F
fultonfish
Guest
GREAT article by Lindzen on the importance of how to understand the science of global warming.
It puts the social justice aspects in proper proportion to the seriousness of the issue.
Wish the article was longer, but space/ number of words is important.
online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html#mod%3Dtodays_us_opinion%26articleTabs%3Darticle
The problem with science is that scientists need to be very very precise in their written and spoken words.
For example, the word “significant” merely means that there is a number associated with it (perhaps even a very extremely tiny number), NOT that the size of the number is meaningful or even very important. [So why bring it up at all? Because that is the nature of science: attaching or attempting to attach numbers to things. Even if the numbers are absolutely of no importance.]
What happens is that politicians grab ahold of numbers and words (like “significant”) and turn them into major emotional issues designed to scare the bejesus out of us. Often so they can glean some personal political leverage out of it. And, usually, it ends up costing us a lot of money or they use it to diminish our political liberty. [Read Levin’s “Liberty & Tyranny”.]
Read this from Lindzen:
"Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
"Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively.
"But even if the IPCC’s iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.
“Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible.”
It puts the social justice aspects in proper proportion to the seriousness of the issue.
Wish the article was longer, but space/ number of words is important.
online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html#mod%3Dtodays_us_opinion%26articleTabs%3Darticle
The problem with science is that scientists need to be very very precise in their written and spoken words.
For example, the word “significant” merely means that there is a number associated with it (perhaps even a very extremely tiny number), NOT that the size of the number is meaningful or even very important. [So why bring it up at all? Because that is the nature of science: attaching or attempting to attach numbers to things. Even if the numbers are absolutely of no importance.]
What happens is that politicians grab ahold of numbers and words (like “significant”) and turn them into major emotional issues designed to scare the bejesus out of us. Often so they can glean some personal political leverage out of it. And, usually, it ends up costing us a lot of money or they use it to diminish our political liberty. [Read Levin’s “Liberty & Tyranny”.]
Read this from Lindzen:
"Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
"Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively.
"But even if the IPCC’s iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.
“Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible.”