It was money well spent. Dr. North was personable and honest, although he had a propensity to default toward alarmism if you did not challenge him. (Such is the neo-Malthusian propensity of most natural scientists who see nature as optimal and the human influence as only downside.) This is why I have called Dr. North, to his chagrin, the non-alarmist alarmist.

North distrusted climate models. He noted time and again the personal relationships and personality traits in driving the scientist’s views. And his own sensitivity estimate was at the bottom end of the IPCC range. (North’s climate sensitivity estimate of about 2ºC for a doubling of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases in equilibrium–with a plus/minus of .25ºC I would later find out–was an intuitive number.)

Some of North’s comments in the late 1990s may prove insightful when the science finally settles out, such as:

“As usual we may have been caught believing our models before we should.”

“[Richard] Kerr’s article delved a bit beneath the surface to find who some of the silent skeptics (really noncommittals) are. I suspect there are many more.”

“I think Dick [Lindzen] and I agree on the role of lag in the oceans and the freedom modelers have in using the oceans to help in the fit to the record.”

“I am buying the Lindzen story as far as the importance of upper level water vapor…. I am beginning to sense a sea change.”

Richard Lindzen

North and I talked a lot about Richard Lindzen: his personality, his brilliance, his penchant to probe and forward hypotheses that he had to later take back. But what was important was that the theoretical pioneer was probing the weakest spot of the high-sensitivity estimates–and that a half-right Lindzen would win the debate against climate alarmism.

And so it is today that three recent peer-reviewed papers are questioning the all-important feedback effects of clouds and water vapor: Lindzen and Choi (Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences);  Spencer and Braswell (Remote Sensing), and Richard P. Allan (Meteorological Applications).

North’s colleague Andrew Dessler will have none of this–the science is reasonably settled in his view toward high warming and the need for public-policy action–but his own work is in dispute.

The science is not settled, much less settled in favor of climate alarmism.

Lindzen’s Response to Emanuel (and Frumhoff) 

Richard Lindzen is an intellectual, not only a climate scientist, who recognizes the non-sequitur of jumping from a human influence on climate to alarm to public policy action. Marlo Lewis has forcefully made this point as well.

And so the MIT chair professor takes issue with his colleague Kerry Emanuel and a recent op-ed the latter coauthored with Peter Frumhoff. The rebuttal follows (and the op-ed is reprinted below).

The op-ed by Peter Frumhoff (with the environmental advocacy group, Union of Concerned Scientists), and the tropical meteorologist, Kerry Emanuel, epitomizes much of what is wrong with the public discourse on this issue. 

The vast majority of scientists working on climate do agree that there has been a fraction of a degree of warming since the middle of the 19th century, that CO2 has been increasing, and that this should contribute something to the warming.  This turns out to be a very innocent proposition.  Nonetheless, a politician who acknowledges this statement is labeled by some who are opposed to global warming alarm as representing softness on the issue.

On the other hand, those who promote global warming alarm treat acceptance of this rather trivial position as tantamount to acceptance of alarm.

Sensitivity, not Warming Per Se, is the Issue

Of course, the real question is one of sensitivity.  That is to say, how much warming does one expect further increases in CO2 (and other greenhouse gases like methane, nitrous oxide, various fluorocarbons, etc.) will give rise to, and even the president of the National Academy of Sciences (Ralph Cicerone) and the previous president of the Royal Society (Martin Rees) agree that this is still unknown (or as they stated in a letter to the Financial Times, “Uncertainties in the future rate of this rise, stemming largely from the “feedback” effects on water vapour and clouds, are topics of current research.”). 

Indeed, even if the increase in CO2 accounted for all of the observed warming, it would not imply a dangerous sensitivity. According to the IPCC, the current levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases already represents approximately the greenhouse forcing that would result from a doubling of CO2. Thus, if the models on which alarm is based are correct, then man has contributed several times more warming than has been observed. Modelers skirt this issue by claiming that aerosols have hidden the difference, but this is simply the invocation of a fudge factor since the aerosol impact is unknown, and each model chooses a different value.

What the proponents of alarm are engaged in is nothing less than a ‘bait and switch’ scam, and it would appear that many of their opponents have taken the bait.

————————-

Peter Frumhoff and Kerry Emanuel, Candidates Must Deal with Facts, not Wishes, Miami Herald, September 14, 2011.

When it comes to foreign policy, the saying goes that politics stops at the water’s edge.

When it comes to climate science, we say that politics should stop at the atmosphere’s edge.

One of us is a Republican, the other a Democrat. We hold different views on many issues. But as scientists, we share a deep conviction that leaders of both parties must speak to the reality and risks of human-caused climate change, and commit themselves to finding bipartisan solutions.

