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1. One Planet Only Forever at 13:37 PM on 14 November 2025
   Ice age predicted in the 70s
   

   angusmac @164:
   I am a retired, quite successful, Canadian Registered Professional Engineer (Structural) with an MBA. I have participated in the successful design of a diversity of structures using a diversity of materials and structural systems in a diversity of nations to a diversity of national standards. I feel obligated to respond to the following part of your comment.

   Additionally, as a structural engineer, I am appalled that climate scientists resist a red team/blue team approach to the discussion of The Science™, because using a red team/blue team methodology is normal practice in major engineering projects worldwide. In fact, on exceptionally large projects, a third team is often tasked with independently reviewing and validating the results of the red and blue team process.

   Of course, if engineers get it wrong, they can be sacked or fined, many people’s lives could be lost, and the engineers may go to jail.

   The Wikipedia description of Red Team also covers the idea of Blue Teams. The Red Team (challengers) conceptualize attacks on the system and the Blue Team (originators) respond with measures that counteract the attacks.

   I would argue that Structure designs are not ‘regularly’ subjected to Red Team attacks. I am familiar with an independent group of people with expertise related to the design being reviewed doing a detailed assessment of the developed design. I have been on many of those review teams. What is done is similar to Scientific Peer Review, not a Red Team attack.

   A structure design must be safe. Engineering work should always be checked by a competent reviewer to ensure that the evaluation and design decisions fully meet the established minimum safety standards of the relevant regional building/structure design Codes. This is sort of like Scientific Peer Review ensuring the methodology and evaluation were done in a way that makes the results defendable. It is not a Red Team attack.

   The engineer’s job is to knowledgeably rigorously think about and evaluate the performance of the structure they are designing, or any of its parts, in response to any potential condition or combination of conditions the structure could experience. An engineer’s design should be checked by a sufficiently capable review engineer. And a responsible professional engineer would not take on a design challenge that they lack the experience to properly perform. They would learn what they need to know from someone who has a better understanding (like good scientists learn from good peer review).

   It would be irresponsible for an engineer to rely on a reviewer (Red Team attacker) to identify any weaknesses of their design. The majority of designs completed by an engineer should completely stand up to detailed expert review. A good engineer would be expected to occasionally make an error or miss a consideration, hence the importance of every design being adequately independently checked. The good engineer would learn from the experience of having weaknesses of their work discovered by an expert reviewer. And a responsible engineer would not attempt to perform a design task they lacked experience in. They would seek adequate education before doing the ‘new to them’ design task.

   If an engineer does not learn to do better work in-spite of having the weaknesses of their work pointed out then they should not continue doing engineering work. The same should apply to scientists.

   One comment in closing. I have no knowledge of the engineering work you do. But I would caution you that how you have been responding to having the weaknesses of your ‘non-engineering’ ‘new to you’ evaluations of climate science literature pointed out raises Red Flags. You should be careful and reflective to ensure that you do not have a similar ‘motivation that keeps you from learning’ compromise your ability to be a good, constantly improving, responsible structural engineer.

   Moderator Response:

   [BL] This is a useful perspective.

   A "red team" that does not look at the details of the project and structural design is unlikely to detect problems that have been missed. A "red team" that consists of some other profession (your dentist, an accountant, etc.) but thinks they know structural engineering because they built their own backyard shed is unlikely to provide constructive feedback.

   And a "red team" that keeps raising objections that were raised on similar projects 20 years ago, and were shown to be wrong (several times over), is also not providing useful alternatives.

   Although I am not an engineer, I worked in an engineering company at one time in my career, on northern pipeline projects. Why? Because my background in permafrost and freezing soils provided expertise and experience related to frost heave - expertise not usually found in engineering training. I could provide useful advice on what the soil would do when it froze - but I for sure would not try to tell the engineers how much force the pipe could handle. That's where the engineers' expertise takes over. I might have questions, but it behooves me to listen to the answers that are given by people with relevant expertise. To quote Harry Callahan, a man's gotta know his limitations.

2. nigelj at 06:27 AM on 14 November 2025
   On the Gates climate memo
   

   Jonbo what realsitic alternative do you have to technology doing most of the work in fixing the climate problem? Before you answer I would suggest the alternative has to work, and has to have a good chance of being adopted and implimented, and not cause us significant harm or problems.

3. Philippe Chantreau at 04:50 AM on 14 November 2025
   Ice age predicted in the 70s
   

   So now we're playing a "my list is bigger" game, that's hilarious.

   If I had the patience to waddle through it, I would pick out every piece that does not deserve the name "paper" and I know there will be plenty of them because, without exercising such patience, I already found some.

   Then I would pick out all the ones that are irrelevant or make no forecasting of future global temperatures, that will be plenty more, because I also found that with a very limited sampling.

   Then I will pick out the ones that were classified as "cooling" or "neutral" and make no such prediction and here, again, there will be plenty, because, again, a limited sample showed them.

   You haven't successfully addressed any of the moderator's remarks. These attempts at distracting are almost as pathetic as the little big list.

   As for myself, I am at an age where patience changes from being a virtue to becoming a luxury, and I don't enjoy wasting my time with nonsense, so I will leave the drudgery of sorting through the little big list to whomever wishes to engage. I have seen enough.

   Moderator Response:

   [BL] Indeed. There is a limit to the patience one might have in going over this stuff time after time after time.

   Angusmac is not presenting arguments that haven't been made before. The two skeptical Science posts cover the NoTricksZone were prepared in 2018 - seven and a half years ago - and even then it was addressing a zombie myth.

   https:// skepticalscience.com/70s-cooling-myth-tricks-part-I.html

   https:// skepticalscience.com/70s-cooling-myth-tricks-part-II.html

   The Petersen et al paper (PCF-08) was written in 2008, so it is now 17 years old - almost old enough to drink in most jurisdictions.

   And I have known (in an Internet sense, not person-to-person) the second author of PCF-08 (William Connolley) since the 1990s when we both participated in climate discussions on Usenet news groups. William had an open challenge for "skeptics" to send him papers that they thought represented "cooling" predictions. You can even still find an old web page of his that includes the challenge. (It has not been updated since 2007, but the Internet never forgets. The OP links to this page in the Further Reading section.) This small individual effort eventually grew into a proper scientific examination of the literature that became PCF-08.

   As previously mentioned, I picked up on the Sellers (1969) paper because I have known about it for more than 45 years, and I knew what was in it and what the paper was trying to do (present a model, and apply it to several hypothetical - but reasonable - aspects of climate and climatic change). An implementation of the Sellers model was used as a teaching tool in the undergraduate climate courses I was taking.

   Angusmac is just the latest in a long series of people that keep making the same bogus arguments.

   I suspect that Angusmac probably does not understand the difference between a search engine and a book index. A book index does not simply list every page in the book that contains the word in question. A book index is the result of a thinking person examining the contents of the book to determine which of the many uses of a word is one that actually provides useful information - defining terms, explaining significant concepts, etc. A paper that uses the word "cooling" is not necessarily one that predicts cooling, and one that predicts cooling is not necessarily talking about the next century, or global climate.

4. Jonbo69 at 02:52 AM on 14 November 2025
   On the Gates climate memo
   

   While Bill Gates has done a lot of good in the world in many areas, I've never seen him as a good advocate for the necessary solutions to tackling climate breakdown, even before this memo. He's always mainly favoured techno-solutions that may not work, become reality, or even make the situation worse. I know this is speculation and I can't know for sure the real intentions behind this memo, but I can't help wondering if it is meant as some sort of peace offering to Donald Trump - given that it was only a few weeks ago that he was photographed, along with all our other tech titans, at a Dinner held by Trump, and sat just the other side of Trump with Melania between them.

