May 3, 1995 ATTACHMENT #1. Entire reviews sent to author of a Science manuscript, noting that This paper addresses an issue that has not been adequately treated in the broad public discussion of "global warming," i.c. "How good are the models that represent the formally stated "greenhouse" hypothesis?" The results given here are definitive for one of the set of such questions. They should be published. Unfortunately the English is so opaque that only a specialist can really tell what the authors say. A few hours spent on improving the English would be well worth the effort - for the message needs saying clearly. This is a very misleading paper. The reason Manabe et al., and others, have been performing coupled atmosphere-ocean GCM simulations is to understand the transient behavior of the models. These simlations are not intended to be "transient forecasts". Nor is it reasonable to assume that the past 100 year temperature record is dua solely to anthropogenic causes. Natural variability is certainy present, and the m.del could not replicate this because of the way it has been initialized. Thone who work with GQMS know the problems associated with their models. This paper is not an objective critique of those problems. Chairman WALKER. Thank you. Dr. Lindzen? STATEMENT OF DR. RICHARD LINDZEN, SLOAN PROFESSOR OF METEOROLOGY, CENTER FOR METEOROLOGY AND PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS Dr. LINDZEN. Thank you, Mr. Walker, members of the Committee. I'm happy to be here to discuss the issue of global change in the context of Mission to Planet Earth. In any event, I will keep my remarks brief. I won't go to my transparencies. But I will say that, as my testimony, my written testimony, points out, that there is a great deal of progress going on in this subject and it's coming from something that was, I think, rather glibly treated by Bob Watson. I think most of my friends in academia and philosophy of science smirked when they heard a statement that we're now confident that man has contributed something to climate change. The only issue now is how much, where and when. Long ago, it was established that unless you answered those, you're not dealing with science. And answering those requires prioritization, which is what we're trying to deal with here. For example, and I hate to draw in numbers, but doubling carbon dioxide will change a flux by four watts per meter square. As I say, don't worry about what that means, but that's a number. You would think that in prioritizing our dealing with the effect of that number, we'd compare with it. And yet, if one looks at the IPCC, one finds no relation. There's emphasis on terms that are a quarter-watt per meter squared. There's dismissal of terms that are a hundred watts per meter squared. Unless we prioritize in that way, we're not likely to make progress. Fortunately, and this is crucial, despite programs, despite national plans, despite organizational patterns, scientists, as a rule, like to know the answer. And although it's been emphasized they're unlikely to work as hard if they're not paid as if they're paid, it is astonishing how much scientists will do even if they're not paid. In this connection, the issue of how much climate change will occur from a doubling of CO2 actually depends a great deal on something called the sensitivity of the climate to radiative forcing. It was recognized by a number of us over many federal labs, over university labs and so on, that this is a measurable quantity. This is an issue that can in significant measure be settled. It won't settle all of climate, but it will tell us whether we have a big problem or a small problem. And the preliminary results from Ming-Da Chou, from others, from Roy Spenser at NASA, Marshall, are that it's going to be a much smaller problem than thought. Now, there's lots of stuff I'll discuss, but I'll skip it in order to just summarize a few things. It is essential in dealing with global change science to distinguish between the health of the science and the health of the programs. I'm going to move back to the earlier session. I was at the LaJolla meeting that responded to Representative Walker. There came out of that meeting a support for AM-1, PM1, and a modified CHEM-1. But in the E-mail discussion, in order to get a final version of that report, there was an insistence on one feature and that is, in the final version that was sent to you-and that was that after AM-1, PM-1, and CHEM-1, it's up for grabs, that there can't be the follow up to 2020. I think Charlie Kennel supported that. What happened was there was a recognition that a community exists that would be demoralized if you just ditched it. But there was also a lot of discussion about the fact that after all the rescopings and cut-backs, it was hard to point to a loss of science. There's an historian of science at Columbia University who came up with a really disturbing result, unless you want to cut budgets. And that was the output of science seemed to go as the third power of the investment. That is to say, you cut in the investment by the factor of eight and you only cut the science by a factor of two. In any event, we've often heard that science is the foundation of EOS Chairman WALKER. The time of the gentleman has expired. Chairman WALKER. It goes real fast. Dr. LINDZEN. Okay. Science wasn't discussed much. I would also turn to a political system. The health of science absolutely requires that we realize that science isn't advocacy. Science that is healthy involves an intense concentration on something called falsification. Whatever idea comes up, you try to find out what will see if it's false. What we're having with Mission to Planet Earth is defensive concensi, and this is a sign of poor health. The last thing I'd like to say is, and this is quixotic, science functions best when it has the trust of society to freely pursue questions and insights as they arise. Science cannot be dependent on fear. There can't be good science if the consequence of answering questions is that the support disappears. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Dr. Lindzen follows:] Testimony: House Committee on Science, March 6, 1996 Richard S. Lindzen, MIT Current State of Knowledge in Global Change Representative Walker, Members of the Committee, I am grateful to the committee for the opportunity to express my views on the science of Global Change, but I must immediately qualify my remarks by admitting that the subject is so broad that I cannot pretend to any degree of comprehensiveness. My remarks represent my personal observations, and are colored by my own research interests which focus on the theoretical foundations of our understanding of climate. I hope I may be forgiven if I claim that this topic is at the foundation of the broader topic. My remarks are both positive and negative. On the positive side, I am happy to report that there is substantial progress being made in dealing with fundamental questions such as What is the sensitivity of climate to changing CO2? What are the mechanisms by which climate change can occur? I will discuss these matters shortly. However, I will begin with the more negative