Scientists have known for more than 100 years that carbon dioxide in our atmosphere traps heat. And today we know that the excess carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere from human activity – primarily, burning coal and oil and clearing forests – is altering our climate.

It’s a conclusion based on established physics and on evidence gathered from satellite data, ancient ice cores, temperature stations, fossilized trees and corals. And it’s a conclusion affirmed by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, established by President Lincoln to advise our nation’s leaders on matters of science.

But as scientific understanding of climate change has advanced, the public discourse has split along partisan lines.

Republicans who identify with the Tea Party are particularly likely to deny the reality of global warming. Several of this year’s aspiring presidential candidates are rejecting the findings of climate science – and feeling the political heat if they don’t.

After former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney reiterated his understanding that human activity is warming the planet, Rush Limbaugh denounced him for doing so, saying, “bye-bye nomination.” Romney now says that he doesn’t know what is causing climate change.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently accused climate scientists of “manipulating data.” In Wednesday’s Republican candidate debate, he made an argument like the one tobacco industry executives used to cast doubt on the scientific evidence of smoking’s health risks, saying, “The idea that we would put Americans’ economy in jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet to me is just nonsense.” Science is never truly settled and no responsible leader would wait for 100 percent certainty to respond to a serious threat.
Making misleading statements about science and picking on scientists is easy. Most would rather defend their findings in peer-reviewed journals than on cable TV. A lie can travel halfway around the world before we even get our lab coats on.

Some politicians, fortunately, are demonstrating a more responsible way to talk about climate change.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, for example, reaffirmed his acceptance of the science in Wednesday’s presidential debate. And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has also been speaking up for climate science, even as he has backed away from taking action.

“When you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and humans play a contributing role, it’s time to defer to the experts,” Christie said last month.

The right rebuked Christie for recognizing the reality of climate change. And the left lambasted him for using the same speech to pull out of a regional pact to curb emissions.

We question Christie’s policy decision. But we commend him for acknowledging the reality of climate change, and for providing New Jersey voters a chance to decide whether they agree with his policy choice. That’s how our democracy should work.

Republicans skeptical about climate policy should follow Christie’s and Huntsman’s lead and realize that they don’t need to misrepresent the science.

And Democrats must speak out as well.

Candidate Barack Obama spoke forcefully about global warming, but has been far too quiet as president. In a rare public statement on climate, he recently told two “kid reporters” with Scholastic News that climate change is one of the chief challenges their generation will face.

That’s not enough. Science tells us that the extent and severity of climate change faced by our children’s generation will be determined by the hard choices we must make today. Political leadership is about ensuring that we adults face up to this task.

We cannot afford to have those leading our nation misrepresent, or be silent about, the reality and risks of climate change.

Whoever wins the next election will lead a nation increasingly affected by climate change, command a Pentagon that calls climate change a national security threat, and preside over federal scientists already working to help states and cities prepare for climate change impacts.

It is time for leaders of both parties to take seriously what science tells us we are doing to our common atmosphere, so we can take up the urgent task of finding solutions on common ground.

The following is the reproduction of the email exchanges involved in the contribution of our paper (Lindzen and Choi, “On the observational determination of climate sensitivity and its implications”) to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The editor of the PNAS follows the procedure of having his assistant, May Piotrowski, communicate his letters as pdf attachments.

These attachments are part of the present package. Attachment1.pdf is simply a statement of PNAS procedure. Note that members of the NAS are permitted to communicate up to 4 papers per year. The members are responsible for obtaining two reviews of their own papers and to report the reviews and their responses to the reviews. Note, as well, that rejection of such contributions by the Board of PNAS is a rare event, involving approximately 2% of all contributions.

The rejection of the present paper required some extraordinary violations of accepted practice. We feel that making such procedures public will help clarify the peculiar road blocks that have been created in order to prevent adequate discussion of fundamental issues. It is hoped, moreover, that the material presented here can offer the interested public some insight into what is involved in the somewhat mysterious though widely (if inappropriately) respected process of peer review.

This situation is compounded, in the present example, by the absurdly lax standards applied to papers supportive of climate alarm. In the present example, there existed an earlier paper (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) [we covered that paper here -CK], that had been subjected to extensive criticism. The fact that no opportunity was provided to us to respond to such criticism was, itself, unusual and disturbing. The paper we had submitted to the PNAS was essentially our response which included the use of additional data and the improvement and correction of our methodology.

Several weeks after we submitted our contribution (included as PNASsubmission.pdf) we received the following email.

