Réchauffement climatique

[Rincevent]

Il y a 6 heures, Marlenus a dit :

On a déjà eu ce débat. Une transformation de notre climat en climat type mousson, pourrait vouloir dire une augmentation des précipitations avec une augmentation des sécheresses.

Je vois mal un Himalaya pousser d'ici la fin du siècle dans l'arrière-cour de l'Europe.

[Calembredaine]

Il y a 8 heures, Marlenus a dit :

On a déjà eu ce débat. Une transformation de notre climat en climat type mousson, pourrait vouloir dire une augmentation des précipitations avec une augmentation des sécheresses.

 

D'où l'intérêt des bassines 

[fm06]

9 hours ago, Mégille said:

Le nombre de victimes est en baisse, mais je croyais (je me suis peut-être fait avoir) que le nombre d'événement "catastrophique" est tout de même en hausse ?

 

La fréquence des tempêtes est stable en France, selon Météo France, que l'on peut difficilement qualifier de climato-sceptique.  Ils ont même l'honnêteté d'écrire: "Les projections ne montrent en effet aucune tendance significative de long terme sur la fréquence et l’intensité des tempêtes que ce soit à l’horizon 2050 ou à l’horizon 2100."

https://meteofrance.com/changement-climatique/observer/tempetes-et-changement-climatique

 

La fréquence des incendies aux USA est stable. 

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-wildfires

 

Les surfaces brûlées sont stables ou légèrement en baisse dans plusieurs régions du monde

https://royalsociety.org/blog/2020/10/global-trends-wildfire/

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0345

 

 

 

[Domi]

Météo France sur les sécheresses : https://meteofrance.com/changement-climatique/observer/changement-climatique-et-secheresses

 

Globalement en hausse mais à interpréter selon les indicateurs (de même pour le lien avec le réchauffement)

[Domi]

Intéressant aussi, cyclone et changement climatique : https://meteofrance.com/le-changement-climatique/observer-le-changement-climatique/cyclones-et-changement-climatique

 

En gros : beaucoup d'incertitudes.

[Philiber Té]

Il y a 12 heures, Rübezahl a dit :

a priori, les avancées/recul des glaciers sont décorrélés des cycles climatiques. Et donc, utiliser ces variations en faisant comme si elles étaient des traces de réchauffement (ou refroidissement) est erroné.
C'est du moins ce que disent certains glaciologues.

 

 

Ah bon ? Ça m'intéresserait de savoir où tu as lu ça.

Sinon, de la lecture sur le sujet (deux chapitres d'un même bouquin en libre accès) :

La glace et les glaciers, indicateurs des changements climatiques

La valse des glaciers et du climat dans le passé

 

Il y a 10 heures, Calembredaine a dit :

Parce que les modèles du Giec donnent plutôt des précipitations accrues.

 

L'un n'empêche pas l'autre.

C'est d'ailleurs pour cela que les bassines ne sont pas nécessairement une solution adaptée...

[Calembredaine]

il y a 39 minutes, Philiber Té a dit :

L'un n'empêche pas l'autre.

C'est d'ailleurs pour cela que les bassines ne sont pas nécessairement une solution adaptée...

Gnié ? 🤨

[Rincevent]

il y a 56 minutes, Philiber Té a dit :

Ah bon ? Ça m'intéresserait de savoir où tu as lu ça.

Sinon, de la lecture sur le sujet (deux chapitres d'un même bouquin en libre accès) :

La glace et les glaciers, indicateurs des changements climatiques

La valse des glaciers et du climat dans le passé

Note bien que ça ne dépend pas que de la température, mais aussi de l'interaction ensoleillement-aérosols (ces derniers font chuter l'albédo de la neige, accélérant sa fonte, avec peut-être un effet encore un poil plus complexe de formation de "trous" et donc d'augmentation de la surface de contact entre glacier et atmosphère).

 

Phénomène assez connu par ailleurs. (Trigger warning : l'article dit que la blancheur est une chose positive, il a donc probablement été écrit par un nazi suprématiste ou assimilé).

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140610-connecting-dots-dust-soot-snow-ice-climate-change-dimick

[Philiber Té]

il y a 28 minutes, Calembredaine a dit :

Gnié ? 🤨

 

Tu peux avoir une augmentation des précipitations et des sécheresses en même temps. La sécheresse, c'est une histoire de déficit de précipitations, de rechargement de nappes, d'humidité des sols, etc. Et si tu n'as pas la possibilité de remplir ta bassine parce que le niveau des nappes est trop bas, elle ne te servira à rien durant la sécheresse... Il me semblait qu'on en avait déjà discuté dans le topic dédié mais je me trompe peut-être.

[Philiber Té]

il y a 18 minutes, Rincevent a dit :

Note bien que ça ne dépend pas que de la température, mais aussi de l'interaction ensoleillement-aérosols (ces derniers font chuter l'albédo de la neige, accélérant sa fonte, avec peut-être un effet encore un poil plus complexe de formation de "trous" et donc d'augmentation de la surface de contact entre glacier et atmosphère).

 

Phénomène assez connu par ailleurs. (Trigger warning : l'article dit que la blancheur est une chose positive, il a donc probablement été écrit par un nazi suprématiste ou assimilé).

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140610-connecting-dots-dust-soot-snow-ice-climate-change-dimick

 

Oui et le climat ce n'est pas que la température. Mais je ne vois pas en quoi cela va dans le sens d'une décorrélation glacier / climat par ailleurs. C'était juste pour mentionner les poussières et le facteur anthropique ?

[Rübezahl]

Il y a 12 heures, Philiber Té a dit :

Ah bon ? Ça m'intéresserait de savoir où tu as lu ça.

 

 

 

 

 

[Philiber Té]

il y a une heure, Rübezahl a dit :

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cet exemple ne va pas dans le sens d'une décorrélation glacier / climat. Au contraire, dans l'article, il est écrit que :

"Climate warming during the past 100 years has evoked substantial glacier/ice patch recession in the

Swedish Scandes.

[...]

They [megafossiles] range in age between c. 11 700 and 4000 cal, yr BP, when temperatures were as most 3 °C

higher than present and treelines 500-700 m above current levels."

 

il y a une heure, Rübezahl a dit :

 

 

C'est visiblement un extrait d'un documentaire qui date un peu ("l'état actuel, 1999 / 2000").

 

"Ces gravures montrent bien que ces fluctuations ne sont pas nouvelles. Affirmer que les glaciers fondent parce que la Terre se réchauffent, n'est pas donc pas un argument solide."

 

Difficile de voir la connexion logique entre les deux phrases. Oui, il y a déjà eu des fluctuations et ce n'est pas une phénomène nouveau. Mais comment ce fait devient un argument concernant le changement climatique actuel ?

 

Ensuite, Robert Vivian montre une photo du glacier des Bossons, etc. et explique que :

"C'est pas parce qu'il y a un réchauffement moyen autour des villes [...] pour les années 80 [...] ça a été pour l'ensemble du globe les années les plus chaudes, et pour les glaciers alpins, les années où les glaciers ont le plus avancé."

 

C'est un bel homme de paille ! Personne n'a dit que la position des glaciers alpins était strictement contrôlée par le thermostat mondial et qu'elle ne pouvait pas varier autrement...

 

J'aime beaucoup cette phrase aussi : "Les fluctuations, elles ont existé bien avant qu'il y ait des voitures, des systèmes de chauffage et des industries [...]". C'est un classique "le climat a déjà changé sans rapport avec les activités humaines, donc l'inverse ne peut avoir lieu".

 

Plus sérieusement, si on se penche sur les données :

 

- Les fluctuations du glacier des Bossons de 1580 à 2005 :

Révélation

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0130-9

 

- Fluctuations de 4 glaciers alpins : Mer de Glace, Argentière, Bossons, Grindelwald

Révélation

Du bouquin en ligne déjà partagé : https://books.openedition.org/irdeditions/9983

 

- Même chose (seulement sur 1800 - 2000) mais ça pourrait intéresser @Rincevent:

Révélation

No role for industrial black carbon in forcing 19th century glacier retreat in the Alps

 

- Fluctuations glaciaires du côté Suisse, toujours durant le PAG :

Révélation

https://geomorphologie-montagne.ch/le-petit-age-glaciaire-et-le-rechauffement-recent-du-climat/

 

- Toujours du côté Suisse, fluctuations du glacier d'Aletsch depuis l'Âge du Bronze :

Révélation

https://geomorphologie-montagne.ch/lholocene-de-10000-bp-a-aujourdhui/

 

Et on pourrait encore multiplier les exemples, en changeant également de continent, etc. Il suffit de taper "holocene glacier fluctuations" sur google image pour en trouver facilement.

