Dr. Richard Lindzen responds to the MIT letter objecting to his petition to Trump to withdraw from the UNFCC.
Apparently, MIT didn’t like its name being used in petition to Trump. Dr. Richard Lindzen responds to that letter.
March 9, 2017
President Donald Trump
The White House
Washington, DC
Dear Mr. President:
On 2 March, 2017, members of the MIT Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate (PAOC) sent a public letter to the White House, contesting the Petition I circulated. The Petition, signed by over 330 scientists from around the world so far, called for governments to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Since MIT’s administration has made the climate issue a major focus for the Institute, with PAOC playing a central role, it is not surprising that the department would object to any de-emphasis. But the PAOC letter shows very clearly the wisdom of James Madison’s admonition, in the Federalist, 10:
“No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time.”
For far too long, one body of men, establishment climate scientists, has been permitted to be judges and parties on what the “risks to the Earth system associated with increasing levels of carbon dioxide” really are.
Let me explain in somewhat greater detail why we call for withdrawal from the UNFCCC.
The UNFCCC was established twenty five years ago to find scientific support for dangers from increasing carbon dioxide. While this has led to generous and rapidly increased support for the field, the purported dangers remain hypothetical, model-based projections. By contrast, the benefits of increasing CO2 and modest warming are clearer than ever, and they are supported by dramatic satellite images of a greening Earth.
We note that:
- The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) no longer claims a greater likelihood of significant as opposed to negligible future warming,
- It has long been acknowledged by the IPCC that climate change prior to the 1960’s could not have been due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Yet, pre-1960 instrumentally observed temperatures show many warming episodes, similar to the one since 1960, for example, from 1915 to 1950, and from 1850 to 1890. None of these could have been caused by an increase in atmospheric CO2,
- Model projections of warming during recent decades have greatly exceeded
Lomborg Blasts UN Paris Treaty’s $100 Trillion Price Tag For No Temp Impact: ‘You won’t be able to measure it in 100 years’
Via: Newsbusters – By James Powers
$100 trillion for a 0.3 degree temperature drop.
That’s a price tag that sounds acceptable to liberals, but not to everyone. An economist and environmentalist who says man-made climate change is real still argues that is “an incredibly expensive way to do almost no good.”
Self-proclaimed “skeptical environmentalist and” president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center Bjorn Lomborg appeared on FBN’s Varney & Company on Feb. 14, to discuss The Paris Agreement. He advised the new president to drop the agreement and focus on other solutions. He also criticized the expense of the deal, for what it would supposedly do to temperatures.
“If everyone does all they promised — and remember the track record ain’t that good — but if everyone does all they promised and do it all the way through the century, we’ll reduce temperatures by end of the century by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit,” Lomborg said. “You won’t be able to measure it in a one hundred years,” he added.
“Yet the costs will be somewhere between $1 trillion and $2 trillion a year. Paying $100 trillion for no good is not a good deal.”
Lomborg recommended that President Donald Trump drop the Paris Agreement but added that “if you want to do something about climate” then we must “invest in research and development into green energy sources.”
He said the debate about the Paris Agreement is “about identity politics. It’s about feeling good… but the climate doesn’t care about how you feel. It’s about doing good.”
“The reason why we emit CO2 — remember, we don’t do it to annoy Al Gore — we do it because it powers everything we like about civilization. So we want permanent and good and cheap energy. Right now we get that from fossil fuels. If we are going to get it from some other source, we need that to be much much cheaper.”
That U.N. climate treaty was approved in late 2015 and signed by former President Obama in April 2016. Reuters reported the deal’s terms began to take effect Nov. 4, 2016.
The liberal media have exaggerated the supposed positive impacts of the agreement. NBC’s Ron Allen praised Obama’s support for the climate agreement and claimed it was …
New Paper: Glacier Melt Rates Were Up To 3 Times Greater, Faster During Early 20th Century
75% Of Total Modern Glacier Melt Occurred Before 1950
“[T]he retreat of the glaciers after about 1925 became rapid. It was almost entirely during the [pre-1950] twentieth century warming that the Alpine glaciers disappeared from the valley floors up into the mountains. Similarly great retreats occurred in Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, in the Americas, and on high mountains near the equator.” — H.H. Lamb Climate, History, and the Modern World (1982), pg. 248
A new scientific paper indicates that the pronounced warming that occurred during the years stretching from the 1920s to the 1940s melted Northern Iceland glaciers much more extensively and at a far more rapid pace than has been observed in recent decades.
