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I see so many shades of blue I cannot speak to them all.There is a blue of memory I’ve wanted to get my hands on.It is dark. Without red, almost grey. It is the color of all memories that cannot be recalled clearly. A haze of existence. There, but not here.Everything purely forgotten is white. Everything remembered is clear as day and every color in the world.Everything half-remembered is blue.Then there is the blue of the 30s. My 30s. Everyone’s 30s.I have a marvelous form of synthesiasia. Colors tied to numbers. When I see numbers, they are in color. The thirties are blue. Blue with red, more like purple. Dark plum. My wedding color.I just passed through plum and am now in bright yellow and orange period of 40s. I feel warmer, somehow. I was so depressed in my 30s.Blue accompanies madness, surely.20th century confessional poet, Robert Lowell, dabs blue all over his poem “Waking in the Blue” about one of his stays at a Boston mental hospital. The walls, floors… all carried a wavy disturbia.…Azure daymakes my agonized blue window bleaker.Crows maunder on the petrified fairwayAbsence! My heart grows tenseas though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.(This is the house for the ‘mentally ill’.)I tried to commit suicide in college and was taken to the exact same Boston mental hospital.I first read Lowell’s poem when I was in plum (late 30s). I was quite overcome.Quite impossibly barren of thought.You see, I never knew where I had been taken. Nor did I ever look back.I knew I had been there, had arrived after having my stomach pumped at the University hospital, and I will never forget the heavy, claustrophobic medical blanket of realization that came over me around 2am when I sobered up and realized I couldn’t leave this “house for the mentally ill”.The heartbeat in my ears when I realized this “not leaving” would leave an absence where I was supposed to be (Harvard exams).The howling in my throat when I realized that absence would be missed and known (roommates).The scorching in my eyes when I realized nothing would be forgiven.Unspoken of, yes, not forgiven.That Lowell was trucked to the same place, lived the same nightmare (I remember also the night attendant, they opened all doors. I remember his manic depression, too). And he mentioned crows. (A particular beast of interest as my name means “crow”)...That he went into the same blue… It is no wonder I am drawn to those who think we are all part of something divinely unknowable. Lowell and I, wrapped in blue.Except… I remember orange.Walls, floors, lighting, night attendant - orange. Had they once been blue and redone? We were there fifty years apart.Is fifty years enough time for a place to change color?Or is it memory, playing tricks on me? Casting orange where blue should be. A palliative, perhaps.The divinely unknowable thinks orange might save me.The metal shaving mirror was the same as Lowell’s. Transfigured your face into a Francis Bacon portrait. Every color at once in the wrong place. Because you’re in the wrong place.Maybe Lowell was right, maybe it was really blue.I visited blue again recently.Not memory blue or 30s blue or mental hospital blue, but actual blue caused by an axis tilt.Arctic blue.A blue born of light and ice visible at this time of year in northern Norway.Every possible thing: ground, snow, water, wood, sky, cloud, fire - all in blue.Stunning. No filter.This is the blue I’d like to remember. In which I’d like to live. A blue of family, and my daughter, and my work.Inviting blue. Embracing blue. The perfectly-wonderful blue of self-forgiveness.I’m in yellow now but I hold blue very dear.When I launched my site, The Examined Life, I cast most features in blue.I worked with my illustrator for weeks to get the right shade (shade is color+black, tint is color+white, I find that interesting).I’d tell him it should be “more like a cloud with night sky behind it” and have “the depth of transparent ice without the menace.”He gave me blue. Has anyone ever given me blue?I love returning to my site every single day because of the blue. I am home there.I love spreading that perfect blue to others. Easing half-memories of pain and uneasy Bacon mirrors. Invoking the unknowable divine using whatever words I can conjure.The Sami people in northern Norway have as many as 500 words for snow. There is snow that spreads when you step, and snow that answers back. There is snow that falls damp and snow that hides as ice. It is possible to have as many as five snows in one moment, in one place.Such is the nature of snow.Such is the nature of blue, too.I’m in yellow now. I won’t be in blue again until my 70s. The 70s are almost the same color as the 30s but not entirely. More green.Moving in and out of blue all of my life is like walking down the street dragging a dead elephant:Everyone sees. Everyone notices. Everyone turns away. Everyone blames you.I know he’s dead, too. I didn’t kill him. But I must bring him along. I am not him.Over the years, more and more, I’ve welcomed blue into my soul and I keep ever a watchful eye on its shade.It’s the best I can do. It’s the best any of us can do. Robert Lowell died of natural causes.I hope I get to live in blue again, in my seventies. I’d like to see that blue.

