An oversimplified picture
of the climate behavior
based on a single process
can lead to distorted conclusions
Richard S. Lindzen, Phd.
ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7520-70281
Below are my
carefully selected quotes,
intended to keep it simple:
"The nature of the climate system is reviewed.
... the centrality of the contribution of carbon dioxide is relatively recent, and probably inappropriate to much of the Earth’s climate history.
The present picture for the global warming issue presented to the general public hinges on the fact that CO2 absorbs and emits in the infrared, and that adding it to the atmosphere must, therefore, lead to some warming.
Indeed, the earth has been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age, and the level of CO2 has indeed been increasing, but this hardly constitutes proof.
However, the fact that large scale computer models can be made to replicate the warming with increasing CO2 is held to be strong confirming evidence.
Beyond this, is the claim that any warming at all is indicative of catastrophe, especially if higher than the politically defined goal of + 1.5 °C (of which over
1 °C has already occurred), and demands major reductions in fossil fuel use
Although it is often noted that greenhouse warming has long been found in the climate literature, it turns out that this was not generally considered a major cause of climate change until the 1980s.
In this paper, ... It is shown that there are substantive reasons to regard the present publicly accepted explanation as improbable.
The core of the system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids (the atmosphere and oceans) interacting with each other.
... solar radiation is directly incident at the equator while it barely skims the earth at the poles.
The uneven heating drives the circulation of the atmosphere ...
In addition to the oceans, the atmosphere is interacting with a hugely irregular land surface.
Evaporation from the oceans gives rise to water vapor in the atmosphere, and water vapor very strongly absorbs and emits radiation in the infrared.
The water vapor essentially blocks infrared radiation from leaving the surface, causing the surface and (via conduction) the air adjacent to the surface to heat, ...
... the amount of water vapor that the air can hold decreases rapidly as the temperature decreases.
Above some height there is so little water vapor remaining that radiation from this level can now escape to space.
The situation can actually be more complicated if upper-level cirrus clouds are present.
They are very strong absorbers and emitters of infrared radiation and effectively block infrared radiation from below. ...
Many factors, including fluctuations of average cloud area and height, snow cover, ocean circulations, etc. commonly cause changes ... comparable to that of doubling of CO2.
Much of the popular literature (on both sides of the climate debate) assumes that all changes must be driven by some external factor. ...
Nature has numerous examples of autonomous variability including the approximately 11-year sunspot cycle and the reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field every couple of hundred thousand years or so.
In this respect, the climate system is no different from other natural systems; that is to say, it can exhibit autonomous variability.
Well-known examples include the quasi-biennial oscillation of the tropical stratosphere, El Nino/Southern Oscillation, the Atlantic Multi-decadal oscillation, and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
The ‘consensus’ assessment of this system is today the following:
In this complex multi-factor system, the climate ... is described by just one variable, the globally averaged temperature change ...
We go further and designate CO2 as the sole control.
Although we are not sure ... we know precisely what policies to implement in order to control it. ...
Between 1988 and 1994 ... In the USA, funding for climate increased by about a factor of 15.
This led to a great increase in the number of people interested in working as ‘climate scientists’, and the new climate scientists understood that the reason for the funding was the ‘global warming’ alarm.
In France, in the 60s, there was essentially one theoretical meteorologist, Queney.
Today, there are hundreds involved with models if not theory, and it is largely due to ‘global warming.’
Is it unreasonable to wonder whether or not a political movement has succeeded in capturing a scientific field? ...
... it is implausible that a system as complex as the climate system with numerous degrees of freedom should be meaningfully summarized by a single variable (global mean temperature anomaly) and determined by a single factor (CO2 level in the atmosphere). ...
Interestingly, even those of us rejecting climate alarm (including me) have focused on the greenhouse picture despite the fact that this may not be the major factor in historic climate change ...
That is to say, we have accepted the basic premise of the conventional picture: namely that all changes in global mean temperature are due to radiative (man made ) forcing.
Although capturing the narrative is a crucial element in a political battle, it should not be permitted to replace scientific reasoning."