During the 1960s to 1980s, glacier melt rates not only decelerated relative to the 1920s to 1940s, the ice actually advanced in some cases due to decades of cooling. It has only been since about the mid-1990s that glaciers have consistently begun melting again — but with far less alacrity than they did in the first half of the 20th century.
Fernández-Fernández and co-authors (2017) indicate that the Icelandic glaciers they studied melted by more than 1,000 meters (1,062) on average between the late 1800s and 1946. But from 1947 to 2005, these same glaciers only retreated by an average of 272 meters more. In other words, about 75% of the total glacier melt production since the end of the Little Ice Age (the late 19th century) occurred prior to the mid-1940s.
Below are some key points and graphs from the paper.
Fernández-Fernández et al., 2017
Summary:
“The abrupt climatic transition of the early 20th century and the 25-year warm period 1925–1950 triggered the main retreat and volume loss of these glaciers since the end of the ‘Little Ice Age’. Meanwhile, cooling during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s altered the trend, with advances of the glacier snouts. Stötter et al. (1999) indicate that the coldest period after the LIA was from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, when temperatures fell to levels equivalent to the warmest recorded in the 19th century. This cooling is the reason given by Caseldine (1983, 1985a, 1985b, 1988) to explain the advance of the Gljúfurárjökull between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s … Studies of aerial photographs and satellite images show that the glacier snouts have retreated by more than 1300 m on average since the LIA maximum
…Fed Whistleblower: NOAA Scientists Manipulated Temperature Data To Hype ‘Global Warming’
http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=1c2cf9b0f9&e=f4e33fdd1e
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 The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change. A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015. –David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 5 February 2017.
The scandal has disturbing echoes of the ‘Climategate’ affair which broke shortly before the UN climate summit in 2009, when the leak of thousands of emails between climate scientists suggested they had manipulated and hidden data. Some were British experts at the influential Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia…Dr Bates retired from NOAA at the end of last year after a 40-year career in meteorology and climate science. As recently as 2014, the Obama administration awarded him a special gold medal for his work in setting new, supposedly binding standards ‘to produce and preserve climate data records’. Yet when it came to the paper timed to influence the Paris conference, Dr Bates said, these standards were flagrantly ignored…In the weeks after the Pausebuster paper was published, Dr Bates conducted a one-man investigation into this. His findings were extraordinary. Not only had Mr Karl and his colleagues failed to follow any of the formal procedures required to approve and archive their data, they had used a ‘highly experimental early run’ of a programme that tried to combine two previously separate sets of records…Then came the final bombshell. Dr Bates said: ‘I learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure.’ The reason for the failure is unknown, but it means the Pausebuster paper can never be replicated or verified by other scientists. 1) World Leaders Duped Over Manipulated Global Warming Data 2) John Bates: Climate Scientists Versus Climate Data 3) Matt Ridley: Politics And Science Are A Toxic Combination |
UN IPCC ‘altered’ climate reports violate U.S. science policy guidelines
U.S. Scientific Integrity Rules Repudiate the UN Climate Process
By Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise, author of the book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert.
Mere days before he left office, Barack Obama’s Department of Energy (DOE) introduced a sweeping new scientific integrity policy. This matters because the DOE is the largest funder of physical sciences in America, and because climate change is one of its core concerns.
Elsewhere, I’ve explained that the new policy is a startling departure from the one that prevailed while Obama was in charge. It seems designed to unleash mayhem. In both instances, however, the DOE was adamant concerning one issue: Politicians should not tamper with scientific findings.
The 2014 DOE policy declares:
Political officials will not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings. [italics added]
The 2017 DOE policy says:
Under no circumstance may anyone, including a public affairs officer, ask or direct any researcher to alter the record of scientific findings or conclusions. [italics added]
…personnel will not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings, or intimidate or coerce…others to alter or censor scientific or technological findings or conclusions.
There’s nothing equivocal about these statements. When scientists produce a document that says one thing, but their findings get massaged and manipulated by the people upstairs, scientific integrity has been violated. That is the clear position of the US government.
I am therefore happy to report that this same government has, in no uncertain terms, repudiated the process by which UN climate reports are produced.
In recent years, I’ve written two entire books about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Tasked with producing authoritative climate change assessments, the IPCC recruits scientists to write these documents.
The last major scientific assessment, released in 2013-2014, runs to 7,000 pages. No one has time to read such an opus, so the IPCC also released a Summary for Policymakers approximately 30 pages long for each of the report’s three sections.
These summaries were authored by a subset of the scientists who worked on the main report. But the IPCC considers scientists’ own, unadorned words to be a mere draft. Before each summary became an official IPCC document it was extensively altered. By political officials.