 

En bref :

- oui, il y a des fluctuations à différentes échelles de temps. Le Petit Âge Glaciaire n'est d'ailleurs pas une longue période froide et uniforme.

- oui, il y a des paramètres régionaux/locaux à considérer (puisque ce n'est pas qu'une histoire de température moyenne ou globale).

- non, ces fluctuations ne permettent pas d'affirmer que "les avancées/recul des glaciers sont décorrélés des cycles climatiques".

[Calembredaine]

@Philiber Té je te conseille de suivre @Elpis_R afin de lui poser toutes les questions que tu veux. Si tu ne l'insultes pas, tu auras des réponses argumentées et sourcées.

Tu pourras également débattre et confronter tes certitudes aux siennes.

[Calembredaine]

Il y a 1 heure, Philiber Té a dit :

- non, ces fluctuations ne permettent pas d'affirmer que "les avancées/recul des glaciers sont décorrélés des cycles climatiques".

 

L'inverse non plus.

[Calembredaine]

Il y a 15 heures, Philiber Té a dit :

 

Tu peux avoir une augmentation des précipitations et des sécheresses en même temps. La sécheresse, c'est une histoire de déficit de précipitations, de rechargement de nappes, d'humidité des sols, etc. Et si tu n'as pas la possibilité de remplir ta bassine parce que le niveau des nappes est trop bas, elle ne te servira à rien durant la sécheresse... Il me semblait qu'on en avait déjà discuté dans le topic dédié mais je me trompe peut-être.

 

S'il y a plus de précipitations, n'est-il pas judicieux de récupérer le maximum d'eau pendant cette période afin de l'utiliser pendant une éventuelle sécheresse?

 

Oui, nous en avions discuté et l'argument anti-bassine avancé était (je résume) que l'on pompait dans les nappes pour alimenter les bassines et que par conséquent les bassines étaient inutiles. Je trouvais cela idiot dans la mesure où il était prouvé que l'on conservait sur l'année un meilleur niveau des nappes avec des solutions comme les bassines.

Alors, si, en plus, la quantité de précipitations augmente, les bassines me semblent encore plus nécessaires.

[Rincevent]

Il y a 2 heures, Philiber Té a dit :

C'est un bel homme de paille ! Personne n'a dit que la position des glaciers alpins était strictement contrôlée par le thermostat mondial et qu'elle ne pouvait pas varier autrement...

Motte and bailey. 95 % des vulgarisateurs et communicateurs de tous ordres ne présentent que la température comme expliquant la fonte des glaciers. Ils ne disent pas explicitement que c'est le seul facteur, mais c'est le seul facteur qu'ils présentent. Forcément, leur public suppose que c'est le seul qui existe. De là, de deux choses l'une. Soit ce résultat n'est pas leur but, auquel cas ils sont nuls (et alors on ferait bien de se méfier de leurs dires de demi-habiles). Soit ce résultat est leur but, ils sont militants avant d'être vulgarisateurs, et il faut d'autant plus se méfier de ce que raconte un militant.

 

Il y a 2 heures, Philiber Té a dit :

C'est un classique "le climat a déjà changé sans rapport avec les activités humaines, donc l'inverse ne peut avoir lieu".

Subtilement à côté de la plaque. Le fait est que si le clinat a changé par le passé sans l'influence de l'homme, alors le fait qu'il change aujourd'hui ne constitue pas une preuve du rôle de l'homme. Pour prouver une telle chose, il faudrait apporter d'autres preuves ("d'autres" ne signifiant pas "davantage", mais "qui démontrent la second thèse et non seulement la première").

[Lancelot]

Le retour du "on ne peut pas exclure".

[Domi]

il y a 24 minutes, Rincevent a dit :

Subtilement à côté de la plaque. 

 

Pas tout à fait puisqu'on ne peut pas faire comme si pour certains l'argument "il y a eu d'autres fluctuations dans le passé" n'était pas suffisant pour rejeter purement et simplement la possibilité d'une responsabilité humaine. Elle montre qu'il y a d'autres possibilités.

[Philiber Té]

il y a une heure, Calembredaine a dit :

@Philiber Té je te conseille de suivre @Elpis_R afin de lui poser toutes les questions que tu veux. Si tu ne l'insultes pas, tu auras des réponses argumentées et sourcées.

Tu pourras également débattre et confronter tes certitudes aux siennes.

 

Je n'ai pas de compte Twitter (et je ne compte pas en avoir, la plateforme ne m'attire pas du tout).

Et je ne suis pas certain que ce soit vraiment productif d'essayer de débattre avec quelqu'un qui part du principe que le CO2 n'est pas un GES.

 

il y a une heure, Calembredaine a dit :

 

L'inverse non plus.

 

Si tu regardes le dernier graphique que j'ai partagé (les fluctuations sur 3000 ans), tu ne perçois pas un signal climatique ?

 

il y a une heure, Calembredaine a dit :

 

S'il y a plus de précipitations, n'est-il pas judicieux de récupérer le maximum d'eau pendant cette période afin de l'utiliser pendant une éventuelle sécheresse?

 

Oui, nous en avions discuté et l'argument anti-bassine avancé était (je résume) que l'on pompait dans les nappes pour alimenter les bassines et que par conséquent les bassines étaient inutiles. Je trouvais cela idiot dans la mesure où il était prouvé que l'on conservait sur l'année un meilleur niveau des nappes avec des solutions comme les bassines.

Alors, si, en plus, la quantité de précipitations augmente, les bassines me semblent encore plus nécessaires.

 

Tout va dépendre justement de la part des précipitations qui va participer au rechargement de la nappe. Pour rappel, le remplissage des bassines est conditionné par le niveau de la nappe phréatique (qui doit dépasser un seuil réglementaire, etc.).

Pour la phrase en gras : non, ce n'est pas systématiquement le cas.

 

il y a 25 minutes, Rincevent a dit :

Subtilement à côté de la plaque. Le fait est que si le clinat a changé par le passé sans l'influence de l'homme, alors le fait qu'il change aujourd'hui ne constitue pas une preuve du rôle de l'homme. Pour prouver une telle chose, il faudrait apporter d'autres preuves ("d'autres" ne signifiant pas "davantage", mais "qui démontrent la second thèse et non seulement la première").

 

Je n'ai pas compris... Cette histoire du "climat qui a déjà changé par le passé" se veut être un contre-argument à la théorie "le CO2 d'origine anthropique a un effet sur le climat" : A ne peut pas causer B, car par le passé B est survenu sans que A ne soit là. C'est simplement une erreur de logique.

[Calembredaine]

il y a 43 minutes, Philiber Té a dit :

 

Je n'ai pas de compte Twitter (et je ne compte pas en avoir, la plateforme ne m'attire pas du tout).

 

C'est dommage car Google déréférence tous les sites qui s'éloignent un tant soit peu de la doxa réchauffiste. Tu ne trouveras donc pas d'argumentaire contraire à tes croyances.

 

il y a 43 minutes, Philiber Té a dit :

Et je ne suis pas certain que ce soit vraiment productif d'essayer de débattre avec quelqu'un qui part du principe que le CO2 n'est pas un GES.

 

Cela illustre ce que j'écrivais plus haut.

[Philiber Té]

il y a 45 minutes, Calembredaine a dit :

 

C'est dommage car Google déréférence tous les sites qui s'éloignent un tant soit peu de la doxa réchauffiste. Tu ne trouveras donc pas d'argumentaire contraire à tes croyances.

 

 

Cela illustre ce que j'écrivais plus haut.

