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We welcome the fact that RSL accepts that:

There has been a large increase of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases due to emissions resulting from human activity over the past 150 years (although we do not agree that “equivalent CO2” concentration has yet doubled, as claimed by RSL on Slide 46 Global average surface temperature has very probably warmed by about 0.7oC in the same period (RSL Slide 10, or 0.8oC in Slide 4), ), Increasing carbon dioxide alone, and in the absence of climate feedbacks, should cause about 1oC warming for each doubling (RSL Slide 3).

We agree that scientific arguments should be based on physical reasoning and data, without exaggerating either the effects or our certainty (or uncertainty) about them. RSL is right to draw attention to uncertainties in climate change feedbacks e.g. associated with clouds. However, it is wrong to infer from this that we know nothing about these feedbacks. Contemporary science suggests unambiguously that there is a substantial risk that these feedbacks will lead to human-induced surface temperature change considerably larger than 1oC in global average this century and beyond.

Click source to read FULL critique to MUST SEE YOUTUBE: Prof Richard S. Lindzen Seminar (Global Warming: How to approach the science) held at the House of Commons

Also see below for more links (with comments from Lord Monckton and Gordon J. Fulks)


A disservice to the scientific method”: climate scientists take on Richard Lindzen - carbonbrief.org

Comments from above link:

Gordon Fulks

As an astrophysicist, I need to take issue with your ill-informed attacks on Professor Richard Lindzen using material from various political sites like Real Climate and Skeptical Science. They feature all sorts of arguments that appear to contain some science because their writers know the terminology of climate science. But there is a vast difference between those who are conversant on this topic and those who understand it. Quoting the opinions of your preferred "experts" is also a logical fallacy in science where only logic and evidence hold sway not asserted authority.

This statement betrays a large lack of understanding:

"Lindzen's arguments are not
anywhere near sufficient to discount man-made climate change."

First of all, the thesis is neither "climate change" nor "man-made climate change." It is "Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming or CAGW" Attempts to restate it as a truism because our climate is always changing or as a phenomenon that cannot be distinguished from natural events is completely unscientific.

Secondly, the burden of proof always lies with those promoting a scientific theory. Show us the proof and address Lindzen's concerns! Do you understand the scientific method? Asserting that the theory still stands because Lindzen failed to take it down is ludicrous. Lindzen pointed out severe weaknesses in the theory, weaknesses that many of us have pointed out too. Theories must withstand ALL challenges to remain standing. CAGW cannot. The proof is missing.

Lindzen very correctly points out that uncertainties in our knowledge of many geophysical and solar phenomena mean that we are unable to say which ones really predominate over the others in the real world. Climate codes are simulations and far from exact solutions of the basic physics. Promoters love to assert that only their explanations fit the observed data, but in reality many explanations are possible within the observations and knowledge we have.

More nonsense is evident in this statement:

"Contemporary science suggests
unambiguously that there is a substantial risk..."

In science you can never "suggest unambiguously." That is a contradiction in terms, unless you further betray your meaning by differentiating real science from "contemporary science." Real science requires a high degree of rigor where you actually PROVE your assertions. Suggestions of one effect or the other might prompt you to investigate say carbon dioxide. But you cannot leap from there to a tall tale that you have it all figured out and there is "substantial risk."

Perhaps the non-scientists who put this blog together need to realize that "contemporary science" is closer to "science fiction" than real science. Just because you like one story line more than another does not mean that it is true.

You owe Professor Richard Lindzen an apology.

Gordon J. Fulks, PhD
Portland, Oregon USA


Monckton of Brenchley

I have long been impressed by Professor Lindzen's willingness to confine his presentations to the science and to avoid making policy statements. The various scientific campaigners in the UK on the climate issue who have challenged his presentation in a rather bad-tempered and unscientific manner have not really understood his central objection to the high-climate-sensitivity case, which is that the temperature feedbacks which the IPCC and its adherents assume must be strongly net-positive cannot in fact be strongly net-positive, for otherwise violent oscillations either side of the singularity in the feedback-amplification equation would have occurred at some time in the past 50 million years, but the paleoclimate evidence is that such violent oscillations have not occurred.

The singularity in the equation occurse when the closed-loop gain in the climate system reaches unity. The IPCC's 2-4.5 K central estimates of the warming in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration imply a loop gain of 0.42-0.74. These values - dangerously close to unity - are far too high for a global temperature which, over the past 500 million years, has fluctuated by less than 3% in absolute terms either side of the long-run mean. On these and other fundamental scientific grounds Professor Lindzen questions the notion of strongly net-positive feedbacks without which the warming in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration would be little more than a harmless 1 K.The scientific campaigners try to argue with the Professor about the cloud feedback. However, as Spencer and Braswell have indicated, the cloud feedback may in fact be as strongly net-negative as the IPCC finds it net-positive. What is certain, however - and this is not fairly reflected in what the scientific campaigners have written - is that the IPCC itself says clearly that the behavior of clouds is one of the greatest uncertainties in the determination of climate sensitivity.

Furthermore, Professor Lindzen has demonstrated not once but twice that the outgoing longwave radiation which the official theory says should be trapped in the troposphere by manmade greenhouse gases is escaping to space much as normal, suggesting a climate sensitivity of 0.7 K per CO2 doubling, in line with Spencer and Braswell, and implying net-negative temperature feedbacks.

Merely because the scientific campaigners from the UK do not find Professor Lindzen's results congenial, they really ought not to accuse him of having conflated uncertainty with lack of knowledge. Whether they like it or not, for 60 years the weather has simply not been getting warmer at a fast enough rate to lend any credence whatsoever to their case for high climate sensitivity. However unfashionable Professor Lindzen's published results may be, the scientific campaigners were wrong to sneer at them on the ground that they had been shown to be wrong. The Professors key results have not been shown to be wrong, though there have - of course - been numerous attacks on them in the scientific literature.

When the history of the strange but profitable intellectual aberration that is catastrophic manmade warming comes to be written, Professor Lindzen's name will be right at the top of the ever-more-rapidly-growing list of those eminent scientists in relevant fields who, having come to the conclusion that there is no case for shutting down the economies of the West in the name of Saving The Planet, have had the courage to stand out against the hive mind that now grips academe worldwide and to say publicly that the official position is wrong.

It was an honour to chair Professor Lindzen's meeting at the House of Commons. The less than scientific tone and manner of the UK's scientific climate campaigners is in marked contrast to the Professor's dignified, thoughtful and scientific presentation. Those members of both Houses who had the pleasure of hearing him will be confirmed in their suspicion that he is right by the shoddiness of this unprincipled attack by soi-disant "scientists" who know that reasoning as sloppy as theirs might not find its way into the pages of even the most true-believing of learned journals. Shame on them all, and three cheers for the Professor