IPCC summary-rewriting meeting. Click to enlarge. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ipccphoto/14108451053/ Image used here in a fair use context. More info here.This …
MIT climate scientist on ‘hottest year’: ‘The hysteria over this issue is truly bizarre’ – Warns of return ‘back to the dark ages’
Full Audio of Lindzen’s interview.
Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT and a member of the National Academy of Sciences ridiculed the media hyped claims that 2016 was the “hottest year” on record. Lindzen was on The Howie Carr Show on January 18 to discuss “global warming” and the latest science and the political motivations behind the movement.
Lindzen on “Hottest Year” claims: (Load of bollocks: 2016 allegedly ‘hottest year’ by immeasurable 1/100 of a degree – While satellites show ‘pause’ continues)
“What happens if your body temp goes up a tenth of a degree, how much do you worry about that? To imply that a rise of temperature of a tenth of a degree is proof that the world is coming to an end — has to take one back to the dark ages.”
“They are talking about temperature data that is rather uncertain. How do you average? You have to make adjustments. That gives them an opening, you can always adjust it up to a quarter of a degree and you will notice that all of the adjustments that are frequently made, always make the temperature seem steeper. They lower the low, they increase the high. In this case (hottest year) they had to depress the high in 1998 to make this one (2016) look a little larger.
But when you are finished you are talking about 2/10ths of degree. No one can feel it. Referring to the New York Times hyping of the “hottest year,” Lindzen added, “Oh boy, can the New York Times can feel it!”
“As long as you can get people excited as to whether it’s a tenth of a degree warmer or cooler, then you don’t have to think, you can assume everyone who is listening to you is an idiot,” he added, noting that “the temperature of the last 20 years is way below what any of the models predicted.”
As to to 2/10ths of degree or a tenth of a degree, nobody can really feel it, not even the New York Times with their immense sensitivity,” Lindzen joked. He also noted that “sea level rise has been going on for 10,000 years, what’s the big deal?”
Adjusting data: “The whole point is so crazy because the temperature is always going up or down a little. What is astonishing is that in the last …
Load of bollocks: 2016 allegedly ‘hottest year’ by unmeasureable 1/100 of a degree – While satellites show ‘pause’ continues
Climate Depot Analysis
It’s that time of year again, the annual media ritual of declaring the previous year “the hottest ever!” And as usual, the media and many activists government scientists are playing fast and loose with the temperature data and.
Former Vice President Al Gore promoted the “hottest year” claim today. “2016 was the hottest year on record — confirmed by NASA and NOAA,” Gore tweeted. (More media hype here: CNN: 2016 was the hottest year on record — again & 2016 breaks record for hottest year ever)
But scientists seemed to yawn at the news.
Extreme Weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. noted that the media “hottest year” scare stories are simply not working. “Selling climate policy on “hottest year ever” hard because 2016 also had very low disasters & record high crop productivity. It doesn’t scare people,” Pielke wrote.
MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, was very blunt. (See: MIT climate scientist on ‘hottest year’: ‘The hysteria over this issue is truly bizarre’ – Warns of return ‘back to the dark ages’)
Lindzen said in an interview on Howie Carr’s radio show: “To imply that a rise of temperature of a tenth of a degree is proof that the world is coming to an end — has to take one back to the dark ages.” He added, “As long as you can get people excited as to whether it’s a tenth of a degree warmer or cooler, then you don’t have to think, you can assume everyone who is listening to you is an idiot.”
“The whole point is so crazy because the temperature is always going up or down a little. What is astonishing is that in the last 20 years it hasn’t done much of anything,” Lindzen continued.
“What they don’t mention is there has been a big El Nino in 2016 and in recent months the temperature has been dropping back into a zero trend level,” he added.
Statistician: UN climate treaty will cost $100 trillion – To Have No Impact – Postpone warming by less than four years by 2100
Danish statistician Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, the President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, has come out denouncing the UN climate Paris agreement as a massive waste of money that will do nothing to impact climate change. In a January 16, 2017 Prager U video titled, “The Paris Climate Agreement Won’t Change the Climate,” Lomborg explains that “the agreement will cost a fortune, but do little to reduce global warming.” (Full transcript here)
Lomborg ridiculed the UN Paris agreement supporters as making “grand pronouncements and vague specifics.”
Lomborg first took his analytical skills to take apart President Obama’s EPA climate regulations done through executive order.
“Using the same prediction model that the UN uses, I found that [Obama’s] power plan will accomplish almost nothing. Even if its cuts to carbon dioxide emissions are fully implemented – not just for the 14 years that the Paris agreement lasts, but for the rest of the century — the EPA’s Clean Power Plan would reduce the temperature increase in 2100 by just -.023 degrees Fahrenheit,” Lomborg explained.
