Richard S. Lindzen was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 2013. He is the author of over 200 papers on meteorology and climatology and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the Academic Advisory Council of GWPF.
Over half a century ago, C.P. Snow (a novelist and English physical chemist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government) famously examined the implications of ‘two cultures’:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the
standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have
with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists.
Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how
many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response
was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific
equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What
do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying,
Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would
have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern
physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world
have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.
I fear that little has changed since Snow’s assessment 60 years ago. While some might
maintain that ignorance of physics does not impact political ability, it most certainly impacts
the ability of non-scientific politicians to deal with nominally science-based issues. The gap
in understanding is also an invitation to malicious exploitation. Given the democratic necessity
for non-scientists to take positions on scientific problems, belief and faith inevitably
replace understanding, though trivially oversimplified false narratives serve to reassure the
non-scientists that they are not totally without scientific ‘understanding.’ The issue of global
warming offers numerous examples of all of this.
I would like to begin this lecture with an attempt to force the scientists in the audience
to come to grips with the actual nature of the climate system, and to help the motivated
non-scientists in this audience who may be in Snow’s ‘one in ten’ to move beyond the trivial
oversimplifications.
The climate system
The following description of the climate system contains nothing that is in the least controversial,
and I expect that anyone with a scientific background will readily follow the description.
I will also try, despite Snow’s observations, to make the description intelligible to the
non-scientist.
The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids(the atmosphere and oceans)
interacting with each other. By ‘turbulent,’ I simply mean that it is characterized by irregular circulations like those found in a gurgling brook or boiling water, but on the planetary scale
of the oceans and the atmosphere. The opposite of turbulent is called laminar, but any fluid
forced to move fast enough becomes turbulent and turbulence obviously limits predictability.
By interaction, I simply mean that they exert stress on each other and exchange heat
with each other.
These fluids are on a rotating planet that is unevenly heated by the sun. The motions in
the atmosphere (and to a lesser extent in the oceans) are generated by the uneven influence
of the sun. The sun, itself, can be steady, but it shines directly on the tropics while barely
skimming the Earth at the poles. The drivers of the oceans are more complex and include
forcing by wind as well as the sinking of cold and salty water. The rotation of the Earth has
many consequences too, but for the present, we may simply note that it leads to radiation
being distributed around a latitude circle.
The oceans have circulations and currents operating on time scales ranging from years
to millennia, and these systems carry heat to and from the surface. Because of the scale and
density of the oceans, the flow speeds are generally much smaller than in the atmosphere
and are associated with much longer timescales. The fact that these circulations carry heat
to and from the surface means that the surface, itself, is never in equilibrium with space. That
is to say, there is never an exact balance between incoming heat from the sun and outgoing
radiation generated by the Earth because heat is always being stored in and released from
the oceans and surface temperature is always, therefore, varying somewhat.
In addition to the oceans, the atmosphere is interacting with a hugely irregular land surface.
As air passes over mountain ranges, the flow is greatly distorted. Topography therefore
plays a major role in modifying regional climate. These distorted air-flows even generate
fluid waves that can alter climate at distant locations. Computer simulations of the climate
generally fail to adequately describe these effects.
A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor
phases, and the changes in phase have vast impacts on energy flows. Each component also
has important radiative impacts. You all know that it takes heat to melt ice, and it takes further
heat for the resulting water to become vapor or, as it is sometimes referred to, steam.