5. Nick Palmer at 23:10 PM on 13 November 2025
   On the Gates climate memo
   

   Zeke Hausfather for President!

6. angusmac at 20:49 PM on 13 November 2025
   Ice age predicted in the 70s
   

   Philippe Chantreau @162

   Your comment that I am trying to “hide the abysmal shortcomings of that little list” is verging on the vituperation.

   Nevertheless, if my “little list” is (as you put it) “abysmal” how would you describe a list that contained less than half of the references to the peer-reviewed literature. Would it be “littler”, “miniscule” or “minute”.

   Wait a minute! PCF-08 contains only 71 papers, whereas my database of the peer-reviewed literature contains 190 (and it includes 71 papers from PCF-08). Surely you would not wish to belittle PCF-08 by calling it “abysmal” or perhaps you might prefer to refer to it as “more abysmal” than my paper.

   Moderator Response:

   [BL] The difference between your list and PCF-08's list is that PCF-08 clearly explains that their initial search produced a much larger list, and that examination of that larger list winnowed the list down to a small number that actually applied to their question about temperature predictions over the decades or century following the 1970s.

   Their initial search was clearly stated in the paper:

   ... we conducted a rigorous literature review of the American Meteorological Society’s electronic archives as well as those of Nature and the scholarly journal archive Journal Storage (JSTOR). To capture the relevant topics, we used global temperature, global warming, and global cooling, as well as a variety of other less directly relevant search terms. Additionally, in order to make the survey more complete, even at the expense of no longer being fully reproducible by electronic search techniques, many references mentioned in the papers located by these searches were evaluated, as were references mentioned in various history-of-science documents.

   And, as you have been told before, they stated:

   While some of these articles make clear predictions of global surface temperature changes by the year 2000, most of them do not.".

   You, on the other hand, have made it clear that you do not have the skill to recognize that when Sellers (1969) talks about changes in the solar constant over periods of millions of years, that this is not a prediction over the decades to a century following the 1970s. You do not have the skill to recognize that when Sellers (1969) says that something is highly unlikely, that this is not a prediction that it will happen soon. You do not have the skill to recognize that when a paper talks about cooling over the period 1940 to 1970, that this is not a prediction of cooling over the decades to a century following the 1970s (Philippe Chantreau's comment 147). You do not have the skill to recognize that a paper mentioning recent colder winters in Michigan is not a prediction of global cooling over the decades to a century following the 1970s (Philippe Chantreau's comment 150).

   Your search is the equivalent of using a web search engine that produces 1,802,603 hits, and failing to realize that most of those hits do not actually cover the question you posed.

   What makes PCF-08 useful is the skill of the authors to be able to read and understand the papers they found and do a good job of assessing whether or not their broad search terms actually found papers that gave an actual prediction over the time period in question (decades to a century following the 1970s). Skill is not bias. You have bias. You lack skill.

7. angusmac at 20:34 PM on 13 November 2025
   Ice age predicted in the 70s
   

   BL@159 and BaerbelW@161

   I had contemplated submitting my paper to a climate journal for (what you call) a “proper peer review”. However, I chose not to submit it because I thought that it wouldn’t get published – not because my review was inaccurate, but because current climate journals do not countenance a red team/blue team approach.

   Current climate journals only allow blue team opinions, whist banning any red team opinions that the question the current climate consensus, aka, The Science™. Furthermore, climate science appears to be the only branch of science and engineering that does not allow a red team/blue team approach. Indeed, the history of science shows that our scientific knowledge has mainly increased by those who chose to challenge the prevailing consensus.

   Additionally, as a structural engineer, I am appalled that climate scientists resist a red team/blue team approach to the discussion of The Science™, because using a red team/blue team methodology is normal practice in major engineering projects worldwide. In fact, on exceptionally large projects, a third team is often tasked with independently reviewing and validating the results of the red and blue team process.

   Of course, if engineers get it wrong, they can be sacked or fined, many people’s lives could be lost, and the engineers may go to jail. However, when climate scientists get it wrong, they usually just move their prediction(s) out by a few years and carry on as if nothing had gone wrong with their earlier prediction(s).

   To sum up, I believe that my paper would have been declined by a climate journal because it would have been considered to be part of the (banned) red team.

   Moderator Response:

   [BL] In other words, you are accusing the entire climate science community of engaging in a conspiracy to hide your genius. Item five in the list of the techniques of science denial.

   [画像:FLICC]

   I agree that your analysis would very likely be rejected by any proper journal - if all you have is what we've seen here. What would be needed to pass review has been explained to you before:

   • A proper description of your research question (e.g., along the lines of PCF-08's goal to examine predictions of climate temperature trends in the period of decades to a century following the 1970s).
   • A proper description of your search criteria, so that others can independently reproduce the results of your search.
   • A proper description of your evaluation criteria, so that others can examine the papers found in the search to see if they have been applied correctly.

   Your postings here fail on all three counts. All you have is opinions, and unsupported opinions rarely get published in scientific journals.

   Our scientific knowledge has mainly increased by those who chose to challenge the prevailing science - and provided evidence that their new ideas provide a better understanding of the science. It is not advanced by people that can do nothing more than "I created a list and applied labels to the papers". Especially when it is clear that those labels do not agree with the contents of the papers.

8. walschuler at 05:11 AM on 13 November 2025
   Climate Adam - Climate Scientist responds to Bill Gates
   

   As usual Climate Adam is clear and passionate. I have not read Gates' piece, and I will, but there is an action he is carrying out that relates to his argument, that is not commented on here, so I assume it is not mentioned by Gates. That action is that he has a permit for construction of a mini-nuclear powerplant in Wyoming that is based on uranium fuel and liquid sodium as primary coolant. Mini in this context means base load 345 Mwe, and with a short term (5 hour) peaking power at 500Mwe. Most recent power company nukes run base load at around 1,000Mwe. The Gates company collaborated with Hitachi, which is well established. But this design carries two burdens. First, the attempts to make liquid sodium reactors have failed. France has made the biggest efforts, in the form of the Phenix and Super-Phenix reactors. See wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix). The French designs had the goal of making them fast breeder reactors, that would generate more fissionable material while in operation than they would use up, using various purified natural sources, such as U238 (which is not a reactor or bomb isotope) or wastes from other reactors..Both reactors had serious problems. Among them is the fact that liquid sodium burns spontaneously if it comes in contact with air, so any leaks are potentially diasterous. Then there is the problem that like conventional reactors such reactors will end up with partly used fuel that will have high and low radiation level other elements as wastes that have to be separated and disposed of. One is Pu239, a great reactor fuel and atomic bomb material. So diversion of that is a threat, an easy threat if incoporated in a dirty bomb dispersed with conventional explosives, or an atomic threat if a critical mass can be purified and imploded. Disposal of it and other wastes demands separation from the environment for 10 half-lives, to reach a human-safe level of contact. For Pu239 that means reliable isolation for 249,000 years! Underground isolation in deep tunnels in geologically quiet and dry sites is needed for this and is the current working approach.. Finland is pioneering one, Sweden and France are gearing up. The USA had one designated at Yucca Mountain, adjacent to the underground test site of Yucca Flats, 65 miles north of Las Vegas. George W. Bush approved that, Nevada residents objected, and Barack Obama reversed it. It may have water leakage issues, but no further action has been taken there or or towards another site. So existing wastes (filled fuel rods) are containerized after cooling in swimming pools and are stored in various locations above ground. Other wastes, such as radioactivated structural materials and equipment, are separated and distributed to various "secure" locations. Potentially there is a second method of disposal, that uses a tuned subatomic particle accelerator or specially designed nuclear plant to convert wastes to either very short lived or stable isotopes. There is some work going on in Europe on this, but none in the US. It would be a way of making disposal of the hazards safe more quickly and it desrves serious funding, in order to dispose of slready generated and (possible) future wastes. To carry on generating nuclear power and wastes, even thogh the energy generated is mostly carbon-free, Gates' stated excuse for going nuclear, is irresponsible without safe operations and disposal guaranteed.

