surface warming over the past decade turns out to be more than double previous estimates, and the climate continues to accumulate heat at a rate equivalent to 4 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations per second. • The accuracy of climate models during that timeframe? Much better than Lindzen claims. In my extensive research into Richard Lindzen's climate papers and talks, I've never been able to find an instance where he predicted how global temperatures would change in the future, other than to say in 1989, "I personally feel that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small," The natural variability of the Earth's climate rarely causes more than 0.2°C global surface warming over the span of a few decades to a century, yet we've already seen 0.8°C warming over the past century and 0.5°C over the past 3 decades, with much more to come over the next century. Based on his comments in that 1989 talk, I pieced together what Lindzen's global temperature prediction might have looked like, had he made one, and compared it to the prediction made by prominent NASA climate scientist James Hansen in a 1988 paper (like Lindzen, Hansen is now retired). Comparison of the observed NASA temperature record (black) with temperature predictions from Dr. James Hansen's 1988 modeling study (red), and with my reconstructed temperature prediction by Dr. Richard Lindzen based on statements from his talk at MIT in 1989 (blue). Hansen's Scenario B projection has been adjusted to reflect the actual observed greenhouse gas concentrations since 1988. SkepticalScience.com Between mainstream climate scientists like Hansen and contrarian climate scientists like Lindzen, it's clear who has the better track record in making accurate climate predictions. Lindzen has made a career of being wrong about climate science, and he's who The Weekly Standard is relying on to evaluate the risks posed by climate change. How do Lindzen and The Weekly Standard justify dismissing the 97 percent expert climate consensus? With conspiracy theories, of course. "[Lindzen] says it mostly comes down to the money—to the incentive structure of academic research funded by government grants. Almost all funding for climate research comes from the government, which, he says, makes scientists essentially vassals of the state. And generating fear, Lindzen contends, is now the best way to ensure that policymakers keep the spigot open." Lindzen would have us believe that tens of thousands of climate scientists around the world are all tossing their ethics aside and falsifying data in order to keep the research money flowing, even though contrarian climate scientists like Lindzen have had no trouble obtaining government research grants. Is this more plausible than the alternative explanation that 97 percent of climate research is correct, and Lindzen, whose claims have consistently been disproved by observational data, is wrong? In the end, the Weekly Standard piece revisits comparisons between Lindzen and Galileo. There's one major difference between the two: Galileo was right. His positions were based on and supported by scientific evidence, and they withstood scientific scrutiny and the test of time. Other scientists at the time also recognized that Galileo was right. On the contrary, Lindzen is an outlier whose arguments have been disproved time and time again, including about the link between smoking and lung cancer. Today's conservative media outlets are rarely willing to consider the scenario in which 97 percent of climate scientists and peer-reviewed research are correct. Instead they ridicule mainstream climate scientists and give disproportionate coverage to the few contrarian scientists like Lindzen. Betting our future on the slim chance that Lindzen is right and nearly every other climate expert is wrong, despite Lindzen's terrible climate track record, would be foolhardy – perhaps humanity's greatest risk management failure. Yet by politicizing science through their biased coverage of the subject, conservative media outlets like The Weekly Standard have created a poisonous environment in which it's almost impossible for Republican policymakers to approach the issue from any direction other than denial of the problem. As The Weekly Standard has previously written, what we need now are conservative policymakers with the courage to do the right thing, take the conservative approach, and engage in constructive debate to develop the best possible climate policies. With most of its climate pieces instead denying the risks posed by climate change, The Weekly Standard is helping to create a toxic partisan atmosphere where conservative policymakers feel they can only obstruct climate policies. This Weekly Standard article exemplifies the problem with today's conservative media, as they ironically help stick us with government greenhouse gas regulations rather than encouraging a potentially more effective free market approach favored by economists, including conservative ones. The above figure caption has been revised to reflect that Lindzen doesn't necessarily deny smoking causes cancer, but he is 'skeptical' about the strength of the link.