Thursday, April 05, 2012

The attack on Lindzen by Warmists

There is here a compilation of points made by Warmist scientists which criticize a talk given by Prof. Lindzen -- who is a fairly conventional climate scientist but who thinks that the effects of rising CO2 levels on terrestrial temperature will be trivial. And on the principle that the past is the best predictor of the future, they certainly will be.

Prof. Lindzen is well able to defend himself but I would like to note just one thing that throws all the Warmist criticisms into a cocked hat: The effect of clouds. It is undoubted that cloudiness correlates with warming but does that cause warming to accumulate or do clouds shelter the earth and hence lead to subsequent cooling? Do clouds provide a positive or a negative feedback? And answering that is absolutely crucial. Because it is only a postulated accumulation of warming from clouds that allows Warmists to claim that future warming will deviate from its present trivial trend.

So what evidence do the Warmists put forward for their unlikely view that clouds do not shelter the earth from warming? All they offer -- wait for it -- is "models" again. They have no facts, just an unlikely opinion. How well justified are their other niggles at Lindzen just does not matter in the light of that central failure.

And another of their central points fails on the cloud effect too. They repeatedly say that uncertainty does not equal ignorance. But it does. They concede that they cannot provide precise predictions of warming but claim that they have got it broadly right. But if clouds tend to cool the earth, they have got it broadly wrong! What a flock of turkeys they are!

1 comment:

Carl Brehmer said...

I did a study a couple of months ago on water vapor feedback and posted the results on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2K1uHvfaek

One part of the study addressed the overall affect of water on climate systems. For example, both Phoenix and Dallas are about the same distance north of the equator so they both receive about the same amount of sunlight every day throughout the year. Phoenix only receives about 7 inches of precipitation annually while Dallas receives about 35 inches consequently Dallas is much more humid and is cloudy 230 days out of the year compared to Phoenix where it more arid and is cloudy only 154 days out of the year.

If humidity and cloudiness had a warming affect on a climate system than Dallas should be on average much warmer than Phoenix but it is not. When you adjust their respective mean temperatures for altitude, Phoenix has a yearly mean temperature about 6 °C higher than Dallas. In other words a *reduction* in the amount of “greenhouse gas” i.e., water vapor, along with a reduction in the cloud cover results in higher temperatures.

The question is this; what does warm moist air do in the real world atmosphere? Does it dwell near the surface of the earth radiating the surface, warming it through "back radiation" or does it expand, ascend and condense, which drives "moist convection," which, in turn, creates very strong winds that cool the surface of the earth? The same parcel of warm, moist air cannot do both simultaneously.