   Moderator Response:

   [BL] Not really a criticism, but a suggestion. The SkS edit box when writing comments does allow you to use the return/enter key to create paragraph breaks. White space makes it a lot easier to read.

9. Eclectic at 13:15 PM on 12 November 2025
   Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change
   

   Bob Loblaw @8 :

   Rogan for clickbait, to be sure. His ilk make a lot of dollars pandering to minorities. I dunno what their real thoughts are.

   Lindzen & Happer ~ doubtless you are right. The pique of being passed over, and the desire to become a Big Fish again, no matter how small the pool. A confluence of many unworthy motives.

10. nigelj at 12:23 PM on 12 November 2025
    Climate Adam - Climate Scientist responds to Bill Gates
    

    Agree with Eclectic. Gates, Musk, and Zuckerberg have all more or less downplayed climate concerns and need for strong mitigation or have been suddenly silent on advocating for such issues since Trumps election.

11. Bob Loblaw at 11:38 AM on 12 November 2025
    Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change
    

    Well, if you look at the ages of Lindzen and Happer (85 and 86, respectively), it's clear that they grew up during the strong anti-communist era in the US, post-WWII. In the 1950s and 60s, a huge part of the population was seeing a commie under every bed. Better dead than red.

    I can easily imagine that this would have influenced their views on life. I certainly preserve some of the attitudes and principles of my parents and my times growing up. (Lindzen and Happer's birth dates fall about half way between those of my parents and my own. Close to a 20 year gap either way.) As I grew into adulthood, I did not expect to have to fight the environmental fights of the 60s and 70s again fifty years later. I'm sure that some people think they are still fighting the commies like McCarthy did in the 1950s.

    Some people just like to go against the flow. Take the contrarian position, because they'd rather be a big fish in a small pond - rather than a small fish in a big pond.

    And today, it's often all about click bait. The desire to be popular, to be adored, as if we were all still in grade school.

12. Eclectic at 11:03 AM on 12 November 2025
    Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change
    

    Nigelj @6 :

    "Gubmint control and overreaching with regulations" is certainly the default outcry by American extreme rightwingers. To give them credit, that was a very reasonable position to take . . . 200 or 300 years ago. Though quite inappropriate in today's high-population hi-tech society.

    [But I wander off-topic.]

    And such outcries are too often a cover for mercenary self-interest. Possibly not much the case, with Lindzen and Happer ~ they are [IMO] more likely to have a mishmash of semi-subconscious motivations, like personal professional pique and a conservative's desire for clinging to the Good Old Days that they were familiar with. And suchlike.

13. nigelj at 10:24 AM on 12 November 2025
    Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change
    

    So we are left with Lindzens and Happers persistent errors or crazy opinions despite their qualifications. According to google gemini both are very suspicious of government regulations and over reach. I just think this is probably making them downplay the science. Impossible to prove of course. But I dont think its a coincidence that they have similar ideological leanings.

14. Eclectic at 08:39 AM on 12 November 2025
    Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change
    

    You are right, gentlemen.

    FLICC is a great concept, particularly when discussing clear-cut matters. Monckton is an excellent example of a clear-cut Fake Expert. The cases of Lindzen & Happer . . . get us deeper into murky semantics. Both are highly intelligent, but doing a crap job of thinking.

    All this, motives aside ~ for we can speculate about their obvious & less obvious psychological "high crimes and misdemeanors" but most people are (properly) not much interested in that topic. After all, it is the outcome that matters, in practical politics.

    In my mind, Lindzen started as an expert, and then progressively degraded his claim to that title, by his persistent and pig-headed errors (which he doubles-down on). And as you say, there is no point in publicly saying that he has no [current] claim to be regarded as a true expert ~ because the Denialists would aim to counter by getting out a tape measure and saying [re old academic qualifications] "His is bigger than yours" .

    Best to simply show that Lindzen is wrong here and wrong there and wrong almost everywhere. And to bypass the "expertise", in his case.

    Please, just the facts, madam.

15. Eclectic at 08:19 AM on 12 November 2025
    Climate Adam - Climate Scientist responds to Bill Gates
    

    Bbrowett @1 :

    Perhaps Gates paying less attention to climate, and more attention to which way the wind is blowing. The wind in the White House.

16. bbrowett at 07:36 AM on 12 November 2025
    Climate Adam - Climate Scientist responds to Bill Gates
    

    Who would have guessed that Bill Gates has a vested interest in blocking public policy, and policies against cooperative actions to deal with the climate emergency?
    Maybe the problem starts with the billionaires who manipulate public opinion, especially in Western countries?

17. Bob Loblaw at 05:35 AM on 12 November 2025
    Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change
    

    I think the question "relevant qualifications" is critical.

    For Lindzen, his educational background is physics (undergrad) and mathematics (grad). Both give an excellent background to lead into what I consider to be the primary focus of his academic career - meteorology. His early work, from what I know, seemed to focus on various aspects of atmospheric dynamics. Weather is strongly dependent on the discipline of geophysical fluid dynamics, due to the need to track short-term variations in atmospheric circulation.

    You would think that this is also a good place to take "transferable skills" into climate science, but Lindzen seems to have botched this. In my experience, meteorologists that reject the science of climate change often do so on the basis of a couple of ingrained viewpoints.

    • The first is that knowledge of the highly variable short-term atmospheric motions related to weather seem to make them think that long-term prediction of "weather" is impossible, and they just see "climate" as "long-term weather".
    • The second is that short-term weather prediction does not require a particularly detailed understanding of radiation transfer. Other energy flows, yes, but not necessarily radiation transfer. Unfortunately, radiation transfer is an essential aspect of climate change (especially for greenhouse gas and aerosol effects). It's hard to get your head around how small changes in radiation transfer can have a big effect on climate, when so much is going on in atmospheric motions.

    I don't know if Lindzen followed either of those paths, but he certainly has brought failed thinking into his climate-related work.

    Happer is a somewhat different case. Again, he's a physicist. He worked on atomic physics, optics, and spectroscopy, and did work in atmospheric radiation transfer. Again, you'd expect this to be an excellent set of transferable skills to deal with climate, but no such luck. His Wikipedia page indicates that he was dismissed from his position with the US department of energy in 1993, due to his views on the ozone layer. This suggests a strong predilection to reject environmental issues - one that existed long before taking on the climate change fight.

    So I would see both of these fellows as people that had good backgrounds and transferable skills that should have enabled them to move into climate science. But neither of them did it well. Lindzen has at least published in the climate literature, even if much of his work has not survived detailed examination. Happer just seems out of his depth.

