@Raggletagglegypsy I don't see how socio-political frameworks could've worked so universally, against such money and resource rich companies and countries, with multiple different economic and political systems. In Saudi Arabia they're publicly beheading people, but somehow socio-political pressure stopped them bunging a billion or two into securing their country's entire income by simply collecting the evidence and definitively showing anthropogenic climate change isn't real.
I watched the videos from your first post, and also found one where Lindzen is presenting at the 20018 Annual GWPF Lecture. I hadn't seen your second post, so I'll try that too, when I get a chance.
As far as I can tell he his main points are:
- He thinks that Earth is less sensitive to CO2 increases, than normally thought. He thinks if you double atmospheric CO2, you would get a 0.5 degree increase. He thinks warming above that is because of coming out of a mini-ice age and long-term climate trends and oscillations.
(Currently, we're at a 50% increase in CO2, with a 1.1 degrees total warming, although a chunk of that is thought to be from methane (about 30%) and some from other GHGs.)
- He thinks the complexity of the ocean, land and atmosphere, and all the various cycles and energy movements and transfers going on makes it impossible for us to make predictions. He thinks climate models are not nearly complex enough, for instance, they don't model local and daily temperature changes. Although, for some reason, he, himself, is able to make predictions.
I think the level of detail he's asking for isn't realistic, and misses the point of a model - it sounds like a really, really long-range weather prediction, and we can't do quite short range weather predictions, (who knows, maybe something like AI or quantum computing will make it possible one day).
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He thinks the Earth's systems will naturally act to stabilise temperature changes from CO2. But I wasn't clear on how. Also I wasn't clear on why they would stabilise CO2 temperature changes, but not the ones he says we're experiencing because of coming out of a mini-ice age.
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He thinks we've been all been hoodwinked into believing anthropogenic climate change because it's been communicated as such a simple message, and general level of scientific understanding is so low. In the GWPF lecture he explains a lot of science - it sounded impressive, but actually I learnt a lot of what he said already in an Earth Science topic in the first year of a part-time science degree I've been doing, and as part of my physics A-level years ago. He didn't have some massive scientific insight that nobody else had, and he didn't do a great job of explaining the relevance of all the bits of information to his central claim.
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In the GWPF lecture he talks more about the motivations behind the hoodwinking. It's very culture-wars. The left-wing is now rich and powerful, and want to force a societal/technical/economic revolution that will benefit them, and force all the poor, right-wing people into a backwards, medieval life. The evil rich, left are doing this by scaring the population into the climate change narrative. The scientists are going along with it because of funding.
God, I hate culture wars. Simplistic science you say Lindzen - what about your simplistic understanding of politics, people, economics and technology. People are acting on climate change for all sorts of reasons, but I should imagine machiavellian reasons are very rare. Mostly it's because people are worried and give a shit about other people. And it's not about making us poorer, or giving us a medieval life style - renewable energy, insulation, heat pumps, electric vehicles, will end up making us richer, because we won't be giving fuck tonnes of money to embarrassingly rich companies and then simply burning what we buy, and leaving us in a position where we just have to buy more and burn it tomorrow. Not to mention, if we stop all the pollution associated with the burning, we'll get healthier. Also, how do Saudi Arabia and BP etc. fit into the left-rich-oppressors vs. right-poor-oppressed narrative?!
- Lindzen says CO2 is a plant fertiliser. They pump CO2 into green houses to increase crop yields on things like tomatoes - it works in these conditions because in a greenhouse they're also controlling the moisture/light/temperature/nutrients to optimal levels. Outside of the greenhouse, plants are in ecosystems, and they don't have controlled levels. If you think of something like the drought and heat we had last Summer in the UK, that harmed plants way more than they were helped by having higher CO2 levels. It'd be like me smashing a big hole in your bedroom wall, so you have to sleep exposed to the elements every night, and then giving you a plate of broccoli every day and saying, it's fine, you'll be healthier.