To: rlindzen@mit.edu
Subject: PNAS: 2010-15738 (On the observational determination of cl…)
Cc: ekavanagh@nas.edu
From: mpiotrowski@nas.edu
X-Brightmail-Tracker: AAAAAQCq+Kk=

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=”_———-=_129546032497941″
X-Mailer: MIME::Lite 3.027 (F2.74; T1.28; A2.05; B3.07; Q3.07)
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:05:24 -0500
Message-Id: <44129546032491@ejpweb15>

Full Email Recipient List:
TO: rlindzen@mit.edu
CC: ekavanagh@nas.edu

Dear Dr. Lindzen,

I am contacting you regarding your contributed paper. Attached is a letter from Randy Schekman.

Sincerely,
May Piotrowski
Editorial Manager
PNAS

Attach1.pdf
Attach2.pdf

Attachment1.pdf is, as already noted, simply a statement of the policy of PNAS. The actual letter concerning our submission is Attachment2.pdf. This attachment begins with what we regard as a libelous description of our choice of reviewers. Will Happer, though a physicist, was in charge of research at DOE including pioneering climate research. Moreover, he has, in fact, published professionally on atmospheric turbulence. He is also a member of the NAS. M.-D. Chou and I have not collaborated in over 5 years, and Chou had absolutely nothing to do with the present manuscript. There then followed a list of other reviewers that we felt were all inappropriate.

Our response was the following. Attached was a letter to Schekman.

Dear Ms. Piotrowski,

I would like to contact Dr. Scheckman directly. His characterization of Drs. Happer and Chou is hardly accurate. My last collaboration with Dr. Chou was over 7 years ago, and he has had no connection with the present research. Dr. Happer, although not a climate scientist (as, for example, is also the case with Anderson), is deeply involved in general spectroscopic issues. Four of the suggested reviewers are well known proponents of global warming alarm, and I don’t think it likely that they would provide a fair assessment. An alternative reviewer with a long and neutral record in this field is Albert Arking (of Johns Hopkins) who would be far more suitable. Of those mentioned by Scheckman, Ramanathan is the most likely to be fair.

Best wishes,

Dick Lindzen

The actual letter, Lindzen-Schekman.pdf, is attached.

The following was the response.

From: “Piotrowski, May B.”
To: “‘Richard S. Lindzen’”
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:11:24 -0500
Subject: RE: PNAS: 2010-15738 (On the observational determination of cl…)

Dear Dr. Lindzen,

Thank you for your email, which has been forwarded to Randy Schekman.

Best,
May Piotrowski

There then followed another email from May.

From: “Piotrowski, May B.”
To: “‘Richard S. Lindzen’”
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 16:07:57 -0500
Subject: RE: PNAS: 2010-15738 (On the observational determination of cl…)

Dear Dr. Lindzen,

Randy has read your letter. We will seek the advice of one of the experts you approved.

Best,
May

I then received the following somewhat cryptic response from May.

From: “Piotrowski, May B.”
To: “‘Richard S. Lindzen’”
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2010 09:24:22 -0500
Subject: RE: PNAS: 2010-15738 (On the observational determination of cl…)

Dear Dr. Lindzen,

We secured the services of one of the experts you approved, but that person suggested we also consult Drs. Bruce Wielicki or Dennis Hartmann to help evaluate the radiation budget data upon which he relies. Please let us know if you have specific concerns with us consulting either of these two experts.

Thanks very much for your time.

Best,
May

As best as I could determine, none of my suggested reviewers would have made such a recommendation. I can only speculate that Schekman considered Ramanathan as one of my suggested reviewers; I have not checked with Ramanathan. In any event, my response was the following.

Actually, yes. Both are outspoken public advocates of alarm, and Wielicki has gone so far as to retract results once they were shown to contradict alarm.

Dick

I followed this with the following recommendation.

Dear May,

Dr. Patrick Minnis, one of Wielicki’s collaborators at Langley, is agnostic on the issue, and would be a much better choice.

Best,

Dick

Apparently, Minnis was indeed asked to review the manuscript. We finally received a decision letter from Schekman (attached to the following email). There were 4 reviews. One was from Minnis. Another may have been by Ramanathan. The other two were from those recommended by the board.

To: rlindzen@mit.edu
Subject: PNAS: 2010-15738 (On the observational determination of cl…)
Cc: ekavanagh@nas.edu
From: mpiotrowski@nas.edu
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:05:24 -0500
Message-Id: <44129546032491@ejpweb15>

Dear Dr. Lindzen,

I am contacting you regarding your contributed paper. Attached is a letter from Randy Schekman.