The term humidity refers to the amount of vapor in the atmosphere. The flow of heat is
reversed when the phase changes are reversed; that is, when vapor condenses into water,
and when water freezes. The release of heat when water vapor condenses drives thunder
clouds (known as cumulonimbus), and the energy in a thundercloud is comparable to that
released in an H-bomb. I say this simply to illustrate that these energy transformations are
very substantial. Clouds consist of water in the form of fine droplets and ice in the form of
fine crystals. Normally, these fine droplets and crystals are suspended by rising air currents,
but when these grow large enough they fall through the rising air as rain and snow. Not
only are the energies involved in phase transformations important, so is the fact that both
water vapor and clouds (both ice- and water-based) strongly affect radiation. Although I
haven’t discussed the greenhouse effect yet, I’m sure all of you have heard that carbon dioxide
is a greenhouse gas and that this explains its warming effect. You should, therefore,
understand that the two most important greenhouse substances by far are water vapor and
clouds. Clouds are also important reflectors of sunlight.
The unit for describing energy flows is watts per square meter. The energy budget of
this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter.
Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds
and other features, and such changes are common. The Earth receives about 340 watts per square meter from the sun, but about 140 watts per square meter is simply reflected back
to space, by both the Earth’s surface and, more importantly, by clouds. This leaves about
200 watts per square meter that the Earth would have to emit in order to establish balance.
The sun radiates in the visible portion of the radiation spectrum because its temperature is
about 6000K. ‘K’ refers to Kelvins, which are simply degrees Centigrade plus 273. Zero K is the
lowest possible temperature (−273◦C). Temperature determines the spectrum of the emitted
radiation. If the Earth had no atmosphere at all (but for purposes of argument still was
reflecting 140 watts per square meter), it would have to radiate at a temperature of about
255K, and, at this temperature, the radiation is mostly in the infrared.
Of course, the Earth does have an atmosphere and oceans, and this introduces a host
of complications. So be warned, what follows will require a certain amount of concentration.
Evaporation from the oceans gives rise to water vapor in the atmosphere, and water
vapor very strongly absorbs and emits radiation in the infrared. This is what we mean when
we call water vapor a greenhouse gas. The water vapor essentially blocks infrared radiation
from leaving the surface, causing the surface and (via conduction) the air adjacent to the
surface to heat, and, as in a heated pot of water, convection sets on. Because the density of
air decreases with height, the buoyant elements expand as they rise. This causes the buoyant
elements to cool as they rise, and the mixing results in decreasing temperature with
height rather than a constant temperature. To make matters more complicated, the amount
of water vapor that the air can hold decreases rapidly as the temperature decreases. At some
height there is so little water vapor above this height that radiation from this level can now
escape to space. It is at this elevated level (around 5 km) that the temperature must be about
255K in order to balance incoming radiation. However, because convection causes temperature
to decrease with height, the surface now has to actually be warmer than 255K. It turns
out that it has to be about 288K (which is the average temperature of the Earth’s surface).
This is what is known as the greenhouse effect. It is an interesting curiosity that had convection
produced a uniform temperature, there wouldn’t be a greenhouse effect. In reality,
the situation is still more complicated. Among other things, the existence of upper-level
cirrus clouds, which are very strong absorbers and emitters of infrared radiation, effectively
block infrared radiation from below. Thus, when such clouds are present above about 5 km,
their tops rather than the height of 5 km determine the level from which infrared reaches
space. Now the addition of other greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide) elevates the emission
level, and because of the convective mixing, the new level will be colder. This reduces
the outgoing infrared flux, and, in order to restore balance, the atmosphere would have to
warm. Doubling carbon dioxide concentration is estimated to be equivalent to a forcing of
about 3.7 watts per square meter, which is little less than 2% of the net incoming 200 watts
per square meter. Many factors, including cloud area and height, snow cover, and ocean
circulations, commonly cause changes of comparable magnitude.