issue: namely, it is not obvious how either the USGCRP or MTPE have explicitly contributed to this progress. In order to explain this, one must briefly consider the historical, political, and institutional problems that have beset Global Change research. I will begin by considering EOS. This was a massive program which began under some remarkable circumstances. One might naively suppose that such an ambitious program was being undertaken because the science had matured to the point where resources were needed to make progress in settling well focussed basic questions of established importance. On the contrary, NASA appears to have begun with platform decisions and an emphasis on existing technology employed in highly expanded form. NASA's approach would have been eminently suitable to explicit engineering tasks like the Apollo and Manhattan Projects, where the underlying science existed to the extent that focussed aims could be addressed. However, EOS was not specifically an engineering program, and the underlying science was in a primitive state. The stated aim appeared to be to examine all aspects of the Earth System in the hope that both questions and answers would emerge from the massive flow of data. Such an approach can, under some circumstances, be justified. Indeed, much of what we currently know about the climate system has depended on serendipitous measurements taken for other reasons. Thus the Marshall Islands Nuclear Tests provided the meteorological data that led to much of our current understanding of tropical meteorology. This understanding permitted us to undertake the subsequent Atlantic Tropical Experiment of the Global Atmospheric Research Program in the 1970's. However, the Marshall Islands Tests had a compelling rationale independent of the resulting atmospheric science. We cannot say the same for EOS. From the beginning, EOS science teams were chosen to support instruments rather than to do science which would be assisted by the instruments. EOS provided no support for developing the basic science that might provide a foundation for the program. While it might be argued that such science was the appropriate object of NSF efforts, there was no provision for any coordinated utilization of basic science. Indeed, given the massiveness of the proposed program, it might be argued that it would be embarrassing to admit the relative absence of foundations, and, as a practical matter, EOS was too clumsy to be responsive in any case. The result has been an inability to rationally prioritize, and a vulnerability to radical restructuring and downsizing which seems to have had little impact on the science. The situation became significantly more complicated as concern developed over global warming. The success of the environmental movement in popularizing this issue provided an after the fact rationale for what became known as MTPE, and an expansion of the effort to other agencies under the aegis of the USGCRP. This led in several ways to a defensive rather than a scientific approach. A major source of support was seen as depending on the perpetuation of an issue rather than on a focussed attempt to solve basic questions in a prioritized manner. Politicization contributed to this by establishing that agreement as to the possibility of crisis constituted public virtue, while scientific questioning was frowned upon (to put it mildly). The situation has been compounded by the desire of a variety of disciplines ranging from economics to trace gas chemistry to medicine to partake in the program. Such participation presupposes a well established problem, and leads to little interest in actually assessing this - especially among scientists whose interests are dependent on the existence of the basic problem. There is also the massive increase in university bureaucracy (nominally associated with the needs mandated by federal guidelines) whose needs are dependent on federal support, but whose immediate concern for science per se is limited. The widespread insecurity within the scientific community following the end of the cold war also acts to distort normative scientific approaches. There is a conviction that funding is based on fear and would not survive the actual solution of the basic problems or the finding that some problems may not be as serious as supposed. The situation has persisted for so long that we now have a generation of scientists for which this situation seems normal. The political system seems to have had difficulty recognizing the importance of security and stability to the proper functioning of science. This contrasts strongly with the twenty year period following WW II, which, in many ways, constituted the golden age of American science. The issue is not simply one of scale. The level of support is far higher today than it was during the earlier period. It must be emphasized that the role of observations is both to uncover phenomena, which must then be analyzed by means of theory, and to test the resulting theory with an explicit aim of falsifying rather than confirming the theory. In this crucial regard, scientific inquiry differs profoundly from legal advocacy - a frequently misunderstood point. With respect to MTPE, the aim must not simply be "better, faster, cheaper," but must be to place legitimate scientific inquiry at the center of the program. Fortunately, there need be no contradiction among these aims. Having begun with a brief litany of structural problems, I must note that the ultimate spirit of science is still alive and well. Scientists still want to know how things work. They continue to ask questions, and huge amounts of data are available - even without additional programs. Indeed, it is a shortcoming of most new programs that they fail to give adequate attention to existing data. With respect to global change, the most obvious question is what is the gross sensitivity of the climate to increasing CO2? It is curious how little attention has been paid to this basic quantity. Afterall, should it prove much smaller than what current models produce, then many of the remaining concerns over consequences of warming would prove less urgent. In principle, this is an easy quantity to define. It is generally argued (though not without caveats) that doubling CO2 would lead to an increased radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere of 4 Watts per square meter. The question of sensitivity boils down to asking how much must the globally averaged surface temperature increase in order to get rid of this additional 4 Watts per square meter. This is what is being referred to when one says that one expects a doubling of CO2 to lead to an equilibrium warming of from 1-5°C. Unfortunately, the expectation depends on weak aspects of current models where uncertainties are many times larger than 4 Watts per square meter. Currently, most assessments of models consist in model intercomparisons which is methodologically questionable. It would obviously be better to have actual measurements against which to test models. In principle this can be done. The global mean temperature fluctuates from year to year naturally. One can measure the top of the Page 2 of 4 |