[ExI] Richard Lindzen on climate hysteria

John K Clark jonkc at bellsouth.net
Tue Aug 4 19:36:29 UTC 2009


"Alfio Puglisi" <alfio.puglisi at gmail.com>

> all known physics tells us that, if you put enough CO2 in the atmosphere,
> global warming will result.

If it were that simple making good climate models would be easy. It isn't.
During the late Ordovician period, 450 million years ago, there was a huge
amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, about 4400 ppm verses 380 today, and yet
the world was in the grip of a severe ice age.

>  we are seeing a clear rise in temperature.

It hasn't been very clear during the last decade!

> we know that the current rise in CO2 and temperature would be a
> *vertical line* on any climate graph of the known Earth history,
> unlike anything we have seen before.

That is simply untrue. During the last 600 million years the atmosphere has
almost always had far more CO2 than now, abut 3000 ppm on average. The only
exception was a period that lasted from 315 million years ago to 270 where
there was about the same amount of CO2 as we have now. The temperature was
about the same then as it is now too, and during the late Ordovician that I
mentioned before it was much colder, but other than a few very brief ice
ages during the last few million years the temperature has always been
warmer than now, or at least during the last 600 million years it has.

> Can you show this numerically? If you can show, quantitatively, that one
> or more of the current unknowns in the models are enough to mask the
> cumulative (in the time axis) effect of CO2, water wapor and other
> GHGs, you will have a point, but not yet.

Can you show me a climate model that has accurately predicted anything?
These things have no track record but you expect us to stake our lives on
them.

> Somehow the clouds have failed to materialize to save the situation.

I'm not saying clouds are going to save us, for all I know they could make
things worse, but I am saying that love them or hate them clouds are vitally
important to climate. So how much confidence can you have in a computer
model that doesn't even try to deal with them?

 John K Clark









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