H/T tomomason for noticing this document submitted to Judge Alsup’s requested tutorial
ADMINISTRATIVE MOTION OF WILLIAM HAPPER, STEVEN E. KOONIN, AND RICHARD S. LINDZEN FOR LEAVE TO SUBMIT PRESENTATION IN RESPONSE TO THE COURT’S TUTORIAL QUESTIONS
The Honorable William H. Alsup
The covering letter and the submission itself are here. Below are excerpts of over view comments
The Court has invited a tutorial on global warming and climate change, which is set to occur March 21, 2018. The Court also identified specific questions to be addressed at the tutorial. Pursuant to Civil L.R. 7-11, Professors William Happer, Steven E. Koonin, and Richard S. Lindzen respectfully ask the Court to accept their presentation (attached to this motion as Exhibit A) in response to the Court’s questions. The professors would be honored to participate directly in the tutorial if the Court desires.
The Court’s specified questions include topics that have been the subject of the professors’ study and analysis for decades. These men have been thought and policy leaders in the scientific community and in the administrations of two different U.S. Presidents. They have extensive research experience with the specific issues the Court identified. As such, they offer a valuable perspective on these issues. The attached presentation contains three sections: (1) an overview; (2) responses to the Court’s questions; and (3) biographies of the professors. The short overview section makes the following points: (1) the climate is always changing; changes like those of the past half-century are common in the geologic record, driven by powerful natural phenomena; (2) human influences on the climate are a small (1%) perturbation to natural energy flows; (3) it is not possible to tell how much of the modest recent warming can be ascribed to human influences; and (4) there have been no detrimental changes observed in most salient climate variables and projections of future changes are highly uncertain. The second section carefully goes through each of the questions the Court has raised.
Overview from the Submission
Our overview of climate science is framed through four statements: 1. The climate is always changing; changes like those of the past half-century are common in the geologic record, driven by powerful natural phenomena 2. Human influences on the climate are a small (1%) perturbation to natural energy flows 3. It is not possible to tell how much of the modest recent warming can be ascribed to human influences 4. There have been no detrimental changes observed in the most salient climate variables and today’s projections of future changes are highly uncertain We offer supporting evidence for each of these statements drawn almost exclusively from the Climate Science Special Report (CSSR) issued by the US government in November, 2017 or from the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) issued in 2013-14 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or from the refereed primary literature.
To summarize this overview, the historical and geological record suggests recent changes in the climate over the past century are within the bounds of natural variability. Human influences on the climate (largely the accumulation of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion) are a physically small (1%) effect on a complex, chaotic, multicomponent and multiscale system. Unfortunately, the data and our understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify the climate’s response to human influences. However, even as human influences have quadrupled since 1950, severe weather phenomena and sea level rise show no significant trends attributable to them. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose. As a result, rising levels of CO2 do not obviously pose an immediate, let alone imminent, threat to the earth’s climate.
via Science Matters
March 21, 2018 at 11:30AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 