Who does the remembering determines how things are remembered.Who remembers the French Revolution determines how they remember it. If they were members of the French aristocracy, France’s 1%, they remember it as a nightmare. If they were members of the French peasantry, they remember it as the Glorious Days–their liberation.Who remembers the Cultural Revolution decides how they remember it. If you or your parents were senior officials (like Jung Chang’s), members of China’s 1% in 1969, they remember the Cultural Revolution as a nightmare. If they were members of China’s peasantry, then 90% of the population, they remember it as a wonderful time, the decade during which they were politically empowered and educated for the first time in Chinese history.Before we condemn the CR for its excesses, let's remember Mao’s warning about revolution: "A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another". – Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (March 1927), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 28.Today’s Chinese elite are still shaking from that challenge to their authority and so remember the Cultural Revolution as a time of chaos, humiliation, and violence. Involving rural people in politics, they say, was a terrible mistake. Only educated and trained specialists should be involved in politics. Of course, ordinary Chinese know that’s bullshit, but Western media–which supports Western-style, monarchic government is very sympathetic to elites everywhere, even Communist ones!Most Westerners learned about the Cultural Revolution from Jung Chang’s books, Wild Swans and Mao: The Unknown Story), and Jung Chang is the grand-daughter of a warlord, a member of the fallen elite with an extremely bitter view of those who replaced her family and blind to the fact that they failed when they had a chance to remake China. She naturally assumed that peasant students are 'semi-literate' with 'little aptitude', while she was clever and deserved the best. Chang says she was the victim of a brutal regime but was, in fact, the privileged daughter of China's Communist elite who grew up with a wet-nurse, nanny, maid, gardener and chauffeur provided by the party, living in a walled compound, educated in a special school for officials' children and given a generous Chinese government scholarship to study in Britain–which she felt was her due.Of course, Western media (and Chinese elites) say the Cultural Revolution was a financial disaster, but the figures say otherwise:USA GDP 1966: $4.29 trillion. GDP 1976: $5.73 trillion–Decadal Growth = 33.6%.China: GDP 1966: 188.87 trillion RMB. GDP 1976: 298.86 trillion RMB–Decadal Growth = 58%.How did the Cultural Revolution got started? Mao said,I continued to read the old romances and tales of Chinese literature. It occurred to me one day that there was one thing peculiar about such stories, and that was the absence of peasants who tilled the land. All the characters were warriors, officials, or scholars; there was never a peasant hero. I wondered about this for two years, and then I analyzed the content of the stories. I found that they all glorified men of arms, rulers of the people, who did not have to work the land, because they owned and controlled it and evidently made the peasants work it for them.” Red Star Over China, by Edgar Snow.Let’s now listen to a peasant boy from a small village, Dongping Han, who grew up there during the Cultural Revolution.Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution for the reasons he gave to the Central Committee and with which they agreed. The Cultural Revolution was not a one-man show; it required the entire government to approve of it, even though many had reservations.As soon as the Communist Party came to power, Chairman Mao launched numerous political campaigns to fight tendencies toward official corruption within the Communist Party. Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution to emancipate 400,000,000 voiceless peasants whose social status had not changed in 3,000 years and was still unchanged 16 years after the Communists took power. He was dismayed by the rising tendency among the Communist Party official ranks to live a life of privileges once the Communist Party came to power in 1949. The Cultural Revolution succeeded in emancipating those 400,000,000 voiceless peasants and was the only popular revolution of the 1960s to succeed in all its goals.He ordered the execution of high officials like Zhang Zishan and Liu Qingshan, in order to send a signal to his former comrades. But these political campaigns and executions were not effective enough in fighting the tendency toward official corruption.In 1966, at the age of 73, Mao, together with his comrades, launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This was the final resort to fight official corruption, by empowering the Chinese people. As someone who accomplished more for humanity than anyone in history, Mao considered the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution one of his two most noteworthy accomplishments is because