    Unreliable, poor quality "experts" for sure. How poor and unreliable you need to be to meet the "fake experts" category is probably subjective. Easy to call "fake" when someone has no evidence of transferable skills that would help them understand climate science. ("I'm a Nobel laureate!" is a pretty weak argument when your Nobel is for literature.) A lot harder to call "fake" when someone has a background that would suggest they have suitable transferable skills - but simply did a crap job transferring them.

18. nigelj at 04:20 AM on 12 November 2025
    Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change
    

    Eclectic, youre right Lindzen makes a lot of mistakes, but I dont see how that makes him a fake expert. Because the only logical definition of a fake expert is someone without relevant qualifications.The incessant false claims do however make him a very unreliable, poor quality expert. I dont see how we can stretch that to mean fake.

    I'm probably being a bit pedantic and I get your point about semantics, but if we say Lindzen is a fake expert its so easy for the denialists to just list his impressive qualifications and the public will see that.

19. Eclectic at 07:05 AM on 11 November 2025
    Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change
    

    Nigelj : Yes, but I will nitpick your nitpick.

    Having made a number of posts recently on the other Rogan/ Lindzen/ Happer thread, I feel duty bound to comment on Lindzen particularly.

    You make good points ~ but ~ a lot of it comes down to plain old semantics. While in some ways it's fair to label Lindzen as an expert rather than a fake expert . . . nevertheless there is the matter of Lindzen's appalling track record. He's not just been wrong on some things (yes, occasionally allowable for experts) but he's been consistently wrong for decades, and has refused to make correction ~ and he has persisted in misleading the public (for decades! ).

    Does that in fact disqualify him as "expert"? Oh, fickle Semantics.

    Does an academic, despite having advanced Doctorates in Mathematics, really qualify as a true expert if he persistently assures the public that 2+2=5 ??

    Also sad, when Rogan obviously prefers "5" .

20. nigelj at 05:06 AM on 11 November 2025
    Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change
    

    Very informative and accurate commentary, except I have one nit pick:

    Commentary says: "Rogan’s fake experts. Rogan’s podcast tends to invite fringe, unqualified climate contrarians who dispute the expert consensus. Happer is a retired physicist with a scant publication record in the field of climate science. Lindzen has an extensive list of climate publications, but his contrarian claims have been consistently proven wrong. In other words, they have not withstood scientific scrutiny or the test of time."

    This is wrong about Lindzen and conflates a whole lot of things. Lindzen cannot be classified as a fake expert. Lindzen is certainly a well qualified in climate science. His CV and publishing record shows this. The fact he has been proven wrong on various issues doesn't make him non qualified. Experts are sometimes proven wrong. The fact hes a contrarian doesn't make him a non expert or non qualified. Hes not a fringe scientist. IMHO Lindzen is a very bad choice to use as an example of a fake expert. However several of his reasonings fit the examples of cherry picking and logical fallacies etc,etc.

    Happer is arguably a fake expert but not an ideal expample because at least he has a physics degree. Someone like Christopher Moncton would be much better example of a fake expert, because he is interviewed as if he's an expert, but he has no climate science related qualifications at all. He has a BArts degree in classical studies and a journalism diploma.

21. Eclectic at 23:49 PM on 9 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Nick Palmer @22 :

    Congratulations on surviving that 48-minute video, with all its waffle & minimization of the Global Warming trend. It was presented on a Denialist youtube channel . . . so it's possible that the video was edited down in places. And I hope you will agree that Lindzen is clearly batting for Team Denialist. (Whether his semi-subconscious motives had a partly religious component, or not.)

    You may recall that (decades ago) Lindzen's model projection was for global temperatures to plateau early in this century. His prediction was an embarrassing failure, compared with the actual rising temperatures (as projected by Hansen and the mainstream climate scientists of the time). And judging from the Lindzen video we have watched, he has fought a rear-guard battle to minimize his total failure. He has simply doubled-down, to a very large extent.

    Lindzen, more than once, gives a nod to a narrowly-controlled climate-resilient design of Earth ~ when, as an academic, he really should know the the ancient paleo climate variations of our planet. #Looking at the overall context, he is IMO engaging in Doublethink about Global Warming. Motivated Reasoning is very evident.

    "Cornwall" or not, it is (to me) rather surprising that Lindzen would take such a 'religious-adjacent' view, for he is not a Christian Fundamentalist nor Christian at all. Sadly, I know little of the pre-Christian Old-Testament tenets of the Creation (dated 6029 years ago, per Bishop Ussher).

    Whether Lindzen's [half-baked?] climate denialism has underlying motives which are 50% religion-based or only 10% religion-based . . .is something which Lindzen perhaps does not know (or acknowledge?) ~ nor does it matter much in the greater sheme of things. We need not get exercised about it. It is enough to see that explicitly and implicitly, he is showing he has abandoned the scientific mainstream.

22. Nick Palmer at 20:23 PM on 9 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Well, I subjected myself to the video Eclectic refers to - a 48 minute conversation with Lindzen. IMHO, at no point does Lindzen imply that he believes that God/Yahweh is looking after us. Lindzen does refer to "design" a couple of times, largely, I think to manipulate the audience of this YouTube channel. I think he is using the same idea as sceptic engineers do, who are convinced that feedbacks must be in Earth's systems to maintain stability. This is similar to the 'Uniformitarianism' principle that sceptic geologists invoke.

    Near the end Lindzen actually pours scorn on the other wing of 'Evangelicals', who think our activities are an assault on God's creation.
    It's clear to me that spreading stories that Lindzen is motivated by a deep religious conviction are as wrong as the denialist assertion that climate scientists are all making it up to keep the jobs and grants gravy train rolling along.

23. Eclectic at 04:39 AM on 9 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Nigelj @19 :

    Hallucinations aside, the AI tools are certainly impressive in their speed & wide-ranging searches.

    AFAIK, they have not yet gained much ability to infer. And when we are needing to scout the public utterances & texts (especially of particularly public figures e.g. politicians and propagandists) then we run up against the problem of "dog-whistling" and nuanced/coded language and subtle cloaking of meaning & intent. And outright camouflage.

    Rogan, Lindzen and Happer are easy to see through, at least at the level of their public actions.

    At this stage, I still think we must make use of the experience and wisdom of the well-informed human mind. A dash of cynicism also helps [recent comments of Philippe Chantreau come to mind! ].

24. nigelj at 04:12 AM on 9 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Clarification: If you asked an AI tool to investigate all possible motives for Richard Lindzens denialism including psychological motives, and listed them the AI would probably trawl the internet looking for commentary that mentions such things, or evidence that might suggest such things, and have a go at making sense of it.

25. nigelj at 04:01 AM on 9 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Eclectic @ 17, said: "I suspect that the AI tools are only capable of going looking for evidence of partisan political affiliation, rather than for the "subconscious" evidence that a person is guided by the deeper (and often unworthy) motives that rule so much of the non-partisan aspect of politics. Power / money / psychological resentments."

    I'm not so sure. If you asked an AI tool to investigate all possible motives for denialism including psychological motives, and listed them the AI would probably trawl the internet looking for commentary that mentions such things, or evidence that might suggest such things, and have a go at making sense of it.

    What I've found is the performance of AI depends on asking very clear and precise questions and providing some explanatory background and even listing your own suspicions. And defining your terms carefully. This leads to more useful answers than just putting in a 5 word search, "Lindzen, motives for climate denialism." You have to help the AI.

    The problem is the AI then tends to tell you what it thinks you want to hear. Accuracy can suffer. But at the very least you get a good list of relevant articles with links.

    The AI has limits of course. I've found accuracy is variable but its good enough to be useful for simple issues, and the AI is so fast and that makes it useful. But I digress and I may have misinterpreted what you are getting at.