It is important to note that such a system will fluctuate with time scales ranging from seconds
to millennia, even in the absence of an explicit forcing other than a steady sun. Much of
the popular literature (on both sides of the climate debate) assumes that all changes must be
driven by some external factor. Of course, the climate system is driven by the sun, but even
if the solar forcing were constant, the climate would still vary. This is actually something that
all of you have long known – even if you don’t realize it. After all, you have no difficulty recognizing
that the steady stroking of a violin string by a bow causes the string to vibrate and
generate sound waves. In a similar way, the atmosphere–ocean system responds to steady
forcing with its own modes of variation (which, admittedly, are often more complex than the modes of a violin string). Moreover, given the massive nature of the oceans, such variations
can involve timescales of millennia rather than milliseconds. El Niño is a relatively short example,
involving years, but most of these internal time variations are too long to even be
identified in our relatively short instrumental record. Nature has numerous examples of autonomous
variability, including the approximately 11-year sunspot cycle and the reversals
of the Earth’s magnetic field every couple of hundred thousand years or so. In this respect,
the climate system is no different from other natural systems.
Of course, such systems also do respond to externalforcing, but suchforcing is not needed
for them to exhibit variability. While the above is totally uncontroversial, please think about
it for a moment. Consider the massive heterogeneity and complexity of the system, and the
variety of mechanisms of variability as we consider the current narrative that is commonly
presented as ‘settled science.
The popular narrative and its political origins
Now here is the currently popular narrative concerning this system. The climate, a complex
multifactor system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged temperature
change, and is primarily controlled by the 1-2% perturbation in the energy budget due
to a single variable – carbon dioxide - among many variables of comparable importance.
This is an extraordinary pair of claims based on reasoning that borders on magical thinking.
It is, however, the narrative that has been widely accepted, even among many sceptics.
This acceptance is a strong indicator of the problem Snow identified.
Many politicians and learned societies go even further: They endorse carbon dioxide as
the controlling variable, and although mankind’s CO2 contributions are small compared to
the much larger but uncertain natural exchanges with both the oceans and the biosphere,
they are confident that they know precisely what policies to implement in order to control
carbon dioxide levels.
While several scientists have put forward this view over the past 200 years, it was, until
the 1980s, generally dismissed. When, in 1988, the NASA scientist James Hansen told the
US Senate that the summer’s warmth reflected increased carbon dioxide levels, even Science
magazine reported that the climatologists were sceptical. The establishment of this extreme
position as dogma during the present period is due to political actors and others seeking to
exploit the opportunities that abound in the multi-trillion dollar energy sector. One example
was Maurice Strong, a global bureaucrat and wheeler-dealer (who spent his final years in
China apparently trying to avoid prosecution for his role in the UN’s Oil for Food program
scandals). Strong is frequently credited with initiating the global warming movement in the
early 1980s, and he subsequently helped to engineer the Rio Conference that produced the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Others like Olaf Palme and his friend, Bert
Bolin, who was the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were
also involved as early as the 1970s.
Political enthusiasm has only increased since then as political ideology has come to play
a major role. A few years ago, Christiana Figueres, then executive secretary of UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change, said that mankind was, for the first time in history, setting
itself the task of intentionally changing the economic system.(1)
Ms. Figueres is not alone in believing this. Pope Francis’ closest adviser castigated conservative
climate change skeptics in the United States, blaming capitalism for their views.
Speaking with journalists, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga criticized certain ‘movements’
in the United States that had preemptively come out in opposition to Francis’s planned encyclical
on climate change. ‘The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to
a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to
give up their profits’, he said.
This past August, a paper appeared in the Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences.
Littered with ‘could bes’ and ‘might bes’, it conclude that ‘Collective human action’ is required
to ‘steer the Earth System awayfrom a potential threshold’ and keep it habitable. The authors
said that this would involve ‘stewardship of the entire Earth System – biosphere, climate, and
societies’, and that it might involve ‘decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement
of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance
arrangements, and transformed social values’.
Remember, in a world that buys into the incoherent ‘precautionary principle,’ even the
mere claim of remote possibility justifies extreme action.
Presumably, the power these people desperately seek includes the power to roll back the
status and welfare that the ordinary person has acquired and continues to acquire through
the fossil fuel generated industrial revolution and return them to their presumably more
appropriate status as serfs. Many more among the world’s poorest will be forbidden the
opportunity to improve their condition.