it had a profound impact on the course of Chinese history.This was due to the educational reforms it introduced and the democratic experiment it carried out. The Cultural Revolution inspired the Chinese people to rise up and democratize Chinese society to an extent never before reached in human history. It also inspired a generation of young people outside China.College students in Europe, America, Japan, and elsewhere, like their counterparts in China, revolted against the existing order, asserted their influence on society, and had an impact on the course of world history. The world would never be the same after the Cultural Revolution.The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was first and foremost an educational reform. It reformed the college entrance examination system.Before the Cultural Revolution, only a tiny percentage of children of school-going age were able to go to middle school and high school. The educational system the Chinese Communist Government established after it came to power was not very different from the one it had inherited from the Nationalist Government. College was still the training ground for the future elite, which largely excluded the children of workers and peasants.An even smaller number of people were able to go to college. Most people who were able to go to college came from privileged families. The majority of people were deprived of middle school and high school education, let alone a college education. Many rural children were not able to even go to primary school. The lack of access to education in the vast rural areas of China continued for 17 years after the Communist Party came to power.During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in response to the demand of students in Beijing, the Chinese Government suspended the college entrance examination system, and called for a reform of the educational system. As a result of the reform, college students were no longer selected through a set of entrance examinations.Instead, high school graduates were required to work at least for two years at a factory, or in the countryside, or in the army before they were eligible for the college entrance examination. After 1973, when Zhang Tiesheng protested against the academic tests, the academic test part of the selection of college students was eliminated completely. Students were selected by workers and peasants based on their work performance.In 1976, a further important reform was instituted: college graduates would return to the place they came from, to serve the community that sent them to college in the first place. Had this new college student selection system continued, the idea of college as the training ground for traditional elites would have been discontinued in China. We would have had a brand new type of college graduates: dedicated to service of the people in their community rather than to personal glorification and self-enrichment. I have always argued that the worker, peasant, and soldier college students have been the best college students that China ever had. It is too bad for China and for the world that the system of selecting college students from among workers, peasants and soldiers was discontinued abruptly in China in 1977.The post-Mao Chinese Government leaders could not see the merits of the new system introduced during the Cultural Revolution. They wanted an education system in line with the general reversal they were instituting. The more profound change in the field of education took place in the primary, middle, and high schools of China.Before the Cultural Revolution, educational professionals were in charge of running the educational system in China. They tended to stress certain standards of education, rather than the expansion of the school system to enable more people to go to school. By stressing the importance of standards, they inadvertently limited many peopleʼs access to education.The Cultural Revolution weakened the educational professionalsʼ control of the educational system (just as it weakened the health professionals' control of the health system) and allowed workers and peasants to have more say in the education of their children. Peasants were allowed to run their own village schools. A village would build its own primary school with local materials, hire its own teachers, and then provide free access to all villagersʼ children in the village. Several villages would pool their resources to build a joint middle school which would provide free access to all peasantsʼ children in these villages.The peopleʼs commune would open two to three high schools so that all the peasantsʼ children would be able to attend high school free of charge. There were 1,050 villages in my home town, Jimo county, Shandong Province. During the Cultural Revolution years, every village set up a primary school. All the rural children were able to go to school free. Before the Cultural Revolution, there were only seven middle schools in Jimo county, which had a population of 750,000. During the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, the number of middle schools increased to 249. Every four villages shared one middle school. All primary