MIT’s Dr. Lindzen Pokes Fun At The ‘Naïve’, Well-Funded ‘Scientific Reasoning’ That 1 Factor – CO2 – Controls Climate

In a new paper, atmospheric physicist Dr. Richard Lindzen summarizes the “implausible” claims today’s proponents of dangerous anthropogenic global warming espouse.

Dr. Richard Lindzen retired several years ago, and yet his immense contribution to the atmospheric sciences lives on. His research is still cited about 600 times per year.

Lindzen recently published another scientific paper (Lindzen, 2020) in The European Physical Journal criticizing the current alarmism in climate science.  Here are a few of the highlights.

1. Doubling the atmospheric CO2 concentration from 280 ppm to 560 ppm results in just a 1-2% perturbation to the Earth’s 240 W/m² energy budget. This doubled-CO2 effect has less than 1/5th of the impact that the net cloud effect has. And yet we are asked to accept the “implausible” claim that change in one variable, CO2, is predominatly responsible for altering global temperatures.

2. A causal role for CO2 “cannot be claimed” for the glacial-to-interglacial warming events because CO2 variations follow rather than lead the temperature changes in paleoclimate records and the 100 ppm total increase over thousands of years produce “about 1 W/m²” of total radiative impact.

3. Climate science didn’t used to be alarmist prior to the late 1980s. Scientists were instead sufficiently skeptical about claims of climatically-induced planetary doom. That changed during the years 1988-1994, when climate research centered on CO2 and global warming received a 15-fold increase in funding in the US alone. Suddenly there was a great financial incentive to propel alarming global warming scenarios.

4. Concepts like “polar amplification” are “imaginary”.

“The change in equator-to-pole temperature difference was attributed to some imaginary ‘polar amplification,’ whereby the equator-pole temperature automatically followed the mean temperature. Although the analogy is hardly exact, this is not so different from assuming that flow in a pipe depends on the mean pressure rather than the pressure gradient.”

Image Source: Lindzen, 2020

20 responses to “MIT’s Dr. Lindzen Pokes Fun At The ‘Naïve’, Well-Funded ‘Scientific Reasoning’ That 1 Factor – CO2 – Controls Climate”

  1. Georg Thomas

    Can anyone give a layman-friendly rendering of points

    1. (“… results in just a 1-2% perturbation to the Earth’s 240 W/m² energy budget. This doubled-CO2 effect has less than 1/5th of the impact that the net cloud effect has …”),

    2. (“the 100 ppm total increase over thousands of years produce “about 1 W/m²” of total radiative impact”), and

    4.?

    1. Mark Pawelek

      I think you should download and read the paper itself. It’s already a summary of the climate system and history of climatology. Summarizing a summary is not on for me. Lindzen is a clear writer and the only difficult to grasp bits are some of technical terminology.

      You can download it from ‘Sci-hub’ for free. Just enter the DOI code for the paper there, which is: 10.1140/epjp/s13360-020-00471-z

      1. Yonason

        Thank you.

  2. dai davies

    The article is hidden behind a pay-wall so I can’t comment on anything other than your quote, but:

    The greenhouse effect is a temperature rise measured in degrees not W/m^2.

    See http://brindabella.id.au for discussion of this and other misunderstandings associated with the climate scare.

  3. Lasse

    In my country a technical university has a research program to see why some people NOT believe in CO2 as the controlling knob.
    I am ashamed, so ashamed I will not give out the institutes name.

  4. MIT’s Dr. Lindzen Pokes Fun At The ‘Naïve’, Well-Funded ‘Scientific Reasoning’ That 1 Factor – CO2 – Controls Climate – Newscats Hasslefree Allsort
  5. richard verney

    There is reason to consider that polar amplification could exist, because of the T^4 relationship. It takes a lot less energy to increase the cold temperatures seen at the poles, by a few degrees, than it does to increase the warm temperatures seen in the tropical regions of the planet, by a few degrees.

    Thus there is real scientific logic behind this particular claim. Of course, it does not mean that it happens in practice, because the atmosphere and the oceanic currents are extremely complex, and the processes not well known, still less well understood.

    1. The Indomitable Snowman,

      It’s also pretty basic thermodynamics. If you could inject an additional amount of energy into the atmosphere uniformly over the entire planet, the temperature response would be much larger in the polar regions than in the tropics – because to get air very cold it has to be very dry. So the temperature response is mainly based on the water vapor content of the air, and there’s a lot less water vapor in very cold polar air than in warm tropical air.

  6. Phil Salmon

    An excellent and much needed paper.
    The recent politicisation of climate science around the CO2 myth is a complete disgrace.

  7. The Stage Sets For The Persecution And Martyrdom Of Christians – In The News Round Up | Traditional Catholics Emerge

    […] In a new paper, atmospheric MIT physicist Dr. Richard Lindzen summarizes the “implausible” claims today’s proponents of dangerous anthropogenic global warming espouse. MIT’s Dr. Lindzen Pokes Fun At The ‘Naïve’, Well-Funded ‘Scientific Reasoning’ That 1 Factor – CO2 – Controls Climate https://notrickszone.com/2020/06/15/mits-dr-lindzen-pokes-fun-at-the-naive-well-funded-scientific-re… […]

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  9. Dr Roger Higgs

    Here’s ‘man-made warming’ demolished in 500 words, by a geologist, not Prince Charles, or a movie star, or a crisis-promoting media reporter, or a manipulated Swedish school drop-out, or a ‘climate scientist’ with, by definition, a huge in-built career-preservation motive …

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341622566

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    […] Prof. Dr.  Lindzen, June 15, 2020 in NoTricksZone_K. […]

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  12. Leitwolf

    Dr Lindzen is wrong on the CRE he quotes. It is claimed by the IPCC and NASA the CRE was about -20W/m2, but a careful investigation shows the models used there are worthless.

    In reality the CRE is strictly positive, which of couse has massive implications.

    https://de.scribd.com/document/466536029/The-Strange-NASA-Map1

  13. JCalvertN(UK)

    It was the insistence by propagandists that the climate had only one independent variable – CO2, that caused me to realise that the climate alarmists were a bunch of one-eyed fanatics. And that they were either a) doing extremely poor science or b) lying.

  14. The Indomitable Snowman, Ph.D.

    “… they were either a) doing extremely poor science or b) lying.”

    Embrace the healing power of “and”… 🙂

  15. Yonason

    Well, since it’s not neither, it’s got to be either one and the other. //:o]

    Since the NTZ post is about Lindzen, here’s a portion of one of my all time favorite Lindzen presentations.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwIixU1JyDU

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