“In the unlikely event that all of these extra cuts also happen, and are adhered to throughout the rest of the century, the combined reduction in temperatures would be 0.057 degrees. To put it another way, if the U.S. delivers for the whole century on the President Obama’s very ambitious rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century,” Lomborg said.
Lomborg continued, aiming his analysis at the much touted UN paris climate agreement.
“Now, let’s add in the rest of the world’s Paris promises. If we generously assume that the promised carbon cuts for 2030 are not only met — which itself would be a UN first — but sustained throughout the rest of the century, temperatures in 2100 would drop 0.3 degrees — the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years. Again, that is using the UN’s own climate prediction model,” Lomborg said.
He continued: “But here is the biggest problem: These miniscule benefits do not come free — quite the contrary. The cost of the UN Paris climate pact is likely to run 1 to 2 trillion dollars every year, based on estimates produced by the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum and …
Study: ‘Strong evidence that first half of 20th century had more extreme weather than the second half’
Abstract:
It is widely promulgated and believed that human-caused global warming comes with increases in both the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. A survey of official weather sites and the scientific literature provides strong evidence that the first half of the 20th century had more extreme weather than the second half, when anthropogenic global warming is claimed to have been mainly responsible for observed climate change. The disconnect between real-world historical data on the 100 years’ time scale and the current predictions provides a real conundrum when any engineer tries to make a professional assessment of the real future value of any infrastructure project which aims to mitigate or adapt to climate change. What is the appropriate basis on which to make judgements when theory and data are in such disagreement?
…
Core Conundrum Revisited
Items of physical infrastructure, for example, for housing, transportation, and energy supplies, must last 50-100 years, and are therefore generally designed to last over that period. Engineers involved in such projects have to assess the value-for-money for clients. Нey will be assisted by economic and environmental assessments, both of which will have uncertainties associated with predictions of the future. Extreme events play an important role in deciding the safety margins and the point where extra protection is not worth it. Нe lack
of clarity about future extreme weather, aіer 20 years of intensive analysis of future climates is deeply worrying. Нere is nothing that
emerges from references [1,2] that would require a significant refinement of the margins that have applied over the last half-century,
the engineering of the physical infrastructure. Over-adaptation that is not needed leaves clients free to sue advisors if the problems have been oversold and the costs of protection prove to have been excessive, even on a 20-year basis.
…
No Joke! Actual NY Times headline: ‘As Donald Trump Denies Climate Change, These Kids Die of It’
We Americans may be inadvertently killing her infant son. Climate change, disproportionately caused by carbon emissions from America, seems to be behind a severe drought that has led crops to wilt across seven countries in southern Africa. The result is acute malnutrition for 1.3 million children in the region, the United Nations says.
Trump has repeatedly mocked climate change, once even calling it a hoax fabricated by China. But climate change here is as tangible as its victims. Trump should come and feel these children’s ribs and watch them struggle for life. It’s true that the links between our carbon emissions and any particular drought are convoluted, but over all, climate change is as palpable as a wizened, glassy-eyed child dying of starvation. Like Ranomasy’s 18-month-old son, Tsapasoa.
Southern Africa’s drought and food crisis have gone largely unnoticed around the world. The situation has been particularly severe in Madagascar, a lovely island nation known for deserted sandy beaches and playful long-tailed primates called lemurs.
But the southern part of the island doesn’t look anything like the animated movie “Madagascar”: Families are slowly starving because rains and crops have failed for the last few years. They are reduced to eating cactus and even rocks or ashes. The United Nations estimates that nearly one million people in Madagascar alone need emergency food assistance.
…
The immediate cause of the droughts was an extremely warm El Niño event, which came on top of a larger drying trend in the last few decades in parts of Africa. New research, just published in the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, concludes that human-caused climate change exacerbated El Niño’s intensity and significantly reduced rainfall in parts of Ethiopia and southern Africa.
The researchers calculated that human contributions to global warming reduced water runoff in southern Africa by 48 percent and concluded that these human contributions “have contributed to substantial food crises.”
Climate Depot Response:
Unfortunately, the New York Times does not have science on its side. Droughts are not worse during the age of “global warming.” Not only are global droughts not increasing, but the notion that you can attribute them to “global warming” is not valid.
Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer in 2016: “Global warming and climate change, even if it is 100% caused by humans, is so slow that it cannot be observed by anyone in their lifetime. Hurricanes, tornadoes, …