26. Eclectic at 03:32 AM on 9 November 2025
    Ice age predicted in the 70s
    

    Philippe @162 :

    I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

    To learn that you have such a cynical streak in your character.

    Doubtless, Angusmac will promptly explain all.

27. Philippe Chantreau at 00:10 AM on 9 November 2025
    Ice age predicted in the 70s
    

    The motivation is simple and as crude as it gets in the denialist bag of tricks: Scientists predicted an ice age in the 70s and it didn't happen, so there is no reason to believe what they are predicting now. The funniest thing is that it no longer is a prediction, it is happening right in front of us.

    Now, Angusmac is only increasing word count, throwing smoke and mirrors to try to hide the abysmal shortcomings of that little list. A first step would be to make sure that every link actually leads somewhere. I'm not holding my breath. The whole thing is a pitiful attempt at twisting reality.

28. BaerbelW at 19:42 PM on 8 November 2025
    Ice age predicted in the 70s
    

    angusmac @159

    Our rebuttals are based on papers published in the peer-reviewed literature and not on some randomly compiled lists or databases published on a blog or website. Write up your arguments with explaining your methods and reasoning, submit your manuscript to a respected journal with proper peer review and have it published. Then we can revisit this rebuttal.

29. Eclectic at 19:32 PM on 8 November 2025
    Ice age predicted in the 70s
    

    Angusmac @159 :

    No ~ my query was with regard to your motivation for pursuing this long-out-of-date topic.

    This thread was started in 2007. That is 18 years ago. Even then it was rather outmoded, and, as I point out ~ the science has moved on, well and truly. And as you look through the thread's posts, you will find several oddball commenters ~ but overall, the topic has not received much attention. Rightly so. The whole topic subject is of only minor (dare I say, trivial?) historical interest, and is of almost zero relevance to today's climate problems.

    So that is why I ask for you to explain your motivation. Are you a fervent amateur historian? Have you discovered a Nobel-Prize-eligible factor of critical value to the world? Have you looked inside yourself, and reflected [as we all should] on your internal processes of thought, to understand yourself? I am sure that other readers also would benefit from understanding your motivation here.

    If you have a Quixotic mindset, then SkepticalScience has at your choice many threads on the modern relevance of wind turbines (or windmills, as our respected leader calls them).

30. angusmac at 17:27 PM on 8 November 2025
    Ice age predicted in the 70s
    

    Eclectic@158
    Regarding your comment that, “Looking at the Bigger Picture, why is it that you are bothering to argue about the exact percentage of scientific papers that were classed in cooling/neutral/ warming?”, since science (and technology) have moved on.

    My answer is simple: both SkS and PCF-08 have stated that there was an overwhelming consensus for warming in the 1970s. To the contrary, I have shown that this is untrue. PCF-08 (and SkS) have ignored the 86 cooling papers that my literature survey found in major scientific journals.

    
    Therefore, I recommend that the SkS 1970s ice age web page should be amended to represent the actual scientific facts (i.e. 86 cooling papers) and, as I have stated @146, PCF-08 should be either withdrawn or subjected to a detailed corrigendum to correct its obvious inaccuracies.

    
    I hope that this answers your query.

    Moderator Response:

    [BL]. No, you have not shown that there are "86 cooling papers" that should have been included in PCF-08. All you have shown is:

    • You can generate a list of papers through some unknown search process.
    • You can assign "cooling", "neutral", or "warming" labels to those papers through some unknown assessment process.
    • ...and when some of those papers are evaluated by people capable of understanding them, it turns out that your labels do not apply when assessed using the criteria clearly set out in PCF-08.

    As Baerbel points out in comment 161, your assertions here carry no weight. Your arguments, as presented here, are extremely weak. I am sure that you can find blogs where uninformed people find your arguments convincing. If you can find a proper scientific journal with proper peer review that accepts your analysis as reasonable, then go for it. Based on what we have seen, you have a lot of work to do to reach that point, though.

31. Eclectic at 11:37 AM on 8 November 2025
    Ice age predicted in the 70s
    

    Angusmac @157 (and earlier) :

    ~ Looking at the Bigger Picture, why is it that you are bothering to argue about the exact percentage of scientific papers that were classed in cooling / neutral / warming ?

    For us now viewing with the advantage of hindsight, the climate situation is very clear. But back in the sixties, there was a modicum of uncertainty ~ the scientists could see that the world had been warming for nearly a century (despite the long-term cooling from Milankovitch Cycle causes) . . . and yet there seemed to be more than a hint of unexpected relative cooling. [Later satisfactorily explained by the effect of industrial air pollution.]

    But nowadays the uncertainty is gone. It is all over and done with, and the Fat Lady has finished singing.

    So, what now? Plenty of room for political arguing about what are the best moves for tackling our Global Warming problem. Should we temporarily put up our feet and continue Business As Usual, or all go and live in a cave . . . or something inbetween, like pursuing Carbon Taxes combined with massive research on cheaper solar panels / cheaper sodium batteries / and a much bigger look at fusion power?

    These are the questions for today. Not what Dr Sellers and others were meaning 50+ years ago. Why would one wish to argue on it?

32. angusmac at 10:38 AM on 8 November 2025
    Ice age predicted in the 70s
    

    BL@155 & Eclectic@156

    I disagree that I am twisting the wording in Sellers (1969) to suit preconceptions and I also disagree with your interpretation of Sellers (1969). However, I will prepare an amended database that will include SkS’s interpretation of the scientific papers.

    Consequently, if I were to amend Sellers (1969) from neutral to warming then the number of papers would be as follows:

    • Cooling (86 papers).
    • Neutral (57 papers).
    • Warming (47 papers).

    In summary, there would be 39 more cooling papers than warming papers.

    I reiterate that I find it astonishing that PCF-08 only uncovered 7 cooling papers and that they did not uncover the 86 cooling papers that my literature survey found in major scientific journals.

    Please let me know of the next paper on which you disagree with my assessment.

    Moderator Response:

    [BL] I will accept your decision to not continue to debate the details of Sellers (1969) as an admission that you can't find anything more in the paper to quote that supports your assessment. The fact that you won't change your mind, despite several attempts to explain the paper to you does not bode well for any further discussion of your list.

    No, you do not have 86 cooling papers, 57 neutral papers, and 47 warming papers. You have a list of papers that you have decided to assign those labels to. What you have not done is:

    • Provide an explanation of your search terms that generated the list of papers you examined.
    • Given an indication of exactly what question you wanted to answer by doing your analysis.
    • Given clear definitions of what criteria you used to assign "cooling", "neutral", or "warming" labels to each paper.
    • Given any indication as to when you would decide that a paper was not relevant to your question.

    In the discussion of Sellers (1969), what you have shown is:

    • You can't understand the paper well enough to be able to distinguish between analyses that apply to the period of decades to a century starting in the 1970s, and analyses that apply to much longer time periods.
    • You won't change your mind when these important details of the paper are explained to you.

    The reason that PCF-08 only found seven cooling papers is because the authors of that paper understood how to properly read a scientific paper and determine what parts of the paper applied to the specific question that PCF-08 was looking at. To repeat what was said to you before, PCF-08 restricted their analysis to the following:

    • The views during the time period of the 1970s
    • The views on global cooling or a full-fledged ice age.
    • That such a change in climate is imminent.
    • That the question is intended to address the future trend of climate, not historical observations

    When restricting their analysis to papers that actually met these criteria, PCF-08 noted "While some of these articles make clear predictions of global surface temperature changes by the year 2000, most of them do not.". What we have seen clearly in your discussion of Sellers (1969) is that you can't tell the difference between portions of the paper that do apply to the question posed by PCF-08 and those that do not.