school graduates were able to go to these middle schools free of charge, without needing to pass any tests. Before the Cultural Revolution, there was only one high school in Jimo county. For seventeen years before the Cultural Revolution, only 1,500 people graduated from that high school and more than half of them went to college and never came back.For 17 years, Jimo high school was not able to train a single high school graduate for each village in Jimo County. Most villages did not have even a single high school graduate before the Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, the number of high schools in Jimo increased to 89. Almost every commune had three high schools. When I graduated from middle school in 1972, only 70 per cent of my classmates were able to enter high school. By the time my younger sister graduated from middle school in 1973, all of her classmates were able to go to high school. By the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, there were more than 100 high school graduates in my village and there were more than 12,000 high school graduates in my commune. The expansion of education during the Cultural Revolution years was unprecedented in Chinese history. It profoundly transformed the Chinese people and society. As the people became more educated, they became more empowered in both political and economic activities. The Cultural Revolution and the democratization of Chinese society.One of the most important accomplishments of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was the empowerment of ordinary people and the democratization of Chinese society. Most people who talk about democracy in this world tend to make the concept of democracy very complicated. Democracy is a very simple and straightforward concept. It means that, contrary to the old system which allowed the elite to run the political affairs, the ordinary people participate in decision making. It means that ordinary people are part of the governance of their society. In order for democracy to work, ordinary people have to be empowered and made equal to the government officials, the old elite. In a democratic society, there should be no privileged classes and there should be no elite. Everybody should be equal politically and economically. That is a prerequisite of democracy.In the so-called western democracies, one per cent of the people own most of wealth. Because of this gap in wealth, the small rich minority can buy power, influence, and control. They literally have a monopoly over power. That is not a real democracy at all. Democracy like that is in name only. It is fake. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution tried to build a real democracy. It empowered the ordinary Chinese people to write big character posters to criticize their leaders, and required their leaders to participate in manual labour like everybody else. It was a big step forward in the progress of Chinese society. During the Cultural Revolution, most Chinese officials had lifestyles similar to those of ordinary people. They lived in houses similar to those of ordinary people. Their children went to the same schools as other Chinese people. They went to work on bicycles like everybody else. Production team leaders were elected by peasants and worked with peasants in the field every day.Village leaders worked with peasants 300 days a year in the fields because they had to attend meetings and make plans for the community. Commune leaders were required to work 250 days a year with peasants in the fields and county government leaders had to work with peasants for two hundred days a year. Chen Yonggui worked as a peasant all his life. After the Communist Party came to power, he became the party secretary of Dazhai Village in Xiyang County, Shanxi Province. He did a good job leading the people in his village to build a better future. During the Cultural Revolution he was promoted to be vice premier of the Peopleʼs Republic of China, and member of Political Bureau of Chinese Communist Party Central Committee in charge of Chinaʼs agriculture. But he continued to devote one-third of his time working with peasants in the fields, and continued to dress and live like a peasant even when he met foreign dignitaries. He was an example of the peasant, worker, and soldier officials that emerged during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. They continued to live like peasants, workers, and soldiers even though they were also government officials.That was the democracy, the proletarian democracy that Chairman Mao tried to build during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a democracy that empowered the 99 per cent at the expense of the one per cent. There were many other national leaders like Chen Yonggui. Wang Jinxi, an ordinary worker in the petroleum industry, Ni Zhifu, a mechanist who invented the most efficient drill bits, and Hao Jianxi, an efficient textile worker from Qingdao, Shandong, continued to work in their respective fields after becoming national leaders. Many more workers and peasants served in local government. These workers and peasants served in the government while continuing to work among