Sunday, April 08, 2007

Richard "wrong way" Lindzen

In an interview with Weltwoche which Eli translated, Richard Lindzen said when asked to explain the current warming

I don’t believe it. The warming occurred from 1976 to 1986, then it plateaued.
Several anonymice sitting in the front row wondered which dog pile he pulled that out from under, but, never fear, Eli has located the source, thanks to friend Lumo. who in response to an inquiry replied with his usual grace and charm uttered:
Dear Alexander, late 20th century global warming did stop in 1986, as well as other moments, see e.g. the graph http://schwinger.harvard.edu/%7E...SU1278- 1204.gif UAH MSU troposphere data...
(you may have to click on the image to get a readable image)
Lubos: You can see that 1986 is as high as 2004; 2006 was cooler than 1986. A naive village student should first try to look at the basic numbers before you try to attack a leader of the field that you pretend to study.
Well, you might see that if the image went out to 2006, but there is a small problem....the image comes from Junk Science in January 2005, so it didn't, and there was a rather large correction that had to be made to the entire MSFC/UAH MSU record later that year. If one looks at the current corrected record
(you may have to click on the image to get a readable image)

you get a different picture. And, as they say, who you gonna believe, Lubos, Lindzen, or your lying eyes. There is no way that 2006 was cooler than 1986, or 2004 was the same in the lower trop. As a mater of fact we can look at the data

Mon 1986 2004 2006
1 -0.022 0.337 0.371
2 -0.164 0.350 0.382
3 -0.146 0.402 0.297
4 -0.028 0.216 0.218
5 -0.050 0.088 0.027
6 -0.159 0.076 0.201
7 -0.193 -0.106 0.236
8 -0.233 0.012 0.281
9 -0.268 0.210 0.335
10 -0.265 0.324 0.376
11 -0.110 0.229 0.284
12 -0.133 0.192 0.303
Avg -0.148 0.194 0.276

There is no month in 1986 that was warmer than any month in 2004 and 2006. Both Lindzen and Lubos, the Mass Ave twins are relying on uncorrected (that means there are big, known errors folk) versions of the UAH tlt lower troposphere reconstructions....but we do know now where that particular piece of folk art came from.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Junk Science by name, Junk Science by nature...

Anonymous said...

If you assume that's where Lindzen's statement comes from, it's still hard to see where the part about the plateau after 1986 comes in.

That sure doesn't look like any plateau I've ever seen.

Andrew Dessler said...

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 ..."

Anonymous said...

Andrew, if so I suspect it's more likely that folks like Lindzen and Carter will just shift their focus to attacking the surface record. Such a stance has the advantage of being more defensible over the long term.

Anonymous said...

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

Actually, I'm willing to bet that if they acknowledge anything, it will be that "all but one of those years have been below the 1998 peak."

While it says the same thing, it emphasizes the years that have been lower.

Get with the framing program, will you Andrew.

Anonymous said...

Good point Andrew.

I would just point out that the peaks from the 1980's on in the graph that Eli included correspond pretty closely with the El Nino years listed here by NOAA.

AS NOAA points out, the close succession of El Nino's in the 90's was actually somewhat unusual (so they do not always show a regular oscillatory pattern with the same period)