 

Pour ça, je peux venir sur le forum ! 😁

Blague à part, je ne suis pas du tout convaincu qu'un réseau social où les messages sont limités en nombre de caractères, où tu choisis quels comptes tu suis, etc. soit une bonne plateforme pour échanger ou s'informer.

Et je pense suivre assez régulièrement les débats autour du réchauffement climatique (à cause du boulot déjà), pour m'épargner les mêmes rengaines climatosceptiques 100 fois éculées.

Donc, non, personnellement je ne vois pas en quoi ce serait productif d'échanger avec cette personne. Il me semble que l'énergie que je dépenserai pour potentiellement le convaincre de chose aussi basique que la réalité de l'effet de serre, serait bien mieux investie ailleurs...

 

En passant, il a listé tout un tas de déclarations de gens qui pensent que l'effet de serre n'existe pas. Je partage celle-ci parce qu'elle est vraiment accablante :

 

Révélation

 

Des comparaisons, toutes choses égales par ailleurs.

[Marlenus]

4 hours ago, Calembredaine said:

 

C'est dommage car Google déréférence tous les sites qui s'éloignent un tant soit peu de la doxa réchauffiste. 

 

Le grand classique qui n'est pas corroboré par les faits.

Hier, pour chercher un peu suite à notre débat, j'ai tapé "historique sècheresse en France".

Résultat sur les 4er sites données par google, météo france, Wikipédia et 2 sites qui disent que le giec c'est de la merde.

 

En tout cas être déréférencé et arriver en 3 ou 4ème position, beaucoup en rêve.

 

[Lancelot]

On 1/8/2023 at 7:00 PM, Lancelot said:

Récemment je suis allé voir, par curiosité, se qui se passe du côté du fils de Peter. Je vous pose ça là comme ça :

 

On 1/12/2023 at 8:52 PM, ttoinou said:

J'ai pas compris la vidéo. Pourtant je parle bien anglais. Faudrait que je ré écoute une seconde fois peut être

 

Sachez que vous me cassez les couilles. Votre conversation m'ennuie et n'est pas du niveau que j'attends de liborg. Bouffez un transcript (pas de la vidéo entière mais de la dernière heure) ❤️

Spoiler

JP: You could make a case, arguably, if you believe the carbon dioxyde catastrophy narrative, you could make a case that it's ethically required to impoverish people if you can demonstrate that that impoverishment actually produced, let's say a decrease in carbon output. But that certainly isn't what happened in Germany since Germany has gone madly green. In fact their energy production is much less efficient than it was 10 years ago and it's five times as expensive and it pollutes far more. And so my sense is that, and I think the data bears this out too, if you provided people with cheap clean energy on a world basis and eradicated absolute poverty, or at least ameliorate it to the degree that it's possible, then people start caring about the long term and they start working for environmental preservation at a local level, and that's a far more effective way of taking care of the planet. So not only do you impoverish people, you impoverish people and make the planet worse and as far as I can tell that's just essentially unforgivable. So why do you think... two things we left out. We left something hanging. You said two editors got fired, one in 1992. When was the second one who got fired for publishing what you wrote?

RL: 2001. It was immediate.

JP: 2001, ok. And so when you started to object to the narrative, back in 92, what narrative were you objecting to and on what ground?

RL: You are touching on something that took me a while to understand. You know, Goebbels famously said, you know, if you tell a big enough lie and repeat it often enough it'll become the truth. There's been a lot of that in this, but there are aspects of establishing the narrative, i.e. what makes something the truth, that I hadn't appreciated. So the narrative was: the climate is determined by a greenhouse effect and adding CO2 to it increases it, causes warming, and moreover the natural greenhouse substances besides CO2, water vapor, clouds, upper level clouds, will amplify whatever man does. Now that immediately goes against Le Chatelier's principle which says if you perturb a system and it is capable internally of counteracting it, it will. And our system is.

JP: And you think that applies. Ok, so that's a very germane issue because even if... please go ahead.

RL: Let me finish because, okay, so that was a little bit odd. You began wondering where did these feedbacks come from. And immediately people, including myself, started looking into the feedbacks and seeing whether there were any negative ones or how did it work. But underlying it, and this is what I learned, if you want to get a narrative established, the crucial thing is to pepper it with errors, questionable things, so that the critics will seize on that and not question the basic narrative. The basic narrative in this sense was that climate is controlled by the greenhouse effect. In point of fact the Earth's climate system, which has many regions, but two distinct different regions are the tropics, roughly the minus 30 to 30 degrees latitude, and the extra tropics outside of 30 degrees plus or minus. They have very different dynamics. In the tropics... The crucial thing for the Earth, by the way, and this is a technicality, and much harder to convey than saying that greenhouse gases are a blanket or that 97 percent of scientists agree. This is actually a technical issue, the Earth rotates. Now people are aware of that, we have day and night, but there is something called the Coriolis effect. When you're on a rotating system it gives rise to the appearance of forces that change the winds relative to the rotation. And the only component of the rotation is the component that is perpendicular to the surface. So at the pole the rotation vector is perpendicular to the surface. At the equator it's parallel to the surface, it's zero, and this gives you phenomenally different dynamics. So where you don't have a vertical component to the rotation vector, motions do what they do in the laboratory, in small scales: if you have a temperature difference it acts to wipe it out. And so if you look at the tropics the temperatures at any surface are relatively flat, they don't vary much with latitude. On the other hand you go to the middle attitudes, extra tropics, there the temperature varies a lot between the tropics and the pole. We know that, I mean, temperatures are cold at high latitudes. And if you look at changes in climate's nearest history, what they consist in is a tropics that stays relatively constant and what changes is the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole. During the Ice Age it was about 60 degrees Centigrade, today it's about 40, during 50 million years ago, something called the Eocene, it was about 20. And so that's all a function of what's going on outside the tropics. Within the tropics the greenhouse effect is significant but what determines the temperature change between the tropics and the pole has very little to do with the greenhouse effect, it is a dynamic phenomenon based on the fact that if you have a temperature difference with latitude it generates instabilities. These instabilities take the form of the cyclonic and anti-cyclonic patterns that you see on the weather map. Now the tropics are very different. I mean, you know, even with a casual look at a weather map the systems that bring us weather travel from west to east at latitudes outside the tropics. Within the tropics they travel from east to west. The prevailing winds are opposite in the two sections, and we're saying that what changes due to the greenhouse effect, however you look at it, is amplified at the poles. That is not true. There's no physical basis for that statement. All they do is determine the starting point for where the temperature changes in mid-latitudes, and that's determined mainly by hydrodynamics. Okay, that's complicated to explain to someone, and yet, and yet it's the basis for claiming that these seemingly large small numbers... You know they're saying if global mean temperature goes up one and a half degrees it's the end. That's based on it getting much bigger at high latitudes and determining that. But all one and a half degrees at the equator would do, or in the greenhouse part of the Earth, is change the temperature everywhere by one and a half degrees, which for most of us is less than the temperature change between breakfast and lunch. And the thought that this is the end of the world, it's a little bit crazy.

JP: All right so let's play devil's advocate here first. And so let me lay out the narrative and correct me if I've got it wrong. So first of all the world at the moment is making a big deal out of climate and associating climate change with the greenhouse effect. The trapping of heat. And they're associating, we're all associating, the greenhouse effect with an increase in carbon dioxide, and at least initially we were associating that increase in carbon dioxide with with global warming, and then we've added the proposition that not only will there be warming, say of up to a degree and a half or two degrees, by the end of the century, and and maybe there's some variation in those predictions, but we're also looking at a system that's characterized by a variety of positive feedback loops. And the danger here is that a one and a half degree increase might not be catastrophic, but that that might trigger a sequence of cataclysmic events. We hear sometimes about the melting of the Greenland ice cap for example, the rapid rise in sea level that would occur as a consequence, the increase of temperatures at the poles, the release of methane as a consequence, let's say, of the permafrost thawing and then a runaway greenhouse effect because of that... And you evinced some skepticism about the whole narrative. But also more particularly and perhaps more importantly you don't sound like you're a big fan of the idea of runaway positive feedback loops.

