A Very Good Point About Skeptics

As Dr. Lindzen points out in the video, below, the term “skeptic” implies being skeptical about a plausible thesis. People in doubt (most of us) about the faked moon landing or the flat Earth are not referred to as skeptics. Since catastrophic warming (CW) is not a plausible theory then the word “skeptic” really should be dropped. Perhaps realist or rational thinker would be a better term.

What would be catastrophic would be for this planet to fall back into another ice age, a far more likely occurrence, though that’s likely to be way out in the future.

Jones says, “It’s Dead, Jim”

One of the Chief Scientists behind Global Warming says that any modern warming is similar to, and not statistically significantly different from prior warming.

Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I’ve assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

This was from a BBC interview with Dr, Jones., via WattsUpWuthThat

update:

Caveats: so why is Dr. Jones saying this? New data? New review of data? Tired of fighting? Tired of pressure to conform? CYA in case AGW falls apart?

• Lindzen said the same thing a couple of years ago.
• Lord Monckton’s remarks

Lindzen on Climate Hysteria

This is from an article by Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations.

Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well.

Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now.

More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.

(paragraphs and emphasis are mine.)

The rest of the article is here: Resisting climate hysteria