You may say “but you declared Lindzen emeritus in 2011“, and so I did. But that was over the issue of peer review. This is concerning science:
That’s just stupid. Really; its nothing but propaganda: designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind to quote one R. Lindzen quoting one G. Orwell.
And if you really don’t know why, the answer is: this is just natural variability. Last year was exceptionally low; this year isn’t exceptionally low. This is very basic stuff, and Lindzen knows it very well.
Which reminds me: I really must do the end-of-season wrap-up post.
Noted shark-jumpers in history
Humourous side show: Woy vs Willis
Meanwhile, Citizen Scientist: Willis and the Cloud Radiative Effect is good for a giggle. In which Dr Spencer points out (but he likes them, so he doesn’t say it in these terms) the obvious: that the denialist types are going nowhere, even when they actually get round to looking at real data, because they’re so ignorant of prior art. This, I think, is a combination of them being convinced that they are so original / brilliant / whatever that there’s no point in even looking; and them being too ignorant or lazy to bother looking (hey, c’mon! In the movies the Brilliant Scientist does science, he doesn’t read other people’s papers! Learning from others is for kids! See-also “Dr” Roy Spencer is sad and lonely and wrong).
Willisgate, Take 2 – oh, it gets better. Woy once again says Willis is clueless, but is desperately trying to keep the Watties on board (who else has he got?) by covering it with sugar.
[Side note: censorship has been turned on at Woy’s place; at least it has for me. I just left him:
Oh look… suddenly censorship isn’t interesting. Why aren’t you prepared to honestly admit that censorship is fine by you, as long as its WUWT doing it?
But as for wiki: yes, its pretty good, in most respects. The pages dealing with GW and surrounding issues are good, and impartial. WUWT can indeed be trusted, to be junk. Note how hard AW had to work to construct a myth to explain away his dislike of wiki.
But it hasn’t appeared.]
Roy fakes it up
Update: “Dr” Spencer has a semi-tolerable post The Danger of Hanging Your Hat on No Future Warming – well, if you’re not too particular; you have to ignore “I don’t know whether the IPCC fingerprint proponents are being dishonest or just plain lazy/stupid.” But! He’s faked his picture, as several commentators point out. That’s deeply dishonest of him.
wmconnolley: scienceblogs.com/stoat archive 
It’s sad to think that -1.17M Km2 below the long-term mean and the sixth lowest on record is ‘not exceptional’. Seems pretty exceptional to me…
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Rapidly shifting baselines…
Beware, this might get epidemic encephalitis. It is an autoimmune reaction.
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Lindzen definitely jumped the megalodon here: Science in the Public Square: Global Climate Alarmism and Historical Precedents in Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
You won’t earn a pat on your head for correctly guessing what the “Historical Precedents” are.
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I happen to agree with you (fwiw) about his jumping the shark on the ice growth, but the rest of his essay was spot on. How about some comments on the rest of his essay?
[“Each IPCC report seems to be required to conclude that the case for an international agreement to curb carbon dioxide has grown stronger” is broken. The “political” bit and the Orwell bit is broken. That’s the entirety of the first paragraph condemned.
“we have had 17 years without warming” – wrong (std.lies from the denialist playbook). “the IPCC insists that its confidence in the model predictions is greater than ever” – looks wrong too. The SPM says “Climate models have improved since the AR4. Models reproduce observed continental-scale surface temperature patterns and trends over many decades, including the more rapid warming since the mid-20th century and the cooling immediately following large volcanic eruptions (very high confidence). {9.4, 9.6, 9.8}”; or “there is high confidence that regional-scale surface temperature is better simulated than at the time of the AR4. {9.4, 9.6}”. Can you tell which of those Lindzen is disagreeing with? -W]
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This isn’t spot on: “…that their greenhouse impact is already about 80% of what one expects from a doubling of CO2…”.
We are still far from an equilibrium, and the forcing from in particular aerosols are not taken into account.
[I wasn’t claiming to have pointed out all his errors; the one I picked is particularly glaringly obvious. Oh, sorry, you were talking to Kevin. Oops -W]
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Did Lindzen seriously publish in JPandS?
Well, if anyone needs any evidence that he has jumped the shark, it’s already right there. I strongly recommend to just look at the Table of Contents for the issue in which he published:
http://www.jpands.org/jpands1803.htm
Notice anything? Anything special? What was it about “skeptics” supposedly being so “skeptic” about climate science due to policy advocacy by climate scientists? Let me guess, Lindzen publishing in a ‘journal’ that is so blatant and open in its policy advocacy is no problem.
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Sorry folks, but I consider Prof. Lindzen enormously better informed and knowledgeable than anybody of you, and therefore believe him and none of the alarm guys.
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> The issue of climate sensitivity is somewhat
> complicated, but the common measure is the
> equilibrium response of mean temperature to a
> doubling of CO2. Almost all observational
> approaches to this question have led to
> sensitivities less than about 1°C.
— Lindzen
Well, can’t argue with that, so long as he’s limiting himself to observational approaches — because after all, how many such have actually been observed by real people in actual reality? Maybe one, maybe somewhat fewer, right?
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When people say stupid things, as Lindzen has done with his arctic sea ice recovery comment, can we please just assume that he really means what he says, rather than arguing that Lindzen actually is smart and knows that what he is saying is wrong?
So: Lindzen repeatedly says idiotic things —> Lindzen is an idiot.
Rather than: Lindzen repeatedly says idiotic things —> but we know that Lindzen is smart and wouldn’t say idiotic things —> therefore Lindzen is pursing some other subtle agenda.
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OK, WC, but you are, of course, a reasonable man, right? Therefore there’s a certain threshold beyond which even you would agree that “Arctic ice is showing surprising growth”. For example, what if next summer’s Arctic ice minimum were 50% over this year’s, would that make you exclaim this phrase? Perhaps you could tell us what your criterion is, so we can all be scientific about this.
[Anything a long way from the trend line would be surprising. 2012 was surprisingly low. 2013 is not surprisingly high. If 2014 was a high above as 2013 was low, that would be surprising, although (obviously) not unprecedented.
But the test of this is money, not words. None of the windbags talking about “recovery” are prepared to put money on it -W]
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Lindzen has a record of being wrong to defend. As RayP put it:
It’s OK to be wrong, and Dick is a smart person, but most people don’t really understand that one way of using your intelligence is to spin ever more clever ways of deceiving yourself, ever more clever ways of being wrong, and that’s OK because if you are wrong in an interesting way that advances the science, I think it’s great to be wrong and he has made a career of being wrong in interesting ways about climate science.
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Of course, 2013 IS exceptionally low. It just isn’t as low as some previous years. but it is lower than every year prior to 2004 or so.
Meanwhile Curry and company are using the 2013 vs. 2012 comparison to claim “recovery” and evidence of some contrived “low frequency variability” in Arctic sea ice.
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I was somewhat surprised by the increase in this year’s minimum compared to last year. Perhaps the IPCC projections of an ice free Arctic later this century as opposed to early aren’t so bad after all.
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Eli is a Brooklyn bunny (Coney Island and all that): Wait till next year
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Michael #13: There is no reason to be surprised that sea ice minima are variable year on year. Taken in isolation this indicates nothing of significance. Sooner or later there is likely to be a Summer when there is no meaningful sea ice cover in September. This seems to indicate fairly clearly that it ain’t as cold up there as it used to be; it also points to a process which appears to be unstoppable already, and finally it demonstrates that messing with global climate has consequences which will, in turn, have consequences.
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