RL: Well there are a lot of things enmeshed in what you've said. Even the one and a half degree depends on the positive feedbacks otherwise CO2 would be even less significant. Much less significant. You know you assume that water vapor increases and amplifies it, but the whole picture is one-dimensional, you'd have to know the area where water vapor is important and... it goes through a mess of things and we know now that that probably isn't occurring. Even people who support the narrative.

JP: The water vapor isn't amplifying carbon dioxide effects?

RL: Uh, if it is, it has to be considered as part of an infrared feedback and nobody has detected that that is actually positive.

JP: Okay well I heard that, I read that the punitive contribution of carbon dioxide to global warming is less than the margin of error for measurement of the effect of water vapor. Do you know if that's true? That's really sad if that's true.

RL: It is true if you want to measure it rather than hypothesize, then what you're saying is true. It's been hypothesized, in other words...

JP: So we're we're planning on spending two trillion dollars to remediate a problem whose magnitude is so small that it could easily be hidden within another measurement error on the water vapor front.

RL: I think so but I mean...

JP: That's really quite something.

RL: I mean it's caught the fancy of the political world. I mean, I'll give you an example of it. You know we're falling into the trap I mentioned, you know. Going along with the narrative, because it has so many weaknesses, ignores the fact that the whole picture of the greenhouse is misconceived.

JP: Okay well let's not go too far down that rabbit hole because I'd like to stay focused on the critique of the major narrative.
RL: I mean, you know, I'm quite willing to talk about the other problems, but the fact that you don't have this polar amplification, you know, that it's going to be bigger at high latitudes, it may be, but it's not due to the greenhouse. It's due to processes in the extra tropics where the greenhouse is secondary by a long shot. There's one example of what you're saying, and it helps I think understand why this issue gets so distorted. In one of the International Panel on climate change, you know this UN body, reports. I think the third report somewhere in the early 2000s. Where I was a lead author but we can get to that later. In any case they have these thousand pages that deal with the science. It have no index, is totally unreadable. And then they have a summary for policy makers which isn't really due to the scientists and they can manipulate the text because that comes out six months before the text of which it's a summary... But, you know, they know people aren't even going to read that. So you you have the thousand pages they're not going to read, then you have 20 pages they're not going to read, and so you have the press release. And the press releases the iconic statement and that's what gets the headlines. So the iconic statement was: they now are I forget how certain that, uh, most of the warming since 1960 is due to man. Okay. In truth that doesn't mean much. It was about a half degree, it was most consistent with the climate being relatively insensitive. It was basically a statement "there's not much of a problem here", but they didn't say that. They just said most of the warming since 1960 is due to man. All of a sudden...

JP: what is most mean, does most mean 95 or 51 percent?

RL: Could mean 51 percent. Even if it meant a hundred percent it wouldn't matter. It was small. But how did senators McCain and Lieberman respond to that? They come out immediately with a statement: this is the smoking gun, we must do something. So as long as the scientists can make innocent remarks and be assured that politicians will convert them into alarm and increase funding, why are they going to complain? And so you have this insidious interaction where scientists... And you know there's another guy, Steve Koonin, who's written this book, and I know Steve well, and you know the point is he could use the documents that are cited on behalf of alarm to say "look nobody here is saying it's the problem that the environmentalists and the politicians are saying, where did this come from?" And the answer is it came...

JP: Well Bjørn Lomborg has done the same thing. I mean he accepts the IPCC predictions, essentially, with some criticism, but says look well if they're right, this is straight from the horse's mouth let's say with regard to the UN, even if they're correct that'll mean two things. The first is we'll be slightly less rich than we would have been a hundred years from now because economic growth is so high, and we won't even notice that in some real sense, but even if it's slightly bigger than we predict we're so good at adapting, and you can see the curves for example in terms of number of people who are dying from natural disasters each year which has declined precipitously over 100 years, we're so good at adapting that the probability that we can just adapt to this is a hundred percent. Now that of course assumes that there are none of these runaway positive feedback loop effects. But my problem with that, on the scientific front, was well how the hell do you predict a runaway positive feedback loop? You can't predict that as far as I can tell.

RL: By the way the feedbacks are not runaways that they're using. They just amplify. You'd have to get a much higher level of feedback to be a runaway system. The tipping point is a different argument. And I find that kind of nutty because tipping points in the climate system are virtually unheard of and there's a good reason for it. They're usually characteristic of systems that have what I would call few degrees of freedom. So it's saying if you want to make a transition from one state to another you don't have many places to go so it has to take a leap.

JP: I see what you mean. So a system that's constrained in its modes of possibility tips because there's only a couple of states.

RL: But a complex system, a system like ours, has an infinite number of degrees of freedom essentially and it can go smoothly through anything.

JP: Okay has that proposition been quantified? Like do people... I've never heard that before, it makes a lot of sense to me that you know a system that flips would flip because it could be frozen or liquid in the case of water, but a system that's complex and highly entropic, because of that, has many many ways of dispensing, let's say, extra energy. Looks like a formal argument.

RL: I haven't seen it explicitly expressed but I'm pretty sure there's something in the literature about that.

JP: Well it makes sense if a system has a multiple ways of dispersing with increased energy input, then the probability that it's going to do something dramatic has got to be proportionate in some sense to the number of options that it has.

RL: Yeah, I mean look, you know, the number of... As I was saying if you want to pepper something with the craziness, this issue has a lot to speak of on that count. I mean one of the ones I like is this metric for climate which is a very peculiar metric, you know, some global temperature. What is it? How do you get it, where is it? I mean how do you take the temperature...

JP: Let's walk into that. Well some of that is a consequence of many many weather stations distributed on the physical surface of the Earth but the problem with those is that many of them were built in places where urban encroachment has expanded over a hundred years and so that's a huge problem on the measurement from.

RL: Yeah but that's sophisticated. How do you average Mount Everest with the Dead Sea?

JP: Well I'm curious about that, how how is that done? Like to think of the earth as having one temperature. So you're making the case there that the mean is the crucial variable, right, that's really what it boils down to.

RL: Well it's saying that, but it's hard to tell how you get it. They don't get it, by the way, by averaging. What they do, okay....
JP: Well how else can you get it?

RL: Okay what they do is take each station, take a 30-year average I forget it's you know like 1950 to 1980 or something, and look at the deviation of the temperature from that average. And they average the anomalies, the deviation. Okay? So, you know, let's say it went up three degrees at one station from the 30-year mean, went up two, and one, and so on they average those numbers instead of the temperature itself.

JP: Okay why? And who's "they"?

RL: The British Met Office, NOAA, NASA, so on... Everyone producing a temperature record is doing that. Okay, maybe it makes sense, you know, because you don't want to average Mount Everest and the Dead Sea, but maybe the changes in temperature at those places you could average and get an average temperature change. Okay, so you do that and they show you the graph, but they never show you the data points. And if you show the data points, and this is a guy at Lawrence Livermore laboratory who did this around 1990, he died in 92, he showed the data points. And whereas this global mean temperature record is changing a degree, a degree and a half, over a century, a century and a half, the data points are scattered over 20 degrees. And they're densely scattered.

JP: Huge error.

RL: Not error. It's just huge range, and if you chose any given period of time, any moment, there are almost as many stations cooling as warming even though the trend is slightly warming, because it's slight. And so when you see somebody at a given location saying "this is a cold day how come it's they say it's warming?", well the data says it could almost be as likely to cool as warm except there's a slight bias. And when you look at the media if there's an extreme at any given place they say it's climate, right. The data doesn't suggest that.

JP: Okay so part of the problem here is that we have a single measure, which is this average change of temperature. Now that's become the standard for assessing something like global planetary health. Now our entire industrial enterprise is being bent to serve that particular master. So what do you think is wrong with the average mean temperature as a univariate variable? I mean you talked about scatter so that's a problem.

RL: The other one problem with it is, and it explains why for instance textbooks on climate from the 40s through the 60s didn't discuss this metric. They discussed the fact that the Earth had many climate regimes. Dozens. And they wanted to know what accounted for the different regimes of climate on the Earth, something called carbon classification. This metric became popular with global cooling, global warming and so on because you wanted to have something singular that showed one or the other. I think they were capitalized also on the fact that, as a British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow realized many years ago, that we have two cultures. Well I think we have more than that, maybe we have no cultures, but if you're not a scientist it is amazing how enumerate and illiterate you can be.