    In addition to Sellers (1969), Philippe Chantreau has looked at several papers on your list, as stated in his comments here. In each case, he found reasons to reject your assessment of those papers.

    The second SkS blog post on the NTZ analysis also lists a variety of papers that NTZ messed up on. You are making the same sort of errors, covered more general in the first SkS blog post on the NTZ list.

    All the evidence in this discussion here points in one direction: your selection of papers and assessment of "cooling", etc. in these papers is highly unreliable. It seems highly unlikely that looking at any more papers in detail will result in a different conclusion. And to be clear, I use the term "highly unlikely" as an indication that it is possible that you have properly classified some of those papers, but the chance of that happening in sufficient numbers to be important is too small to be worthy of further consideration.

33. Eclectic at 08:01 AM on 8 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Bother. Another typo @17. Should read: "Sad like has never been seen before." ~ He deeply resents being misquoted . . . and now I shall have to worry about the next tumbril/indictment.

34. Eclectic at 07:52 AM on 8 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Quite correct, Nigelj @16. I suspect that the AI tools are only capable of going looking for evidence of partisan political affiliation, rather than for the "subconscious" evidence that a person is guided by the deeper (and often unworthy) motives that rule so much of the non-partisan aspect of politics. Power / money / psychological resentments.

    Sad that Lindzen & the handful of eminent "denialist" scientists have abandoned logical scientific thought. To quote my favorite politician : "Sad. Sad like has never seen before."

    [Except that we have seen it before.]

35. nigelj at 05:04 AM on 8 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    I asked some of the usual AI tools what are Richard Lindzens political beliefs. The responses were lengthy and listed references but here are some key quotes fyi:

    Google Gemini: Richard Lindzen was a lifelong Democrat who switched to the Republican Party due to his views on climate change and government policy responses. He describes his political beliefs as generally conservative or libertarian, especially regarding what he sees as government overreach in the name of climate action.

    Microsoft Copilot: While Lindzen doesn’t publicly identify with a specific political party, his affiliations and rhetoric suggest a strong ideological alignment with libertarian and conservative critiques of environmental regulation.

    So he may be minimising the climate problem as a way to avoid government involvement in solutions. He may not even realise hes doing this.

36. Paul Pukite at 02:13 AM on 8 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Becoming clear that Richar Lindzen is vastly overrated as a scientist. Even his earliest research from back in the 1960's needs to be revisited. Some foundational mechanisms were dismissed or overlooked by Lindzen, and for the longest time his arguments were never revisited. I started reviewing his early models on the QBO several years ago and found surprising connections that he missed. Alas, Lindzen is no longer in the picture as he is no longer active as a researcher, but his disciples can take the helm if they wish to defend him They seem mum about the new findings as PubPeer reappraisals are being ignored
    
    

    https://pubpeer.com/publications/E27F0929E64D90C32E9358889CC80F

    PubPeer is the place for futther discussion, not the comment section here, IMO. This won't make a dent when it comes to arguing for a change

37. Eclectic at 21:58 PM on 7 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Nick Palmer :

    A lengthy PART TWO of the religious component of Lindzen's climate science denialism.

    While we see where the typical Denialist (e.g. to be found in the street or @WUWT website) harbors anger / selfishness / deficiency in empathy . . . . there is IMO an additional fundamentalist religious component in the Motivated Reasonings of some prominent Denialists. You yourself could name a few of those luminaries, I am sure.

    IIRC, there was an interview with a very relaxed, laid-back Lindzen sitting in a chair in his garden, while being interviewed by a "sympathetic" interviewer. My perhaps-faulty memory was that the occasion was 2006 ~ but perhaps that date is wrong. My googling this week turned up youtube: "Interview with Professor Richard Lindzen" on the "Rathnakumar S" channel. I am unclear on its date ~ maybe 2014 or 2015. Hard to be sure, since youtubers tend to recycle and re-post stuff from years earlier from other sources. But the exact date is a trivial matter. And please do not bother to view the video, unless you are in a masochistic mood.

    # The "Rathnakumar S" channel is new to me, and I have not viewed any of the rest of the playlist. But the playlist does include interviews (originals or re-posts?) of people such as :- W.Soon; W.Happer; H.Svensmark; M.Salby; P.Michaels; S.Baliunas; Bob Carter; et alia. And including that paragon of ethical public education, Marc Morano. Plus there appears to be a flirtation with anti-vax. Of course.

    Video with approximate time-stamps :

    Lindzen seems to favor a degree of Intelligent Design ~ the World is well-designed. 3:05 "Oh I think the case is pretty strong that it is in fact better designed, and there are strong negative feedbacks that will instead of amplifying, diminish the effect of man's emissions."

    Lindzen keeps minimizing the Global Warming: "Only half a degree in a century ... [and] the temperature is always flopping around."

    Lindzen opines that CO2 can have a warming effect, but most of it is not due to humans . . . though yes, water vapor and clouds "worsen what we do with CO2." [Note that Lindzen's "Iris Hypothesis" has been a dud.]

    22:20 "We still don't know why we had these ice age cycles. We don't know why 50 million years ago we could have alligators in Spitzbergen."

    27:00 "Ever since we invented the umbrella, we've known how to deal with climate, up to a point."

    37:20 "Nothing in this [climate] field is terribly compelling. The data is weak. ..."CO2 will contribute some warming : not much. ..."It is then claimed that recent changes are due to man : I don't think that's true."

    46:13 He returns to Intelligent Design : "A well-engineered device tries to compensate for anything that perturbs it."

    So ~ not much particularly explicit denialisty statements . . . but a great deal of implicit statements. Including, throughout the video, a great deal of "Cornwall" wording.

38. Eclectic at 18:43 PM on 7 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Nick Palmer @11 :

    Aha ~ I am disappointed that the AI [Artificial Intelligence] detected my comment of 8 January 2025. Here I was, thinking that I was flying under the radar, by my [unspecified cloaking] of my public comments.

    More seriously, you could perhaps try Lindzen+God / Lindzen+Jehovah / Lindzen+Elohim / etcetera. Bur why waste yhour time on such a project? AI's are improving by the month : but while they are great on specific words, they are not yet ( I gather) much chop at inference, induction, and the "reading-between-the-lines" of meaning & context.

    Just as I find it tiresome to read the vague fuzziness & "plausible deniability" style of Judith Curry's climate commentary/opinions ~ so too I avoid following Richard Lindzen closely during his lengthy almost-but-not-quite denial of the mainstream science over the years. Lindzen does not wear his heart on his sleeve . . . so we must look for his implicit position.

    Nor had I looked into the "Cornwall Alliance" and its "evangelical statements" [~ thanks BL]. Since Lindzen is non-Christian (of evangelical or any other type) then I am a tad surprised that he would sign onto anything from the Cornwall Alliance. However, Wikipedia says the Cornwall Declaration goes: "We believe Earth and its ecosystems ~ created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence ~ are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory."

    Well, you get the picture. And thinking back on the youtube interview (that I touched on earlier) I can see that he was using many of the words/phrases expressed by the Cornwallites.

    So if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a real denialist ~ with an added teaspoon of That Old Time Religion.

    Nick, already my post is too long : so I shall coffee up and get back to your inquiry, soon.