Sincerely,
May Piotrowski
Editorial Manager
PNAS

Attach3.pdf

The attachment was a polite rejection of our paper. Included were the complete reviews. Although some of the points in the reviews were, in fact, addressed in our paper, we thought it advisable to respond to the reviews in detail, and to revise our paper in order to clarify matters. It was, however, clear, that the revised paper would no longer satisfy the space constraints of PNAS – especially since the reviewers made clear that important material should not be relegated to ‘supplementary material’.

Although Schekman’s rejection could be interpreted as mildly encouraging, our experience has been that any attempt to resubmit a revised paper simply leads to further delay culminating in re-rejection. Our final letter to Schekman (Letter_to_Schekman.pdf) is attached. As already noted, we chose to respond in detail to each review, and these responses are attached (Response.pdf). The revised paper (as well as the original version submitted to the PNAS: Lindzen-Choi-PNASSubmission.pdf) is also attached (Lindzen-Choi-APJAS.pdf). The final version is accepted (following review) by the Asian Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.

If one reads the paper, one sees that it is hardly likely to represent the last word on the matter. One is working with data that is far from what one might wish for. Moreover, the complexity of the situation tends to defeat simple analyses. Nonetheless, certain things are clear: models are at great variance with observations, the simple regressions between outgoing radiation and surface temperature will severely misrepresent climate sensitivity, and the observations suggest negative rather than positive feedbacks.

“[Robert] Mendelsohn’s position is rather similar to yours…. He believes the impacts are not negative at all for the US and most of the developed countries. Most impact studies seem to be showing this. It leads us to think that a little warming is not so bad. Glad I have kept my mouth shut on this issue of which I know so little.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), November 12, 1999

“I agree that the case for 2C warming [for a doubling of manmade greenhouse gas forcing in equilibrium] is pretty strong.”

- Gerald R. North to Rob Bradley, email communication, August 13, 2007.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published my letter-to-the-editor rebutting Kerry Emanuel’s letter, which, in turn, was critical of his fellow MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen’s op-ed, “Climate Science in Denial.”

My arguments opposing those of Professor Emanuel (see entire letter below) are fairly straightforward, but I end with this challenge:

“But when will many climate scientists, including Mr. Emanuel, face Climategate and the fact that the human influence on climate, on net, is as likely to be positive than negative?”

Is this challenge rash, or is it backed by the facts?  Well, let’s consider the views of an esteemed climate economist and an esteemed climate scientist. They are, respectively,

Robert O. Mendelsohn (Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor of Forest Policy; Professor of Economics; and Professor, School of Management)

Gerald R. North (Distinguished Professor, Physical Section, Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the
Department of Oceanography).

Dr. North’s long held sensitivity estimate of 2ºC for a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse concentrations is one-third below the “best guess” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or the IPCC’s best guess is one-half greater than that of Dr. North). That is a big difference, and if you believe Mendelsohn et al. that a 2ºC for 2x results in net positive benefits for the world, then voila!

Is it radical to believe that the human influence on climate, on net, has more positives than negatives for many decades out and even beyond a century or more?  After all, the CO2 fertilization effect is a strong positive, and warmer and wetter is going in the right direction for the biopshere…

Perhaps CO2 as the green greenhouse gas is ’closet’ mainstream, if North’s (private) views are considered.

Therein lies one of the peculiarities of the multi-disciplinary climate-change debate, for Gerald North may privately believe something that he is unwilling to admit in public.

Appendix: Robert Bradley Jr. “Doubts on Climate Are Reasonable” (Wall Street Journal letter-to-the-Editor)

Kerry Emanuel’s letter of April 28 illustrates some of the major points of Richard Lindzen’s op-ed, “Climate Science in Denial” (April 22). It is bad enough that Mr. Emanuel refers to major misrepresentations, errors and unethical behavior among scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports as “minor errors.” But claiming that Mr. Lindzen’s opinions are at odds with basic climate theory, which does not support climate alarmism, is worse.

Mr. Emanuel suggests that such disputed matters as sea-level rise and glacier dynamics (which depend on factors other than global warming) form a “vast body of evidence” for climate change. But no one disputes that climate is changing and has always been changing. So what is his point?

Mr. Emanuel implicitly attacks a recent paper by Mr. Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi (2009) that, indeed, did have important errors as acknowledged by Mr. Lindzen. But according to the authors, corrections have not altered its conclusion of a low climate sensitivity to man-made greenhouse gases.

The majority of the public is right to discount anthropogenic climate change as an environmental concern. But when will many climate scientists, including Mr. Emanuel, face Climategate and the fact that the human influence on climate, on net, is as likely to be positive than negative?

Robert Bradley Jr.

CEO & Founder, Institute for Energy Research, Houston