JP: Or even if you are a scientist.

RL: Yeah but there's there's a different kind of ignorance, specialization and so on, but most people looking at a graph can't read a graph. So you know if you look at the financial page people see the same graph if it went up 10 points, went up a hundred points, went up 200 points, all they see is it went up. And they rescale and they show you that because if they only show you something that is objective, some days it wouldn't look like it's doing anything.

JP: What would you re what would you regard as the major drivers of... Look okay let's go back even a step further. Do you think that we have any existential, real existential concerns, on the climate front?

RL: Not for the next five thousand years.

JP: Okay, okay, so so we probably don't have to worry about that for at least four thousand.

RL: I think so. And we would see it. I mean it's, you know, we had these massive ice ages every roughly 100 000 years and the glacial part of it is longer than the interglacial that we're in now. So, yeah, I mean, but we're talking about scales of thousands of years for that. That's a major change and uh it was understood by a Serbian astronomer in the 1930s early 40s, that this was largely due to the orbital variations of the earth which produce changes in solar radiation incident on the Earth in summer in the Arctic of a hundred watts per meter squared. Remember with CO2 you're talking about two watts per meter squared, three Watts per meter.... The ice age is 100. And why summer in the Arctic? Because you always have snow in the winter in the Arctic, the question is how much of it survives the summer? If it's cold during the summer the snow lasts and builds up on a new base each year, and over thousands of years becomes a kilometer or two of ice for you. On the other hand if the summers are warm the snow doesn't last and you don't build your ice.

JP: Okay, so the main drivers of that kind of cataclysmic change, that's orbital, and so and those are you said a hundred watts per square meter essentially. And now you're pointing out that the putative effect of carbon dioxide warming is something like two watts per meter and that's going to produce a a comparatively small perturbation. Nothing of the order of magnitude that's associated say with glaciation or the lack thereof. And also not an amount that'll produce positive feedback loops.

RL: You know, producing positive feedback loops I think is a kind of funny phrasing. The feedback loops are intrinsic to the system and the question is do we have positive feedback loops, and I don't think so, not really serious ones, and yet they're assumed in order to get a big bang out of the CO2.

JP: Yeah okay so on what basis are they assumed? Because you already made the case no degrees of freedom, so like what's going on here scientifically, how can that story be put forward with any degree of credibility?

RL: By saying it's credible. I mean that's what we're doing. I mean you know, in other words, Suki Manabe did some papers in the early 70s where he assumed essentially one dimensionality for the system, no clouds, no nothing, and he said if I assume relative humidity remains fixed and I have no clouds, or I don't let clouds change, then because of something called the Clausius Clapeyron relation the warmer it gets the more moisture the atmosphere can hold. And if the relative humidity is fixed you'll have more moisture. Okay, and he showed you could get an amplification, a doubling of the effect of CO2 from that. It just happens to only apply in the tropics. And it is not... the clouds are not fixed, they are also changing and counteracting. in I think much of what's happening due to the water vapor, and changing the area over which the water vapor acts. So it's a much more complicated affair and the measurements from satellites are suggesting that the whole shebang, when put together, is not producing the feedback that you needed to double the effect.

JP: You've expressed a lot of skepticism about computer models. Now when the average person reads that a computer model makes a given prediction, especially if it's reported in a peer-reviewed paper, they're inclined to presume that that means two things. It means data and it means fact. But I'm very skeptical of computer models because you have to make all sorts of assumptions and the devil's in the details with something as complex as climate. So on what grounds have you gone after the climate models?

RL: Well you know, actually, I have a use for the models. There's no way that models can accurately, well there is a way maybe, simulate fluids. I mean you know the trouble is our atmosphere, our ocean, have motions on every scale. They have motions on the scale of your fingernail, they have motions on the scale of the planet. They all have an impact. That small-scale turbulence in the boundary layer the clouds which have a scale of a kilometer or so, the weather patterns that have scales of thousands of kilometers, and you're modeling them on a computer. Even today's massive computers can't resolve a centimeter. That would be incredible. So they have to assume what the small scale turbulence does. They have to assume what the clouds do. They have to assume what you know all sorts of things are doing. And even then there are some systems where you can prove mathematically that as you reduce the mesh size of which you're approximating things, because you're you're not doing it continuously, you have to just make points, that it converges to the right answer. But no one has ever done that for fluid dynamics, we don't know if it even converges. So you have to in these models... you know often you'll run a model and it goes haywire. You throw in damping to prevent it from going haywire. The damping has no physical basis, it's just to keep the model from blowing up. You're doing all these things and you're hopeful that it may still have some insight. Now I said I actually am not against models. So for instance if you do theory for a phenomenon in the atmosphere you usually do what's called order of magnitude analysis. What that means is you take the full equations and you try to estimate how big and small the terms are, and you're trying to see if these terms are small can I approximate the system with a simpler system, and can I test it in this way? And you learn a lot from that. Almost everything we know came from that sort of analysis, not for models. But once in a while if things get complicated I'd like to look at a model and see whether there were things possibly going on in the model that might go on in nature that I hadn't thought about. And so the models can be useful promoters of more thinking about possibilities.

JP: Sure of course, that's very different than assuming that they're valid models of what's going to happen in climate and so, okay I have two questions on that front. Is it hard to approximate fluid dynamics regardless of mesh size because a fluid system has so many degrees of freedom?

RL: It's very hard to do. I mean nobody would pretend... Let's say you have a gurgling Brook with pebbles and so on, it's doing all sorts of things, nobody's going to predict the eddies for let's say a mile, I mean that would be hopeless. You might make a statistical forecast on certain things and you might get useful information, and you might be able to make an approximation that tells you how the roughness of the surface affected the flow rate and so on, but... And you know all you do is scale that up many orders of magnitude and you have the Earth's atmosphere, and those little eddies that you couldn't track are now your weather systems and so on. You still have trouble tracking them.

JP: So part of the issue here is that the we're dealing with temperature changes that are of relatively small magnitude compared to the potential range of temperature change, and what that means is that for that degree of accuracy and prediction, let's say you need an accuracy of one to three degrees over a hundred years, you have to have an unbelievably finely tuned model at an extremely high level of resolution, and then with the difficulties in modeling fluid dynamics it isn't even obvious that you could do it in principle.

RL: I think that's probably true. You know, you can restrict, as I say you damp the models, you keep them from blowing up, you do all sorts of things and, you know, for instance with the greenhouse picture, I've been critical of it because I think it only really is useful in the tropics, but it is useful if I'm comparing Venus and Mars and Mercury. For them, you know, the gross idea of the greenhouse does tell you why they're different. But you know, the changes in the Earth's climate involve minuscule temperature changes compared to the temperature differences between the planets.

JP: Right well then we have the additional problem on the political front that, so imagine you have an unstable climate model or an inaccurate climate model at the scale of resolution we're discussing, and then you put on top of that an economic model. And the economic model uses the climate model as an axiom. And then it tries to predict out 100 years which, like, I just don't see that as going anywhere at all because you can't predict economic development with any degree of accuracy over a hundred year period. If you could do that you'd have all the money in the world almost immediately. If you could generate a model that accurate. You simply can't do it. So if you stack a bad economic model on a flawed climate model you really do have a tower of...

RL: And they don't even do that. I mean, the economic models that people like Nordhaus and so on use just take that metric for climate and a sign...

JP: Right but they assume it's accurate

RL: And they assume that you can put a monetary value on it. And then, you know, tune the... I mean, you know, there are various kinds of models that do these things but uh... I don't know what to say, I mean, I don't think any longer that is the models that are driving the perception. I think it is the pure repetition. And this was understood from the beginning in 1988 when Jim Hansen gave testimony to the Senate about finding that there was global warming, and Newsweek Newsweek had a cover, and the cover showed the Earth on fire and had the label "all scientists agree". Now, you know, you had all sorts of funny problems at that time, like most weather men disagreed, and the American Meteorological Society decided they needed re-education. I mean the March through the institutions was pretty effective, and we could talk about that, I mean that's been...