39. Nick Palmer at 15:02 PM on 7 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    "climate science is wrong.ost of it is about how environmental" should have been 'climate science is wrong, most of it is about how environmental... '

40. Nick Palmer at 14:58 PM on 7 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Ok, I grant that Lindzen signed the documents, but that's a far cry from meaning he supports every word in them. The actual 'God loves us and wouldn't let us' bit is the CA's 'reasoning' for why they believe mainstream climate science is wrong.ost of it is about how environmental stewardship should be for the benefit of human flourishing etc. The only direct quotes AI could find relating to Lindzen and Yahweh was from me questioning it and Eclectic themselves saying it here several months back "Eclectic at 07:43 AM on 8 January, 2025".

    Most AI points out that Lindzen does not use religious arguments to make his case about low climate sensitivity

41. Eclectic at 14:04 PM on 7 November 2025
    Ice age predicted in the 70s
    

    Angusmac @155 :

    Over the past 500 million years, the solar output has been increasing by 1% every 120 million years (approx). Such is the nature of the beast, according to astro-physicists, in having a gradual increase in the hydrogen fusion rate.

    A reduction in solar output of 2-5% (or even the 7% you mentioned earlier) would represent a truly colossal alteration in our Sun.

    I think you have confused the term "physically realistic" (in practical terms) with the abstract mathematical exercise which Sellers has performed for the reader's interest & comparison.

42. angusmac at 13:19 PM on 7 November 2025
    Ice age predicted in the 70s
    

    @152 & @153

    BL, you state that, “To claim that PCF-08 is wrong, angusmac needs to evaluate using the same criteria: a time scale of decades to centuries. If he is to gain any credibility, he needs to outline where in Sellers (1969) he finds support to argue that Sellers thought that the solar constant would decrease by this amount (or any amount) over the next century.”

    In response, I now enclose an image of a paragraph from p.399 of Sellers (1969).

    [画像:Paragraph from p.399 of Sellers (1969)]

    Note that Sellers (1969) states that"...in as little as 100 years…it is not inconceivable that the solar constant will change”. Consequently, it is obvious that my classification of Sellers (1969) is based on "time scales from decades to a century".

    Notwithstanding the above, he does state that such a change in the solar constant for an extended period is, “on the fringe of being highly unlikely”. Furthermore, I would suggest that “on the fringe” means that the possibility cannot be discounted. Additionally, nowhere in Sellers (1969) is a change to the solar constant ruled out. Indeed, he includes such a possibility of solar change as one of his "major conclusions" (as highlighted below).

    [画像:Conclusions from p.399 of Sellers (1969)]

    I contend that all of the Sellers (1969) conclusions are valid because all of them “were specified to be physically realistic” (although some outcomes may be more likely than others).

    Consequently, I still maintain that my change to the PCF-08 classification of Sellers (1969) from warming to neutral is valid because he did state that there was a possibility of another ice age and that it was specified to be "physically realistic” .

    Moderator Response:

    [BL] Congratulations on continuing your habit of taking any wording that matches your preconceptions and twisting it into what you think is a convincing argument.

    The first section you quote clearly states that it is the warming due to "man's activity" that could take "as little as 100 years or as long as 1000 years".

    Sellers does not give any indication how much he thinks the solar constant will change over that time period. He just says that it is "not inconceivable that the solar constant will change." He also does not indicate whether he is thinking about the short end (100 years) or the long end (1000 years). He does explicitly say that it would take a 7% drop in the solar constant to counteract the warming due to CO2. And he says "such a large drop [7%] in the solar constant over any extended period is on the fringe of being highly unlikely".

    So, in your argument, saying that something is highly unlikely is the same as making a prediction that it is likely. Contrast this with the wording that Sellers uses on p398, with respect to the CO2 rise (variations in infrared transmissivity": "the global mean temperature should slowly rise due to this factor."

    • To put it simply, you are creating a false equivalence between "highly unlikely" and "should happen". You just see a balance between two things that are "possible", and you are ignoring the fact that Sellers (1969) is quite confident that one will happen (warming due to CO2) and the other most likely will not (cooling due to a hypothetical drop in the solar constant).

    And once again, you misinterpret the conclusions. The "physically realistic" statement is simply a recognition that the solar constant can change over extended time periods (indeed it has, over millions of years). It says nothing at all about what is likely over the next few decades to a century. The paper as a whole does not limit itself to the next century - it looks at possible climate effects (as modelled) over very long periods. It is only in your imagination that you can take Sellers' results over millions of years (ice age) and claim that they represent a prediction over the next century.

43. Eclectic at 13:10 PM on 7 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Three matters :-

    (a) One Planet and Nigelj ~ you make many excellent points.

    (b) Thank you Moderator [Bob]. I hope that a careful reading of my words @5 does show that I am not accusing these elderly scientists of deceit ~ but simply that they are persistently wrong and should know better. I am sure that they have high intelligence (well above mine) and that a few (e.g. Lindzen) have a high level of climate science knowledge . . . even though their own comments all too often suggest otherwise.

    At a functional level, the human brain is rather like a stack of pancakes. The top pancake, exposed to the world (and generally being the "self-aware" pancake) can be strongly influenced and/or controlled by some of the deeper pancakes. [Freud used an over-simplistic concept of superego/ ego/ id. ]

    However, just as a highly-skilled driver can sometimes crash his car, or as a poker-player can sometimes botch the good hand he has been dealt . . . . so too can eminent scientists sometimes present garbage to the world. And keep presenting it for decades ~ and the longer they do it, the less likely they are to admit they are wrong. Human nature. They are not intending deceit, at least not at their surface pancake level. (Versus those paid propagandists at Heartland Institute, etc. )

    (c) Nick Palmer @7 :

    Regarding Lindzen's expressed belief that God/Jehovah/Yahweh would of course design an Earth which narrowly controlled its climate for the benefit of the human race ~ it might take me a while to find the exact reference. A quick search shows me a youtuber interviewing a relaxed Richard Lindzen sitting on a chair in his garden (which rings a bell in my memory) but the date was stated as 2014 (or 2015) . . . but I am not clear whether that's the release date or the interview date.

    My initial impression is that the video is 48 minutes of Judith-Curry-like vagueness & minimisation. But I will make a separate post once I have digested it.

    Moderator Response:

    [BL] The moderator's comment on #5 was intended for all. Your comment was simply the last in the chain at the time. Some people were getting closer to the line than others - and maybe were crossing over it. I simply wanted to send up a warning flag to all participants to be careful. Basically, a moderator's equivalent to a parent saying "don't make me come down there!".

44. Bob Loblaw at 08:52 AM on 7 November 2025
    Climate sensitivity is low
    

    SCaGW2 @ 390:

    Well, the "journal" is the publishing house of the organization "Science of Climate Change", which lists Hermann Harde as its editor. Harde is a well-known Norwegian "skeptic" with a reputation for misinformation. The organization's web page outlines their publishing purpose:

    The objective of this journal was and is, to publish – different to many other journals – also peer re-viewed scientific contributions, which contradict the often very unilateral climate hypotheses of the IPCC and thus, to open the view to alternative interpretations of climate change.

    You can't express a predetermined agenda much more clearly than that.

    As a result, there seems little reason to think that the paper represents an unbiased analysis. A very short glance at the paper suggests that his "climate model" is extremely simplistic. Huijser's name seems pretty new in the climate skeptic camp, and Google Scholar doesn't seem to pick up any publications in credible climate science journals.

