[ExI] [wta-talk] Richard Lindzen on climate hysteria

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Alfio Puglisi<alfio.puglisi at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 1)  If you want to criticize models, you better make sure that you
> know how they work. Current climatic models *cannot*, by design,
> reproduce the climate signal over a time span as short as 10 years.

### The problem is that predicted temperatures at one point in time
crucially depend on the predictions for preceding times, which makes
it more difficult to predict the longer the time span involved. Your
errors compound, rather than average out. You need to know the climate
sensitivity to CO2 and a number of additional variables describing
various secondary processes, like releases of CO2 from other sources,
interactions between CO2, temperatures, aerosols, biogenic chlorine
compound production (changes with temperatures and humidity) and the
feedback effects between them all - and climatologists still cannot
make models correctly predicting climate over years or decades,
however you slice it.

-------------------------------------------------
>
> You have it backwards. It's easier to predict climate over decades
> than over a few years, because random processes (weather) and
> oscillations (ENSO, etc) will average out.
>
### Random processes average out, yes, but the systematic errors of
the model (such as CO2 sensitivity pulled out of thin air) compound.

------------------------------
>
> 3) "the current period of  global cooling when it started in 1998"
>
> can you please provide a reference (with numbers) for a "global
> cooling started in 1998"?   Plotting GISS data from 1998 to 2008 I get
> a positive slope of  +0.0106 °C/year, too small to be statistically
> significant given the variation of the period, but hardly evidence of
> "cooling".

### What do you mean by "statistically significant"? The year 1998 was
the warmest in recent history, right? It follows logically that no
year since then could have been warmer (or else it would become the
new record year). It then follows that for the last 11 years there was
a period of cooler weather, compared to 1998.

--------------------------------------
>
>> ### Our infrastructure cannot deal with destroying fifteen or more
>> trillion dollars that would be necessary to stop anthropogenic CO2
>> emissions.
>
> Can you please give a reference for that $15T number? Did you also
> find the cost of not stopping the CO2 emission (that is, the cost of
> adaption), and compared?

### Honestly? I just made it up.

Actually, once you start looking at other estimates, it pales in
comparison - for example, Kyoto protocol cost 670 billion already, and
it might reduce warming by 0.07C. If there was a linear relationship
between the amount of money thrown at the issue and the resulting
cooling, it would cost about 100T (worldwide) to cool by 1C.

Nobody knows how many Tdollars it would take to stop global warming
(if it is real) but we can be sure it will be many.

As for the cost of adaptation (i.e. do nothing, even assuming global
warming is real), it has been estimated at 50 billion dollars in the
US - essentially invisible in an economy worth 50Tdollars.
---------------------------------
>
>  why you are also sure that adding CO2 to
> the atmosphere will change nothing?

### I am sure there is insufficient data to make precise predictions
about climate 100 years from now. Did you read something else into my
statements?

-----------------------------

Why do you think that the change
> will be smaller than the IPCC says and not, for example, much higher?

### The IPCC is a political body, not a scientific one, therefore
their results can be treated as propaganda rather than science.

Rafal