the working class and peasants. This created a strong egalitarian social climate in China that promoted a strong work ethic and led to an economic performance outstanding in world history. During the Cultural Revolution years, Chinese management personnel were required to participate in manual labour and workers participated in managementʼs decision-making process. Workers, engineers, and management cooperated to solve technical, and managerial problems. Unreasonable rules and regulations were reformed with workersʼ input.This revolutionary management philosophy and style empowered the workers, engineers, and management personnel to work together. (Such pooling was formulated as a capitalist management concept and dubbed ‘post–Fordismʼ in the West, or ‘team spiritʼ in Japan.) It led to a great burst of productivity during the Mao era. The Cultural Revolutionʼs impact on industry and agriculture When the Peopleʼs Republic was founded, its industrial base was smaller than that of Belgium, a very small country. Its per capita industrial output was less than one-fifteenth that of Belgium.But during the Mao Era, Chinaʼs industrial output increased 38 times and the heavy industrial portion increased 90 times. From 1950 to 1977, Chinaʼs industrial output increased at an average rate of 13.5 per cent annually. This speed of industrialization was faster than any country in a comparable period. It surpassed the performance of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union over comparable periods of their development. From 1880 to 1914, Germanyʼs industrial output increased by 33 per cent every ten years and its per capita increase was 17 per cent. From 1874 to 1929, Japanʼs industrial output increased by 43 per cent every ten years and its per capita increase was 28 per cent. Between 1928 and 1958, Soviet industrial output increased by 54 per cent every ten years and its per capita increase was 44 per cent. By comparison, between 1952 and 1972, Chinaʼs industrial output increased 64.5 per cent every ten years and its per capita increase was 34 per cent. During the third and fourth five year plans, China invested 316,642 billion yuan in infrastructure, and increased its industrial assets by 215,740 billion yuan. By 1979, there were 355,000 enterprises, 2.25 times the number in 1965. The size of these State-owned enterprises expanded across the board. Among these enterprises, the big and medium-sized enterprises amounted to 4,500. In the field of energy, between 1967 and 1976, Chinaʼs petroleum output increased by an average of 18.6 per cent annually. By 1978, its annual output of petroleum reached 100 million tonnes, a five-fold increase over 1965. During the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, China maintained an annual growth rate of 9.2 per cent in the output of coal, chemicals, and electricity. Between 1965 and the mid-1970s, China invested 205 billion yuan in third line industrial projects. A group of steel plants, machine tool plants, airplane plants, space programs, and electronic plants were built in the central and western regions. By late 1970s, the industrial assets in the third line region accounted for one-third of the total industrial assets in China. Chinaʼs industrial output increased 3.92 times.The industrial development of the central and western regions improved the overall picture of Chinaʼs industrial development, with profound strategic significance for Chinaʼs national security and development as a nation. While stressing self-reliance, Chairman Mao approved of importing technology when necessary. In 1972, Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai approved the plan of importing 26 foreign industrial plants with a total investment of $5 billion. A big group of petroleum and chemical plants were constructed, which increased Chinaʼs output of fertilizer, chemical products, and artificial fabrics. The thirteen big fertilizer plants built during this time accounted for one-fifth of Chinaʼs chemical fertilizer output. During the 1970s, China also built many small-scale chemical fertilizer plants. By 1978, there were 1,534 small chemical fertilizer plants in China. The emergence of these small fertilizer plants in China played an important role in the countryʼs agricultural development. In the 1960s and 1970s, the US and other western nations spread the Green Revolution technology to Third World countries like India, Mexico, Brazil, Philippines, and so on. The spread of Green Revolution technology in Third World countries had some devastating effects on the agriculture of the third world countries.The use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and big machineries increased the input of agriculture. But the increase of yield also caused grain prices to decline. Moreover, input costs went up over time. Many small peasants were not able to deal with the challenges caused by market fluctuations. A large number of small peasants became bankrupt, and lost their land. They had to migrate to urban areas in order to survive. The emergence of large shanty towns and homeless populations in the Third World countries was one of the direct results of the spread of western Green