JP: Well let's talk about this because I was going to push back at you again, Playing devil's Advocates. So we hear all the time this idea that well 97 percent of scientists agreed that climate change is real. Which is different than saying that global warming is real by the way. But 97 percent of scientists agree, and now we're hearing from Dr Richard Lindzen and he doesn't agree, but 97 percent of scientists do, so why the hell should we listen to Dr Lindzen? And so let's start with the 97 percent of scientists agree claim.

RL: Well, yeah, I mean there are a couple of aspects to it. There are some studies like one by a man called Cook that were just bogus. They you know, ended up looking at 50 papers specially selected and found, you know, this percentage, and this was taken apart in The Wall Street Journal by uh Spencer. and Bast and it was nonsense. But there are some issues where I think you could say there was a hundred percent agreement. So for instance if you were to say "CO2 is a greenhouse gas" and adding "it will probably create some warming", I don't think too many people would disagree. I think the only thing would be how much, and many people would think it would be negligible, but no one would disagree with that. And so given this telephone game where you can say something perfectly innocent and the politicians can interpret it as saying "oh so you agree that we'll have warming", and that warming however small, you know, they'll assume is the end of the world. Well yeah there is agreement. But it's not agreement with what they're ultimately claiming, that it's an existential threat. I think if you've posed it that way you know you would for instance notice that the UN's IPCC inter governmental panel on climate change never in its working group one, which is the only part dealing with science, speaks of an existential threat.

JP: Right while Lomborg has been telling people that constantly you know with his attempts to shed some light, some intelligent light, on this issue, he keeps saying "well look I'm willing to accept the IPCC forecast" even though he has some problems with the forecast, he said "look I'll give you that but the negative consequences that are often assumed are simply not realistic". RL: You know even there I mean, you know, in the part I participated, in we said that, you know, the models cannot handle water vapor and clouds and thus there is no basis for our assertions about the feedbacks. That was in there. And it was interesting because... I mean the whole procedure is a little bit nutty. I was responsible with two other people for three pages. For this we traveled around the world twice or three times, I mean the meetings, and you had quote thousands of the world's leading climate scientists, which is a field that probably had a few dozen at, you know, early in my career. And suddenly when you piled in the money, you know, in the US I think the increase with Clinton Gore was maybe a factor of 15, you suddenly had thousands of quote climate scientists. Now no one in my department claimed they were a climate scientist in 1990 because nobody, you know, I didn't know everything about, you know, paleo climate, I didn't know how you assessed ice cores. I knew Dynamics, I knew radiation. Other people knew other things.

JP: Right it's not a it's not a field of specialization "climate science".

RL: Right I mean it is the definitive interdisciplinary thing and nobody has mastered all the disciplines. Trouble is when you increase the funding 15, and the condition for funding was supporting the narrative, that you then could get lots of people all of them calling themselves climate scientists and most of whom have not familiarized themselves with the physics and the chemistry and so on. So you have this idiocy of impacts. So you know, you've seen it, you know, "global warming and obesity", "global warming and diabetes", I mean you know, anyone can get a piece of the action.

JP: What happened to you on the funding front when you started to, well, let's say swim against the tide to some degree, although really what you were doing was just pursuing your research.

RL: For a while, I would say in the 90s, I continued to get money from this National Science Foundation but never for climate. I was working on hydrodynamic instability other things that were pure meteorological. But by the 90s, late 90s, I was known well enough for my skepticism of climate that people were rejecting it saying, you know, he'll use some of this money for that. NASA also was pretty open in the 90s, and so for instance my work on feedbacks my colleagues were from NASA and it was okay, but by the end there was a NASA administrator who was skeptical of climate and they got rid of him. And they got sticked up. The department of energy was actually trying to keep balanced funding and then the government just clamped down on them.

JP: So that also means that... So that's very interesting too because it means that not only does the narrative spin itself up to chase the funding, but any elements that would run contrary oh yeah alternative just vanish.

RL: Oh yeah. I mean at MIT for instance we had a celebration of the work of two distinguished faculty members who had died some years ago, Jules Charney and Ed Lorenz, chaos theory and so on, and you know because of my closeness to Jules they asked me to speak on that, and the administration from MIT decided "no, given his position on climate and that we have a climate initiative we can't do that". The department was quite okay, they found someone else to do that talk and I gave another talk and so be it, but the administration was upset with that. You know it again, I mean...

JP: It's really appalling to hear of that sort of thing happening at MIT. I mean I'm always hoping that the engineers and the STEM types will have enough, what would you say, clout and political conviction to push back against this hyper administrative invasion of the technical schools and the universities. At MIT you have to think things are very very sad. That's a very sad state of affairs.
RL: Hope springs eternal but you know, we just went through the issue of Dorian Abbot I don't know if you heard about it.

JP: Yeah.

RL: He was going to give a talk on exoplanets. Pretty... I mean you know he's keeping away from this issue in a way. Exoplanets is easy. But on the other hand he had written a piece with someone from Stanford for Newsweek in which he said, you know, they really didn't think diversity equity and inclusion was that great, they preferred maintaining meritocracy while having school choice for children including poor children, black children... so that they could be qualified for equity instead of it being a kind of trap. And so MIT's  administration decided that this was not consistent with MIT's values. And, you know, a statement, and you know then it got the point, who speaks for our values?

JP: Well that is the question all right.

RL: And you know this is very much the case with almost every university, every professional society, and you probably know this. You know the people in these, the faculty, the people in professional societies, are busy. They like their work. They're doing things they like and so you often choose one person to be executive director or so on... and they're happy not to have to do it or to be president of the university, or a dean, not everyone wants to do it. They'd rather do their science and research.

JP: Well that's a big problem because it leaves the administrative avenue open.

RL: And they can speak for you. And speak of "our values" without ever polling you. That's true in the professional societies, it's true of the National Academy in the US, there are a handful of people who can speak for the organization and the organization is full of people who would rather do their work and happy to leave them that power.

JP: Yeah. So have you, what's been your experience with cancellation? You said it got harder and harder for you to get grants so that's a problem when you run a lab at MIT.

RL: It also makes it almost impossible to publish. As I said editors get fired if you get published. The more common thing is, among the peer reviewers, they insist that there be gatekeepers. So you'll send in a paper, and a lot of people have had exactly this experience, at first it was pretty crude. So one of the papers I published in the early 90s I had submitted to Science pointing out questions about climate, and they sent it back without review saying there's no interest in this.

JP: Oh yeah right no interest.

RL: Right and then they got a little bit more, I don't know if I'd call it sophisticated. You would send it to a journal and they would reject it immediately and it came that wasn't very effective because you send it to another journal. So what happened is you typically, and again this is a common experience, you send it to a journal, they take about six seven months to review, and they send back a review that says accepted with major revision. And so you spend six months making major revisions if you pay attention to them, send it back, they take another six seven months and reject it. That got them to stymie it for a year, you know, so that you're not sending it to other journals.

JP: It's also a very good way of wasting the time of who might be actually trying to conduct research.

RL: Right so you know, all these things happen and even with my students, you know, I couldn't tell them, you know, to oppose global warming. It would ruin their careers they couldn't even get a postdoc afterward.

JP: Was being associated with you, eventually, was that enough to make it difficult for your students to get a job?

RL: No I don't think so.

JP: Oh well that's good. I would have expected that to have happened.

RL: No it I haven't seen it happen but you know I think most of my students, I think all of them, pretty much have steered clear of climate. There are other things you can work on just like with Dorian I mean you know, he doesn't want to get in trouble with climate, pick an area which isn't climate. The only difficulty with it is funding and balance can give preference to climate. On the other hand they've induced so many people to support climate alarm that they probably don't have enough money to support all of the people who want to go feed at the trough.

JP: Well the other problem of course is that the very people who are hell-bent on pursuing their actual research, that's where all the real scientists are. And so now if we're in a situation where the real scientists, and those would be the ones who want to do their research, are refusing to have anything to do with so-called climate science, then what happens is that we're deprived of the very expert voices that we would need to bring some sense and stability to the overarching narrative upon which so many of our economic decisions are made now. So that just doesn't seem like a very good state of affairs.

