K-Lo’s recent post of an op-ed by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe is basically a platform for Richard Lindzen of MIT to express reasonable doubts about global warming hysteria.
Those who have read my prior article on this topic (hi mom!) know that I believe that any sensible reading of the technical literature leads to the conclusions that: (1) human activities are very likely causing some amount of global temperature increase, and that (2) nobody has been able to successfully quantify the magnitude of this effect with sufficient accuracy to predict reliably how much warming we will experience in the future.
In this op-ed, Richard Lindzen is quoted as saying very directly that long-range global-warming forecasts rely on computer models that are “inherently untrustworthy” because there is so much about climate dynamics that we don’t understand.
Freeman Dyson has repeatedly said virtually the same thing about global climate models:
“Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details to be sure that they are unreliable. They are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behavior in a world with different chemistry, for example in a world with increased CO2 in the atmosphere.”
It’s always encouraging to have your views on a scientific topic seconded by one of the world’s greatest living physicists. Of course, I’m sure he’s just a shill for ExxonMobil.