Revolution technology. It led to a three-fold crisis of agriculture, rural areas, and peasants. The long-term impact of this crisis is difficult to fathom today. China was the only country that was able to successfully escape this three-fold crisis of agriculture, rural areas, and peasants, because of its collective farming practices.The organized Chinese peasants developed their own home-made Green Revolution. Because Chinese peasants owned the land collectively, and shared the benefit of the Green Revolution technology more equally, they enjoyed the benefits while avoiding the devastating negative effects. The homegrown Green Revolution technology reduced the intensity of farm labour, and also gave rise to many rural industrial enterprises. Because of the rise of these rural industrial enterprises, peasants were able to leave the fields, but not the village, to engage in industrial work. With the development of local Green Revolution technology, the use of locally-made farm machines, and the rise of rural industrial enterprises, Chinese peasantsʼ living standards improved significantly during the Cultural Revolution years. – The Socialist Legacy Underlies the Rise of Today’s China in the World– by Dongping Han. Aspects of India's Economy Nos. 59-60 (Oct. 2014): Remembering Socialist China, 1949-1976Do you see the difference?Now let’s see what happened after Mao died on September 9, 1976.Four weeks, later, Hua Guofeng became the first leader of the Peopleʼs Republic to use force to solve political differences with his opponents and, claiming he was carrying out Chairman Maoʼs will, seized power for himself and arrested the so-called the “Gang of Four” – Chairman Maoʼs wife, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan.Deng Xiaoping, who came from an elite Chinese family and who was twiceremoved from power by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, managed to return to power a third time. Chairman Mao had removed Deng Xiaoping from power at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Deng wrote three self-criticisms and two letters to Chairman Mao begging for an opportunity to work again. In 1974, Chairman Mao reinstated him, but removed him again in April following the April 5 1976 riot in Tiananmen Square (there was another Tiananmen riot against him in 1989).Deng Xiaoping began dismantling the Cultural Revolution’s accomplishments, discontinuing the practice of selecting college students from workers, peasants, and soldiers, and reinstituting the college entrance examinations, dismantling the peopleʼs communes and collective farming, and dividing the collectively-owned farm land into small plots for peasants to farm individually–which caused the rural public education and medical care network built during the Cultural Revolution–to collapse.Peasants had to pay tuition for their children to study in primary school so many children lost access to education because they could not afford to pay the tuition and other costs of education and many rural schools were closed . New generations of illiterate peasants, particularly women, emerged and prostitution and crime skyrocketed. The network of barefoot doctors collapsed with the end of collective farming and many peasants could no longer afford medical care. Fewer people could afford the medical service and as a result many barefoot doctors could no longer survive as doctors. Peasants could not afford to buy fertilizers AND often resorted to crime, as did rural children forced out of school. By 1983, crime had reached such a high level that Deng Xiaoping ordered a campaign to suppress crime using extra-legal measures and gave police and the courts quotas of the number of criminals that had to be executed. Farmers were executed for stealing bags of fertilizer and prostitution, drug trafficking, drug addiction, trafficking of women and children, petty crime, organized crime, official corruption, and profiteering became rampant.Even worse, corruption among officials became so rampant that the government lost control of the economy and inflation reached 200%. That was the spark for the Tiananmen Demonstrations. An American agronomist, William Hinton, was there and reported,In the Cultural Revolution, Mao mobilized millions of citizens to confront powerholders, particularly capitalist roaders, to overthrow the traditional hierarchy from below, and to build a new government structure, starting with revolutionary committees composed of citizens, cadres and soldiers. But every effort in this direction generated a counter-effort from the establishment under attack. Core functionaries were able to delay, divert, misdirect, or carry to absurd extremes every initiative from Mao’s side. Far from creating a new, more democratic form of government, the movement bogged down in unprincipled power struggles that exhausted everyone and led nowhere. The failure of the Cultural Revolution laid the groundwork for a great reversal of policy in all fields. (William Hinton, 1991 speech at Harvard University. Monthly Review, November 1991, 10)China withstood 10 years of revolution and did not come unglued. The peasants, as a class, stood up for the first time in 5,000 