MIT Proff of Meteorology @ MIT, and Atmospheric Physicist talks of ‘Global Warming’

By: James Burge
November 26th, 2010

Ok I just realized I have been posting a lot of videos lately with almost no commentary on them so I wanted to talk quickly about a video I just came across of an interview with Richard S. Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT, an Atmospheric Physicist and one of the lead authors on the IPCC 3rd Assessment Report.

I wanted to bring some quotes to your attention, but you should catch them if you are going to watch the video.

On the climate change debate:

[They are] “trying to deal with global warming as though the issue was weather the climate ever changes, or weather there is a greenhouse effect or weather man could contribute something to it. None of that is actually in dispute; there is a greenhouse effect, climate always changes, and undoubtedly man can contribute something if the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings could contribute something. The question, as always in science, is how much. If man’s contribution is very little when compared to the normal variability people experience, then there’s not much point in trying to manipulate it because it won’t make much of a difference.”

On the use of Climate models:

“The issue of climate sensitivity is the primary question we are dealing with. […] There are numerous pieces of evidence, some of them quite rigorous, that the current models are greatly exaggerating climate sensitivity, that in reality it’s very modest. And what we are dealing with is the potential effect over the next century or so of ½ a degree, and there is no evidence whatever that this is associated with catastrophe”

“In general, […] using models, especially models that don’t test out very well to predict long into the future beyond the time scale which they function does not seem wise. […] What isn’t realized is, the models are quite similar to each other and their agreement on climate sensitivity within a broad range hardly proves anything. It depends on rather delicate feedbacks and primarily on feedbacks from clouds and even the IPCC acknowledges that we are virtually ignorant of clouds and the models do a very bad job of them. So if you understand how the feedbacks function, that statement is tantamount to the statement that the models cannot be used to predict climate.”

On the idea of a ‘tipping point’:

“It is almost unheard of to have a natural system that when you perturb it, it tries to make the perturbation worse. That would say the earth system was ‘sick’ from the origin, 4.5 billion years ago, and it doesn’t seem like it would have made it this long if that were true.”

On who is keeping the ‘crisis’ alive:

“[F]or a lot of people including the bureaucracy in government [...] the issue is power. It is hard to imagine a better leverage point than C02 to assume control over a society. [...] [I]t is essential to the production of energy, it is essential to breathing. It’s a point, if you demonize it and gain control of it, you so to speak control everything. That’s attractive to people.”