    Is there anything in the paper that you find remotely interesting? It looks like yet another self-published analysis from a highly unreliable source. My personal view is that it is probably not worth reading in depth, but if there is an aspect of it that you think is interesting, please tell us.

45. SCaGW2 at 07:40 AM on 7 November 2025
    Climate sensitivity is low
    

    Not sure if this has been addressed already. Couls someone analyse this report? https://scienceofclimatechange.org/wp-content/uploads/SCC-Vol5.3-Huijser-Balancing-Act.pdf

46. One Planet Only Forever at 07:20 AM on 7 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Nick Palmer @7,

    Regarding Lindzen's 'alternative understanding of the impact of cloud changes as warming occurs due to increased CO2 levels'.

    I may be mistaken. But nearly 1.5 C warming has happened with CO2 increasing from 280 ppm to 420 ppm (only a 50% increase of CO2). I appreciate that correlation does not prove causation. But that information would appear to fairly solidly establish that Lindzen's past belief, that he appears to powerfully resist changing his mind about in spite of updated information, has 'very little merit'.

47. One Planet Only Forever at 07:03 AM on 7 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Because of Lindzen's past history of contributions to climate science, I find it very difficult to grant him any benefit-of-doubt regarding his statement in the first point raised (repeated below):

    Lindzen @ 6:02: “global mean temperature doesn't change much, but you know you focus on one degree, a half degree, so it looks like something”

    Lindzen @ 22:06: “Gutierrez (sic) at the UN says the next half degree and we're done for. I mean, doesn't anyone ask, a half degree? I mean, I deal with that between, you know, 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m [laughs]. Rogan: "it does seem crazy. It's just that kind of fear of minute change that they try to put into people.”

    To start, Lindzen seriously misrepresents what Gutierres has said. A quick internet search finds the following UN News item: There is an exit off ‘the highway to climate hell’, Guterres insists. It includes the following selected quotes:

    “It’s climate crunch time” when it comes to tackling rising carbon emissions, the UN Secretary-General said on Wednesday, stressing that while the need for global action is unprecedented, so too are the opportunities for prosperity and sustainable development.

    ...

    Question of degrees

    He said a half degree difference in global warming could mean some island States or coastal communities disappearing forever.

    Scientists point out that the Greenland ice sheet and West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse and cause catastrophic sea level rise. Whole coral reef systems could disappear along with 300 million livelihoods if the 1.5°C goal is not met.

    Extreme weather from East Asia to the western seaboard of the US has been turbocharged by climate chaos, “destroying lives, pummelling economies and hammering health”, said the Secretary-General.

    It is very challenging to excuse someone like Lindzen saying those types of things (and all the other cases of misleading manipulative messaging by him and Happer that have been pointed out).

    Rogan can be excused for being a gullible desperate pursuer of popularity who is easily impressed and therefore potentially is unwittingly massively harmfully misleading. No such excuse comes to mind for Lindzen (or Happer).

    I look forward to the follow-up mentioned by Dana that will "...look at the underlying psychology in a separate article in the near future."

48. Nick Palmer at 06:49 AM on 7 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Does anyone have a reference for the claim that Lindzen has used the 'God wouldn't let us wreck our climate' argument. I knew both John Christie and Roy Spencer have very strong religious beliefs which makes them kind of believe that God wouldn't let us do it, which colours their views, but I've never heard anything similar about Lindzen.

    In any event, I think it's unfair to characterise Lindzen as a denialist because his basic position is that he "accepts the elementary tenets of climate science. He agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, calling people who dispute that point 'nutty.' He agrees that the level of it is rising because of human activity and that this should warm the climate. He also believes that decreasing tropical cirrus clouds in a warmer world will allow more longwave radiation to escape the atmosphere, counteracting the warming."

    This is his hypothesised 'Iris effect'. This is why he believes that climate sensitivity is about 1/3 that of the figures 'IPPC science' works with. If he's right, then global warming genuinely will not be a problem. He often phrases his rhetoric to assert that 'science shows' that the sensitivity is a lot less than the IPCC's, but he's usually referring to his own papers and sort of implies that science generally supports him - but it's just his own views about clouds in the tropics.

    Moderator Response:

    [BL] According to Wikipedia, Richard Lindzen has signed onto the Cornwall Alliance's evangelical statements. Web searches provide a variety of hits indicating a strong connection with the Cornwall Alliance.

49. nigelj at 04:23 AM on 7 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    KR said: " I wonder, at this point, whether the reward for such denial is financial (I don't think either has published much recently), ideological (against government control/pro libertarian), or just consistency with past assertions?"

    The denialism may be a mixture of all three motinations. Humans often have multiple motivations for a particular action or view. This is a basic finding of psychology.

    We humans are reductionist we prefer a simple singular explanation. Occams Razor being the formalisation of this broadly saying that the simplest explanation for an event that can explain all the facts is usually correct. But with human behaviour the simplest explanation that works is sometimes a not so simple.

    And I think you can add more motivations for climate science denialism. Religious beliefs and extreme attention seeking. And unusual stubborness. Some people have a big narcissistic ego so it becomes difficult and downright painful to admit they are wrong or made a mistake so people hold onto absurd beliefs their whole lives. Of course we are all egotistical but most of us are capable of admitting we made a mistake. People at the extreme end of the ego spectrum have a huge problem walking back from their views. They are unusually stubborn.

    And some people are super smart and over confident so they believe they just cannot be wrong. But everyone is fallible

    Of course its hard to know precisely what motivates Lindzen but the evidence suggests it may be some sort of combination of money and religion and I reckon over confidence and attention seeking.

    When reading denialists comments and getting in discussions with them a large number do seem to have very strong libertarian leaning anti government regulation ideologies, so denying the science is an obvious strategy to prevent governments control. Nick Palmer is right.

    I dont like accusing people of lying. Its hard to know if they are lying because lying means deliberately spreading falsehoods that they know are falsehoods. Sometimes they are just mistaken. Genuine lying does happen of course and can sometimes be proven, but in scientific issues its tricky to prove because scientifc findings have error bars and theories are not the same as facts. So someone like Lindzen may really believe his numbers are the truth. I think hes more in the delusional category. Hes certainly spreading "miss"information.

50. Eclectic at 22:29 PM on 6 November 2025
    Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
    

    Plincoln @4 :

    Lindzen may be the exception, indeed. IIRC, roughly 19 years ago [aged 65?] he gave an interview where seemingly his fundamental denialism was on the religious basis that Yahweh would prevent the Earth's climate deviating from the Eden-like state. Doubtless Lindzen's viewpoint would also be reinforced by the usual political and/or motivated reasonings of the true Denialist.

    Yes, Lindzen had received some small payments/stipends from the usual industry suspects. Interestingly, the psychologists say that small payments of cash or other benefits, can have a remarkably strong effect on the mindset of recipients.

    Happer and the other elderly Denialists ~ in which I include the youthful [mid-70's] Koonin ~ seem to have the more typical mishmash of ego/Emeritus-Syndrome/wingnut/etcetera distortions of logic as well as a deficiency in Charity.

    But I guess we should update the traditional virtue of Charity, to be re-named as Empathy.

    Moderator Response:

    [BL] A note to all participating in this thread: please try to avoid inflammatory accusations such as deceit, etc.

    Lindzen was a well-respected meteorologist and did some good work early in his career. Happer was a well-respected physicist. Both have wandered away from good science in their positions on climate change, but they do not deserve having us ignore the SkS Comments Policy statements against accusations of deception, etc.

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