RL: It's not a good state of affairs but it's desired by the people who want this state of affairs.

JP: So let me recapitulate because we're running out of time on on this section. So we talked about your career and where you worked, MIT and Harvard primarily on the academic front. We talked about the fundamental climate narrative which is that, well, climate's a major concern, it's changing primarily because of the greenhouse effect that's a consequence of carbon dioxide, most of that's warming there are a variety of potential runaway positive feedback loops involved... You're not convinced of any of those propositions that climate should be our major concern, that the greenhouse effect as popularly conceptualized is an existential catastrophe, that carbon dioxide is a contributor again of existential proportions or that the positive feedback loops that are often put before us are likely to manifest themselves. In fact you think that the climate system has enough degrees of freedom to be relatively immune to large-scale perturbations. Is that a decent summary?

RL: I mean I'd modify it a little bit. You know I think feedbacks and tipping points are slightly different and you're conflating them. I don't think this system has tipping points, it has feedback but they're not running away feedback.

JP: Okay well that's the critical issue. I'll make sure that I use that technology from here on in. And then we talked about the, well we tried to investigate some of the reasons why this more apocalyptic narrative has gained a foothold. We talked about the malthusians, we talked about the the political tilt of the funding regime, we talked a little bit more implicitly about the fact that more apocalyptic and doom saying prognostications tend to attract a lot more attention, and so that's a big problem.

RL: Constant repetition and the fact that children... I mean, you know, Al Gore, no it was John Kerry, who made this statement, I mean, it was just astounding, I think it was in a talk in Indonesia, he said something to the effect that we all know how difficult physics and chemistry can be but climate is easy enough for any child to understand.

JP: Which showed you the level of his understanding.

RL: Well yeah but also the impact is, we're starting to teach kindergarten children climate. But you don't teach them...

JP: Terrifying.

RL: Right. "Your world is coming to an end in 10 years unless your parents stop eating meat" or, you know, God knows what right.

JP: Or driving their vehicle or heating their house to keep Grandma warm.

RL: Or recharging their electric car.

JP: Well that. All right so let me offer a set of propositions to the listeners and and stop me or clarify what I'm saying if I get it wrong. So there are lots of drivers of climate variation. The big drivers have to do with oscillations in planetary orbit or other comparative effect or other factors.

RL: Yeah there are so many factors that would impact it there are ocean currents, you know, for instance again it's a technical term, but the surface of the Earth is not isolated you know, it's not in equilibrium with space. It has the oceans underneath it. Ocean circulations have time scales up to a thousand years and they're constantly bringing fluid up and taking fluid away from the surface and that fluid is carrying heat. And so the system is never quite an equilibrium it varies on its own. Until we understand these systems perfectly well we don't necessarily have a good theory for the fact that you know there was a medieval warm period, there was evidence of a warm period you know 2000 years ago, all sorts of things. There were things... oddly enough I mean, let's say at the beginning of the 19th century in New England, every town had a learned society, and they had their proceedings, and you would look at these old documents of ordinary people, well ordinary educated people, at that time discussing whether Rome when they had vineyards and so on and so on was warmer than it is at their time. They're still in little ice age and they were wondering if it was just reportage or there was something really different had climate changed? They were doing sophisticated thinking about it which is virtually disappeared from our world.

JP: We also talked about the 97 percent of scientists fallacy and you pointed out that 97 of scientists likely agree that carbon dioxide plays a role in greenhouse warming phenomenon, but that doesn't mean that 97 percent of scientists believe that there are tipping points built into the climate and that we're going to slide off the edge of an abyss within the next hundred years. Those are very different claims.

RL: No and and it's, you know, as I say, I mean, I was speaking at a group, I think doctors for disaster preparedness, and they'd give me some recognition and I decided that I would point out who opposed this narrative during the early 90s or the 90s, and it was leading figures in the field. And Bill Nye the science man on TV or something was saying that, you know, these are just old people, they'll die soon, and we won't have these objections, and there was some truth to that. I mean you had directors of major labs, directors of the Max Plank, people who are heading the European medium range weather forecasting which is a premier group, all of them objecting to it. Presidents of the National Academy and so on. But starting in the 90s with the takeover of major funding institutions and so on, you weren't going to get many younger people.

JP: Right. Okay so if we close this off and maybe we could do this. If you could take 30 seconds. We get a lot of relatively young people watching this YouTube channel and, you know, they're worried because they've been fed a non-ending diet of apocalyptic catastrophe and oppressive patriarchy since they were like three. And so if you wanted to address them directly and say what you wanted to say about what we can expect over the next 50 years let's say, because that's kind of not a bad lifespan viewpoint, or 75 years, what do you think, what should we be contemplating on the climate front?

RL: Much the same as we've seen. You'll see variations. They've always occurred. There will be places like the gulf coast of the US which had been a citrus country in the 40s and now it's too cold for citrus. Other things will change. Things always change a bit. There may be you know several inches of sea level rise. But not a lot more, there's no evidence it'll be much more. You'll still have a situation where if you live in New England Mark Twain's remark, you know, "wait a minute and the weather will change" will still be true. And, you know, that's life. That's why you have overcoats and gloves and swimsuits. And there will be nothing special. It's not cataclysmic. You're not going to be inundated with hungry polar bears fleeing the Arctic. You're not going to have cities underwater. And you know, get on with your life. But the question is, if your teacher insists on your saying the world is coming to an end or you won't get promoted... I'm not sure what I should tell them.

JP: well I've told I've told my students my whole life, I said never to.. don't falsify your words. Because the thing is, you know, I'll tell you an experiment, a psychological experiment that's quite interesting, it might even be valid. So imagine you bring people in to the lab, young people, and you give them a political attitudes questionnaire regarding their views on a particular topic, maybe abortion, maybe climate, whatever some topic that's you know relatively contentious, then you have them sit down and write a 500 word essay arguing against their position. Now they know they're doing this in a lab then you bring them in a week later and you give them the same political attitudes questionnaire. You find that their attitudes have shifted substantially and significantly towards the direction of their writing. And so the problem is you can't falsify your words without falsifying your thinkings because your your words construct your perceptions. And so if you kowtow to the teacher's ideology... We found this too when we were looking at what predicted politically correct beliefs. So the trait agreeableness did, being female, did having a lower verbal IQ did, but another major predictor was whether or not you'd taken any courses at all that were explicitly politically correct in their orientation. So you have to be very careful about kowtowing to the ideology because you can't get away with it. You'll you'll falsify your own psyche if you falsify your words.

RL: You know I think I agree with what you're saying but 1984 you know was a fairly good example of how society can break that down. And so...

JP: Well you've maintained your ground. You've maintained your ground, how come?

RL: Age. In other words, you know, it's the business that, for scientists of an older generation up to mine, pretty much, maybe a little further, we could develop our reputations, our work product, over a freer time. The other thing is theoreticians don't need as much money as experimenters and so I needed money just to support students, I didn't need equipment, I didn't need very much of anything else. But it was mainly that people were advanced in their career, if you were a director of a lab and so on, if you were near retirement, you could speak freely. The more sad were the weatherman, the people, the media forecasters and so on who had a love of meteorology, in many cases were very knowledgeable and objected to this by and large. I would go on a train ride or something and meteorologists from the media would see me in there and say thank you for that, but the media have been firing people who don't attribute every weather event to climate, right, and the meteorologists know this is nonsense but they just you know are being pressured immensely, and we were lucky our jobs were not at issue, we had tenure and so on. But younger people don't have that luxury.

JP: Well being canceled is no fun, I mean I've known like 200 people who've been canceled and it's about equivalent to a major illness. It's no joke so all.