Nevertheless, when these claims are presented to the leaders of our societies, along with
the bogus claim that 97% of scientists agree, our leaders are afraid to differ, and proceed,
lemming-like, to plan for the suicide of industrial society. Again, nothing better illustrates
the problem that Snow identified.
Interestingly, however, ‘ordinary’ people (as opposed to our ‘educated’ elites) tend to
see through the nonsense being presented. What is it about our elites that makes them
so vulnerable, and what is it about many of our scientists that leads them to promote such
foolishness? The answers cannot be very flattering to either. Let us consider the ‘vulnerable’
elites first.
1. They have been educated in a system where success has been predicated on their ability
to please their professors. In other words, they have been conditioned to rationalize
anything.
2. While they are vulnerable to false narratives, they are far less economically vulnerable
than are ordinary people. They believe themselves wealthy enough to withstand the
economic pain of the proposed policies, and they are clever enough to often benefit
from them.
3. The narrative is trivial enough for the elite to finally think that they ‘understand’ science.
4. For many (especially on the right), the need to be regarded as intelligent causes them
to fear that opposing anything claimed to be ‘scientific’ might lead to their being regarded
as ignorant, and this fear overwhelms any ideological commitment to liberty
that they might have.
None of these factors apply to ‘ordinary’ people. This may well be the strongest argument
for popular democracy and against the leadership of those ‘who know best.
What about the scientists?
1. Scientists are specialists. Few are expert in climate. This includes many supposed ‘climate
scientists’ who became involved in the area in response to the huge increases in
funding that have accompanied global warming hysteria.
2. Scientists are people with their own political positions, and many have been enthusiastic
about using their status as scientists to promote their political positions (not unlike
celebrities whose status some scientists often aspire to). As examples, consider the
movements against nuclear weapons, against the Strategic Defense Initiative, against
the Vietnam War, and so on.
Scientists are also acutely and cynically aware of the ignorance of non-scientists and the
fear that this engenders. This fear leaves the ‘vulnerable’ elites particularly relieved by assurances
that the theory underlying the alarm is trivially simple and that ‘all’ scientists agree.
Former senator and Secretary of State John F. Kerry is typical when he stated, with reference
to greenhouse warming, ‘I know sometimes I can remember from when I was in high school
and college, some aspects of chemistry or physics can be tough. But this is not tough. This
is simple. Kids at the earliest age can understand this’. As you have seen, the greenhouse
effect is not all that simple. Only remarkably brilliant kids would understand it. Given Kerry’s
subsequent description of climate and its underlying physics, it was clear that he was not up
to the task.
The evidence
At this point, some of you might be wondering about all the so-called evidence for dangerous
climate change. What about the disappearing Arctic ice, the rising sea level, the weather
extremes, starving polar bears, the Syrian Civil War, and all the rest of it? The vast variety of
the claims makes it impossible to point to any particular fault that applies to all of them. Of
course, citing the existence of changes – even if these observations are correct (although surprisingly
often they are not) – would not implicate greenhouse warming per se. Nor would it
point to danger. Note that most of the so-called evidence refers to matters of which you have
no personal experience. Some of the claims, such as those relating to weather extremes, contradict
what both physical theory and empirical data show. The purpose of these claims is
obviously to frighten and befuddle the public, and to make it seem like there is evidence
where, in fact, there is none. If there is evidence of anything, it is of the correctness of C.P.
Snow’s observation. Some examples will show what I mean.
First, for something to be evidence, it must have been unambiguously predicted. (This
is a necessary, but far from sufficient condition.) Figure 1 shows the IPCC model forecasts
for the summer minimum in Arctic sea ice in the year 2100 relative to the period 1980–2000.
As you can see, there is a model for any outcome. It is a little like the formula for being an
expert marksman: shoot first and declare whatever you hit to be the target.
Turning to the issue of temperature extremes, is there any data to even support concern?
