Not the End of the World

Is your hair on fire yet from the eco-alarmism?!!! Take heart, a global warming rethink around the world.

Lindzen Climate Testimony before the UK House of Lords. Memorandum by Professor Richard S Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the UK Parliament, Select Committee on Economic Affairs:

This brings us, finally, to the issue of climate models. Essential to alarm is the fact that most current climate models predict a response to a doubling of CO2 of about 4C. The reason for this is that in these models, the most important greenhouse substances, water vapour and clouds, act in such a way as to greatly amplify the response to anthropogenic greenhouse gases alone (ie, they act as what are called large positive feedbacks). However, as all assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have stated (at least in the text—though not in the Summaries for Policymakers), the models simply fail to get clouds and water vapour right. We know this because in official model intercomparisons, all models fail miserably to replicate observed distributions of cloud cover. Thus, the model predictions are critically dependent on features that we know must be wrong.

If we nonetheless assume that these model predictions are correct (after all stopped watches are right twice a day), then man's greenhouse emissions have accounted for about six times the observed warming over the past century with some unknown processes cancelling the difference. This is distinctly less compelling than the statement that characterised the IPCC Second Assessment and served as the smoking gun for the Kyoto agreement: The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate. This is simply a short restatement of the basic agreement with the addition of a small measure of attribution. While one could question the use of the word "discernible", there is no question that human influence should exist, albeit at a level that may be so small as to actually be indiscernible. As we have already noted, however, even if all the change in global mean temperature over the past century were due to man, it would still imply low and relatively unimportant influence compared to the predictions of the models that are drawn on in IPCC reports.

Also this:

As you can see, the global warming issue parts company with normative science at a pretty early stage. A very good indicator of this disconnect is the fact that there is widespread and even rigorous scientific agreement that complete adherence to the Kyoto Agreement would have no discernible impact on climate. This clearly is of no importance to the thousands of negotiators, diplomats, regulators, general purpose bureaucrats and advocates attached to this issue.

And Der Spiegel is skeptical as well. Interesting so what? discussion.

NOT the end of the world as we know it.

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