MIT climatologist finds fault with global climate change assessment.

[NNadir]

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=15893

For anyone who stumbles on this post who is not familiar with me and my writing in E&E, this post is tongue in cheek.

[hatrack]

1. Why, it's Dick Lindzen! Color me shocked, shocked!!

:eyes:

[NNadir]

2. Well, he's at MIT.

Everything he says must therefore be true, unless maybe contradicted by someone at Harvard.

[drm604]

3. It can't be true.

He's one of them ivory tower academics and therefore liebrul!

[jpak]

4. Lindzen has little credibility among his peers

His infamous "Adaptive Iris" hypothesis (his proposed tropical negative climate feedback mechanism)...

http://ams.allenpress.com/amsonline/?request=get-abstract&issn=1520-0477&volume=082&issue=03&page=0417

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Iris/

...was reexamined, using Lindzen's OWN data, by a research group at the University of Washington and was falsified...

Hartmann, D.L. and Michelsen, M.L. (2002) No evidence for IRIS. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 83: 249-254.

http://ams.allenpress.com/amsonline/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F1520-0477(2002)083%3C0249:NEFI%3E2.3.CO%3B2

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:Zw0wa9ZoHsMJ:www.earthscape.org/r2/ams/vol83_02/ams83_02_07.pdf+Hartmann,+D.+L.,+and+M.+L.+Michelsen,+2002:+

Other research groups independantly came to the same conclusion...

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Iris/iris2.html

Fu, Q., Baker, M. and Hartmann, D.L. (2002) Tropical cirrus and water vapor: an effective Earth infrared iris feedback? Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 2: 31-37.

B Lin, BA Wielicki, LH Chambers, Y Hu, KM Xu (2000) The Iris Hypothesis: A Negative or Positive Cloud Feedback? Journal of Climate 15: 3–7.

B Lin, T Wong, BA Wielicki, Y Hu (2003) The decadal tropical mean radiation data and the Iris hypothesis. Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2003. IGARSS '03. Proceedings. 2003 IEEE International. Vol 5: 3211- 3212.

But that doesn't keep Li'l Dicky from shooting his mouth off in the Wall Street Journal regarding the alleged "lack of evidence" for anthropogenic global warming...

[depakid]

5. Lindzen- sheesh. I just had someone cite the "Oregon Petition"

Quacks the lot of them. Some more dangerous than others.

This guy's a Brit (and should know better)- so I responded with Lord May of the Royal Society:

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/publication.asp?id=2181

[NNadir]

6. To tell you the truth, I don't know much about the guy.

I was aware of the existence a prominent so called "skeptic" at MIT and googled my way to him.

The point, of course, was the silliness of the type of "appeal to authority" argument that is institutional based. Somehow Americans attach quite different meanings to "MIT Climatologist" and "South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Climatologist." It happens though, that the latter could be correct while the former is wrong.

[depakid]

7. That charlatan has been been making noise for years

Sourcewatch has a list of the most well known- and frequently cited "skeptics."

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Climate_change_sceptics

[NNadir]

8. Lord May, on the other hand, seems like a reasonable man.

I especially like his evocation of the prisoner's dilemma. It strikes a chord.

[happyslug]

9. Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT?????

"Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."
Which is the SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT at MIT, not its engineering School.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Sloan_School_of_Management

Who is Alfred P. Sloan? He was the chairmen of GM during it true heyday (1937-1956):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_P._Sloan

That should explain why this professor says what he does.