Don't Lose Any Sleep Over Global Warming

M.I.T. meteorology professor Richard S. Lindzen writes in Newsweek that the concern over global warming, even if it is occurring, is overblown:

Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.

A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now. Much of the alarm over climate change is based on ignorance of what is normal for weather and climate. There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way, according to scientists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which released the second part of this year's report earlier this month). Indeed, meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing.

Read it all.

Comments

[Heather Paquinas]

Nice post.

It's always good to fact check the clowns. One comment: I think the argument about the recent temperatures and their implications for global warming misses the point. One has to subtract out non-human effects to see the human signature. I blogged about this here. If you do that, you get quite a different answer.

At any rate, I suspect 2007 will exceed 1998, and then the clowns will say, "only one year has exceeded 1998 ..."

[Harold Kildow]

"Send in the clowns--don't bother, they're here." The last line of Judy Collins' rendition of that song comes to mind reading Heather's post.

It continues to amaze me the forms that ignorance and superstition take in our post-industrial, technocratic age. I'm sure our Enlightenment forebears thought these features of human nature would have been replaced by sweet Reason by this point in human progress. But look at what we have instead--a continuous concatenation of mythical technological scares, begetted upon an unscientific public by elites of various sorts even more piously supertstitious than the masses they hope to sway. Discouragingly, what this shows is that science, which the Enlightnment pinned all its hopes on, is subject to the same sociological and political dynamics as any medieval villiage, high school clique, or major media newsroom; to wit, groups of people more concerned with their standing and reputation than with the truth. Count science among the Western institutions reeling under the weight of decay and decadence. The clowns, as well as the barbarians, are inside the gates.