years. If you were a peasant, wouldn’t you feel it was worth it? Spare a thought for them today, too. Today President Xi (who, as a member of the super-elite, suffered more than most but, like most Chinese, has mixed feelings about the era) is encouraging the peasants' now-urbanizing children to turn in crooked Party officials the way their parents did – just without the placards and face-slapping and the continuing revolution is being televised.The Cultural Revolution scared China's intelligentsia so badly they’ve been improving the peasants' lot ever since. THAT’s why peasants’ incomes and literacy have doubled every decade since.For an account of how life in a poor village was transformed by the revolution, you'll enjoy reading The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village: Dongping Han and Gao Village: A Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China, by Mobo C. F. Gao:Then you can decide for yourself how you ‘remember the Cultural Revolution.’

NO. But MIT scientists do not speak for MIT on controversial issues as they are independent in their work and MIT IS NOT A POLITICAL ORGANIZATION. There are many famous MIT scientists who are skeptical for good reason of the unfounded theory of man made global warming.Dr. Richard LIndzen is a great example. HIs new paper “An oversimplified picture of the climate behavior based on a single process can lead to distorted conclusions.” is summarized byTHIS WEEK:By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)Greenhouse Warming: Last week, TWTW focused on a new book by Peter Webster, Dynamic of the Tropical Atmosphere and Oceans, reviewed by his spouse Judith Curry, formerly the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There are many issues that we do not understand about the tropics, which render climate modeling used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highly questionable and the US climate modeling efforts highly doubtful.Writing in No Tricks Zone, Kenneth Richard brings up a new paper by Richard Lindzen, “An oversimplified picture of the climate behavior based on a single process can lead to distorted conclusions.” A retired professor at MIT, Lindzen was last year’s recipient of the Fredrick Seitz Memorial Award for exceptional courage in the quest for knowledge. The current work is an example of his courage. [Unfortunately, the paper, published in The European Physical Journal Plus, is paywalled, and TWTW relies on what was reproduced in No Tricks Zone.] Lindzen begins:“Although it is often noted that greenhouse warming has long been found in the climate literature, it turns out that this was not generally considered a major cause of climate change until the 1980s.“Many factors, including fluctuations of average cloud area and height, snow cover, ocean circulations, etc. commonly cause changes to the radiative budget comparable to that of doubling of CO2. For example, the net global mean cloud radiative effect is of the order of – 20 W/m squared [minus 20 watts per meter squared] (cooling effect). A 4 W/m squared forcing from a doubling of CO2, therefore, corresponds to only a 20% change in the net cloud effect.“The ‘consensus’ assessment of this system is today the following:“In this complex multifactor system, the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables – especially the temperature deference between the equator and the poles) is described by just one variable, the global averaged temperature change, and is controlled by the 1—2% perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable (any single variable) among many variables of comparable importance. We go further and designate CO2 as the sole control Although we are not sure of the budget for this variable, we know precisely what policies to implement in order to control it.“How did such a naïve seeming picture come to be accepted, not just by the proponents of the issue, but also by most skeptics?”Lindzen gives his views on how this came about and discusses problems therein. In the blog Richard highlights certain points presented in the full paper:“1. Doubling the atmospheric CO2 concentration from 280 ppm to 560 ppm results in just a 1-2% perturbation to the Earth’s 240 W/m² energy budget. This doubled-CO2 effect has less than 1/5th of the impact that the net cloud effect has. And yet we are asked to accept the ‘implausible’ claim that change in one variable, CO2, is predominantly responsible for altering global temperatures.“2. A causal role for CO2 ‘cannot be claimed’ for the glacial-to-interglacial warming events because CO2 variations follow rather than lead the temperature changes in paleoclimate records and the 100 ppm total increase over thousands of years produce ‘about 1 W/m²’ of total radiative impact.“3. Climate science didn’t used to be alarmist prior to the late 1980s. Scientists were instead sufficiently skeptical about claims of climatically-induced planetary doom. That changed during the years 1988-1994, when climate research centered on CO2 and global warming received a 15-fold increase in funding in the US alone. Suddenly there was a great financial incentive to propel alarming global warming scenarios.