The CO2 Coalition " What Warming " tweetstorm suggests the coalition's JASON emeriti have enlisted their old friend and neighbor John Clauser to relaunch Dick Lindzen's "Iris Effect" theory of limited global warming.
Their transmission & endorsement of Lindzen's recent, and oddly published DIY review of his own work recalls Carl Sagan and his co-authors efforts to outflank critics of the apocalyptically framed 1983 "nuclear winter" paper in Science , with a DIY review of subsequent publications: "Climate and Smoke: an Appraisal of Nuclear Winter" that ranks as a masterpiece of selective citation.
Here we go again : the tweetstorm's debt to Lindzen becomes fairly obvious if you compare his 2021 paper with what Clausen has said, especially while pointing to Steve Koonin's Unsettled during his Competitive Enterprise Institute presentation
Full disclosure:
In 1986, I was invited to lunch with CEI Founder Fred Smith after I criticized the science of 'nuclear winter' in the peer reviewed pages of Nature, and the politics of its PR campaign in The National Interest, Foreign Affairs, Il Tempo , The Wall Street Journal, and The Bangkok Post
Earlier that year , the Editor of the NAS magazine Science Technology and Human Values had observed that, in terms of pop culture,
"Science is whatever Carl Sagan says on the Johnny Carson show."
The meal was not memorable but after it, Smith asked me:
"Do you believe in global warming ?"
And I replied
"Of course!"
adding that the same radiative forcing science that led to the meltdown of Sagan's much publicized TTAPS model showed CO2 would warm the Earth as surely as darkening the atmosphere could cool it
He seemed puzzled , but inquired :
"Would you like to be the next Carl Sagan?"
Though taken aback, I recalled Steve Schneider's experience with Carl, and replied:
"One is one too many."
I was not asked back, and not much has changed at CEI since:
JOHN CLAUSER , 2022 PHYSICS NOBEL PRIZE WINNER:
"I can very confidently assert, there is NO climate emergency." “As much as it may upset many people, my message is the planet is NOT in peril. … atmospheric CO2 and methane have negligible effect on the climate. The policies government have been implementing are total unnecessary and should be eliminated.So far, [we] have totally misidentified what is the dominant process in controlling the climate, and all of the various models are based on incomplete and incorrect physics.The dominant process, is “the cloud-sunlight-reflexivity thermostat mechanism. Clouds are all bright white, and they reflected 90% of the sunlight back into space making them the most crucial yet most overlooked aspect of the climate system. Two-thirds of the Earth are ocean. The Pacific Ocean alone is half the Earth. The average cloud cover for the Earth is 67%; about 50% over land and 75% over oceans. I claim that the above conspicuous properties of clouds are the missing part of the puzzle.• I assert that the IPCC's computer models have all misidentified the dominant process that controls the earth's climate. They are based on incomplete and incorrect physics.• My contribution here is to introduce the "cloud-sunlight-reflectivity thermostat mechanism". theot tat mechanist song canals the ideas mage and temperavitre.• This thermostat provides nature's own Solar Radiation Management System. It is built-in to nature. It works. It is very effective. And, it is free!• I further show here that my cloud-sunlight-reflectivity thermostat mechanism constitutes the overwhelmingly dominant process that controls and stabilizes the earth's temperature and climate.I show here that the effect of CO2 is totally negligible by a factor of more than 100with respect to that provided by my cloud reflectivity thermostat mechanism• (Pardon the metaphor) I claim that my model is an elephant in the room hiding in plain sight. (I earlier discovered two similar elephants-in-the-room in quantum mechanics.)• Finally, I show that NOAA's own data disprove their claims that the frequency of "extreme weather events" is recently increasing at an alarming rate as a result of global warming.
Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences
The Iris Effect: A Review
Lindzen, Richard S; Choi, Yong-Sang
Volume 58, pages 159–168, Seoul (2022)
This study reviews the research of the past 20-years on the role of anvil cirrus in the Earth’s climate – research initiated by Lindzen et al. (Bull. Am. Meteor. Soc. 82:417-432, 2001).The original study suggested that the anvil cirrus would shrink with warming, which was estimated to induce longwave cooling for the Earth. This is referred to as the iris effect since the areal change hypothetically resembles the light control by the human eye’s iris. If the effect is strong enough, it exerts a significant negative climate feedback which stabilizes tropical temperatures and limits climate sensitivity.Initial responses to Lindzen et al. (Bull. Am. Meteor. Soc. 82:417-432, 2001) denied the existence and effectiveness of the iris effect. Assessment of the debatable issues in these responses will be presented later in this review paper. At this point, the strong areal reduction of cirrus with warming appears very clearly in both climate models and satellite observations. Current studies found that the iris effect may not only come from the decreased cirrus outflow due to increased precipitation efficiency, but also from concentration of cumulus cores over warmer areas (the so-called aggregation effect). Yet, different opinions remain as to the radiative effect of cirrus clouds participating in the iris effect. For the iris effect to be most important, it must involve cirrus clouds that are not as opaque for visible radiation as they are for infrared radiation. However, current climate models often simulate cirrus clouds that are opaque in both visible and infrared radiation. This issue requires thorough examination as it seems to be opposed to conventional wisdom based on explicit observations. This paper was written in the hope of stimulating more effort to carefully evaluate these important issues.