As to these extremes, the data shows no trend and the IPCC agrees. Even Gavin Schmidt, Jim
Hansen’s successor at NASA’s New York shop, GISS, has remarked that ‘general statements
about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the
popular media’. He went on to say that it takes only a few seconds’ thought to realise that
the popular perceptions that ‘global warming means all extremes have to increase all the
time‘ is ‘nonsense’
Figure 1: Climate model projections of rate of Arctic sea ice loss.
Source: Eisenman et al., J. Clim., 2011.
At the heart of this nonsense is the failure to distinguish weather from climate. Thus,
global warming refers to the welcome increase in temperature of about 1◦C since the end
of the Little Ice Age about 200 years ago. On the other hand, weather extremes involve temperature
changes of the order of 20◦C. Such large changes have a profoundly different origin
from global warming. Crudely speaking, they result from winds carrying warm and cold air
from distant regions that are very warm or very cold. These winds are in the form of waves.
The strength of these waves depends on the temperature difference between the tropics
and the Arctic (with larger differences leading to stronger waves). Now, the models used to
project global warming all predict that this temperature difference will decrease rather than
increase. Thus, the increase in temperature extremes would best support the idea of global
cooling rather than global warming. However, scientifically illiterate people seem incapable
of distinguishing global warming of climate from temperature extremes due to weather.
In fact, as has already been noted, there doesn’t really seem to be any discernible trend in
weather extremes. There is only the greater attention paid by the media to weather, and the
exploitation of this ‘news’ coverage by people who realize that projections of catastrophe in
the distant future are hardly compelling, and that they therefore need a way to convince the
public that the danger is immediate, even if it isn’t.
This has also been the case with sea-level rise. Sea level has been increasing by about
8 inches per century for hundreds of years, and we have clearly been able to deal with it.
In order to promote fear, however, those models that predict much larger increases are invoked.
As a practical matter, it has long been known that at most coastal locations, changes
in sea level, as measured by tide gauges, are primarily due to changes in land level associated
with both tectonics and land use.
Moreover, the small change in global mean temperature (actually the change in temperature
increase) is much smaller than what the computer models used by the IPCC have
predicted. Even if all this change were due to man, it would be most consistent with low sensitivity to added carbon dioxide, and the IPCC only claims that most (not all) of the warming
over the past 60 years is due to man’s activities. Thus, the issue of man-made climate change
does not appear to be a serious problem. However, this hardly stops ignorant politicians
from declaring that the IPCC’s claim of attribution is tantamount to unambiguous proof of
coming disaster.
Cherry picking is always an issue. Thus, there has been a recent claim that Greenland
ice discharge has increased, and that warming will make it worse.2 Omitted from the report
is the finding by both NOAA and the Danish Meteorological Institute that the ice mass of
Greenland has actually been increasing.3 In fact both these observations can be true, and,
indeed, ice build-up pushes peripheral ice into the sea.
Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking, or outright lying pretty much covers all
the so-called evidence.
Conclusion
So there you have it. An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly
has become politically correct ‘knowledge,’ and is used to promote the overturn of
industrial civilization. What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by
industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness as well as a landscape degraded
by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays. False claims about 97% agreement
will not spare us, but the willingness of scientists to keep mum is likely to much reduce trust
in and support for science. Perhaps this won’t be such a bad thing after all – certainly as
concerns ‘official’ science.
There is at least one positive aspect to the present situation. None of the proposed policies
will have much impact on greenhouse gases. Thus we will continue to benefit from the
one thing that can be clearly attributed to elevated carbon dioxide: namely, its effective role
as a plant fertilizer, and reducer of the drought vulnerability of plants. Meanwhile, the IPCC
is claiming that we need to prevent another 0.5◦C of warming, although the 1◦C that has
occurred so far has been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history.
As we used to say in my childhood home of the Bronx: ‘Go figure’.
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