 

[fm06]

Sur la stabilité de la fréquence des ouragans, et autres bonnes nouvelles climatiques.

https://www.climato-realistes.fr/ces-bonnes-nouvelles-du-climat-dont-les-medias-ne-parlent-pas/

[Marlenus]

27 minutes ago, fm06 said:

Sur la stabilité de la fréquence des ouragans, et autres bonnes nouvelles climatiques.

https://www.climato-realistes.fr/ces-bonnes-nouvelles-du-climat-dont-les-medias-ne-parlent-pas/

Effectivement, quand un article commence comme ça:

"Aucune preuve ne soutient la thèse du réchauffement climatique anthropique"

 

Les MSM ne vont pas en parler vu qu'eux pensent que des preuves du RCA, il y en a.

 

 

Et je n'ai pas les connaissances pour dire qui a raison ou pas, mais pour ce que j'en vois dans les MSM, c'est pas qu'ils cachent c'est qu'ils ne sont pas d'accord avec les nouvelles présentés ici.

 

Par exemple:

Quote

Comme nous pouvons le voir, les températures tendent à diminuer depuis 2016. L’année 2022 n’arrive ainsi qu’en septième position des années les plus chaudes. Même si depuis 7 ans la planète se refroidit, cela ne signifie évidemment pas que le réchauffement est terminé. 

Alors que dans les MSM on peut lire des reprises de ce communiqué:

https://public.wmo.int/fr/medias/communiqués-de-presse/c’est-officiel-les-huit-dernières-années-sont-bien-les-plus-chaudes

Et cela dit un peu l'inverse.

 

 

Après libre à chacun de se faire son opinion.

 

 

 

[Philiber Té]

il y a une heure, fm06 a dit :

Sur la stabilité de la fréquence des ouragans, et autres bonnes nouvelles climatiques.

https://www.climato-realistes.fr/ces-bonnes-nouvelles-du-climat-dont-les-medias-ne-parlent-pas/

 

"Personne n’a été en mesure de prouver que le réchauffement climatique est principalement une conséquence de nos émissions." sauf, peut-être, ceux qui affirment "que « les activités humaines sont la principale cause du réchauffement climatique observé au cours des dernières décennies »"

 

Plus sérieusement, une autre erreur de logique que je retrouve dans cet article et qui revient souvent :

 

Citation

En théorie, il n’est pas possible que le réchauffement ralentisse alors que la concentration de CO₂ dans l’atmosphère accélère fortement. La conséquence de l’augmentation du CO₂ sur l’effet de serre est bien connue. Chaque molécule supplémentaire intercepte le rayonnement infrarouge, élevant la hauteur moyenne d’émission de l’atmosphère et nécessitant une augmentation de la température de surface pour que la planète maintienne son équilibre radiatif, c’est-à-dire pour rayonner une énergie équivalente à celle qu’elle reçoit du rayonnement solaire. La théorie ne permet pas au réchauffement climatique de inutileralentir quand les émissions de CO₂ augmentent. Elle est donc erronée ou incomplète. Il y a dans le changement climatique des facteurs que nous ne comprenons pas, mais qui sont capables de compenser, voire d’annuler et même d’inverser l’effet de l’augmentation du CO₂ sur la température.

 

Comment est-ce qu'on appelle le procédé rhétorique qui consiste à présenter une théorie adverse de façon volontairement erronée ?

En théorie, le réchauffement peut parfaitement ralentir (ou le climat se refroidir) alors que la concentration de CO2 atmos. accélère dans le même temps. Il suffit de regarder deux minutes ce genre de graphiques pour s'en rendre compte :

 

Révélation

 

Qui pense sincèrement que la théorie derrière l'effet de serre est aussi bancale ? Comment l'auteur a pu lire "des milliers d'articles scientifiques" et en ressortir quelque chose d'aussi tordue ?

[fm06]

Oui il y a des choses bancales dans cet article. Je retiens surtout les observations: il n’y a aucune accélération dramatique du changement climatique, contrairement à ce que nous ressassent les MSM.
Ni dans les ouragans, ni dans la température globale, ni dans le niveau de la mer.

[Domi]

Il y a 22 heures, Philiber Té a dit :

Je n'ai pas compris... Cette histoire du "climat qui a déjà changé par le passé" se veut être un contre-argument à la théorie "le CO2 d'origine anthropique a un effet sur le climat" : A ne peut pas causer B, car par le passé B est survenu sans que A ne soit là. C'est simplement une erreur de logique.

Je vais essayer de te répondre, étant précisé que je n'ai pas fait d'études scientifiques. 

 

La preuve de l'attribution au CO2 de l'augmentation des températures repose "en gros" sur les preuves suivantes :

- La physique modélisée (modélisée dans la mesure où on ne mesure pas que l'effet du CO2 lui-même mais les rétroactions positives et négatives). Si on prétend être absolument sûr de soi à cette étape, il n'y a pas besoin d'autres preuves. Mais est-on totalement sûr des modélisations (cf tes discussions précédentes avec Rincevent) ? On arrive alors à une seconde preuve...

- La seconde preuve est en gros "il n'y a pas d'autres explications" Mais si on observe des fluctuations importantes du climat par le passé, elles aussi non expliquées, on peut légitimement s'interroger sur la possibilité d'un réchauffement non expliqué aujourd'hui. Evidemment dire qu'il est possible de s'interroger et dire qu'on a réfuté le rôle du CO2 sont deux choses différentes (et certains sceptiques confondent les deux). 

 

Il y a sans doute un autre ordre de preuve qui relève des "signatures". Le réchauffement par les gaz à effet serre doit présenter un certain nombre de signatures (réchauffement plus accentué à certains endroits, à certaine période). Sont-elles présentes aujourd'hui ? 

[Philiber Té]

il y a 41 minutes, Domi a dit :

- La seconde preuve est en gros "il n'y a pas d'autres explications" Mais si on observe des fluctuations importantes du climat par le passé, elles aussi non expliquées, on peut légitimement s'interroger sur la possibilité d'un réchauffement non expliqué aujourd'hui. Evidemment dire qu'il est possible de s'interroger et dire qu'on a réfuté le rôle du CO2 sont deux choses différentes (et certains sceptiques confondent les deux).

 

Je réagis juste sur ce passage là : pourquoi ces fluctuations passées seraient non-expliquées ?

 

On retrouve régulièrement (dans les commentaires des articles de presse par exemple) des gens qui viennent expliquer que le climat a déjà changé par le passé, que c'est à cause des paramètres de Milankovitch, de l'activité solaire, etc., que le CO2 n'était pas responsable et ne peut donc pas l'être aujourd'hui. Pas d'usines, de voitures ou d'avions pour expliquer les interglaciaires du Quaternaire ou l'optimum médiéval ! Seulement, personne ne défend la théorie selon laquelle seul le CO2 contrôle le climat (comme le prétend l'auteur de l'article partagé par fm06).

 

Le système climatique est influencé par plusieurs facteurs, dont le poids et le sens peuvent varier au cours du temps. Bien évidemment qu'il faut s'intéresser à tous ces facteurs pour tenter de comprendre l'évolution actuelle du climat ! Et ça tombe bien, on se contente pas de dire "c'est la faute au CO2 !", on vérifie aussi si les autres ne sont pas déjà coupables (cf. le graphique ci-dessous, déjà partagé ici).

 

 

Sur les conseils de Calembredaine, j'ai tenté d'ébranler mes croyances en regardant le dernier argument en date de @Elpis_R :

 

Qui pense sérieusement que la Terre (et le système climatique) il y a 440 millions d'années est comparable à aujourd'hui ? Sans même parler du gros truc rond et lumineux autour duquel on tourne !

 

Révélation

 

[Marlenus]

8 minutes ago, Philiber Té said:

 

 

Sur les conseils de Calembredaine, j'ai tenté d'ébranler mes croyances en regardant le dernier argument en date de @Elpis_R :

 

Qui pense sérieusement que la Terre (et le système climatique) il y a 440 millions d'années est comparable à aujourd'hui ? Sans même parler du gros truc rond et lumineux autour duquel on tourne !

 

Alors si on déroule son fil, son argument c'est:

Il y a 440M d'année il y avait 1100% de CO2 dans l'atmosphère par rapport à maintenant et c'était une boule de glace.

 

Donc il ne compare pas  les climats, il dit que le CO2 ne provoque pas de réchauffement (bon j'ai l'impression qu'il oublie juste les autres facteurs...).