“4. Concepts like ‘polar amplification’ are ‘imaginary’.“‘The change in equator-to-pole temperature difference was attributed to some imaginary ‘polar amplification,’ whereby the equator-pole temperature automatically followed the mean temperature. Although the analogy is hardly exact, this is not so different from assuming that flow in a pipe depends on the mean pressure rather than the pressure gradient.’”In short, although considered complex, the climate models oversimplify critical parts of the climate system, making the models unreliable. Lindzen’s findings are similar to those of Webster in last week’s TWTW: Critical parts of the climate system are over-simplified, and a minor part (CO2) is over-emphasized. See links under Challenging the OrthodoxyBRACE FOR TURBULENCE —Turbulence, the oldest unsolved problem in physicsThe flow of water through a pipe is still in many ways an unsolved problem./ "Please prepare the cabin for technical discussions of physics..."Werner Heisenberg won the 1932 Nobel Prize for helping to found the field of quantum mechanics and developing foundational ideas like the Copenhagen interpretation and the uncertainty principle. The story goes that he once said that, if he were allowed to ask God two questions, they would be, “Why quantum mechanics? And why turbulence?” Supposedly, he was pretty sure God would be able to answer the first question.Turbulence, the oldest unsolved problem in physicsWeekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #412Lindzen’s lecture at GWPF on turbulence and global warming last year is worth reading in my view.Richard Lindzen Lecture at GWPF: ‘Global Warming for the Two Cultures’Anthony Watts / October 9, 2018by Dr. Richard LindzenOver half a century ago, C.P. Snow (a novelist and English physical chemist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government) famously examined the implications of ‘two cultures’:A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.I fear that little has changed since Snow’s assessment 60 years ago. While some might maintain that ignorance of physics does not impact political ability, it most certainly impacts the ability of non-scientific politicians to deal with nominally science-based issues. The gap in understanding is also an invitation to malicious exploitation. Given the democratic necessity for non-scientists to take positions on scientific problems, belief and faith inevitably replace understanding, though trivially oversimplified false narratives serve to reassure the non-scientists that they are not totally without scientific ‘understanding.’ The issue of global warming offers numerous examples of all of this.I would like to begin this lecture with an attempt to force the scientists in the audience to come to grips with the actual nature of the climate system, and to help the motivated non-scientists in this audience who may be in Snow’s ‘one in ten’ to move beyond the trivial oversimplifications.The climate systemThe following description of the climate system contains nothing that is in the least controversial, and I expect that anyone with a scientific background will readily follow the description. I will also try, despite Snow’s observations, to make the description intelligible to the non-scientist.The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids (the atmosphere and oceans) interacting with each other. By ‘turbulent,’ I simply mean that it is characterized by irregular circulations like those found in a gurgling brook or boiling water, but on the planetary scale of the oceans and the atmosphere. The opposite of turbulent is called laminar, but any fluid forced to move fast enough becomes turbulent and turbulence obviously limits predictability. By interaction, I simply mean that they exert stress on each other and exchange heat with each other.These fluids are on a rotating planet that is unevenly heated by the sun. The motions in the atmosphere (and to a lesser extent in the oceans) are generated by the uneven influence of the sun. The sun, itself, can be steady, but it shines directly on the tropics while barely skimming the Earth at the poles. The drivers of the oceans are more complex and include forcing by wind as well as the sinking of cold and salty water. The rotation of the Earth has many consequences too, but for the present, we may simply note that it leads to radiation being distributed around a latitude circle.The oceans have circulations and currents operating on time scales ranging from years to millennia, and these systems carry heat to and from the surface. Because of the scale and density of the oceans, the flow speeds are generally much smaller than in the atmosphere and are associated with much longer timescales. The fact that these circulations carry heat to and from the surface means that the surface, itself, is never in equilibrium with space. That is to say, there is never an exact balance between incoming heat from the sun and outgoing radiation generated by the Earth because heat is always being stored in and released from the oceans and surface temperature is always, therefore, varying somewhat.In addition to the oceans, the atmosphere is interacting with a hugely irregular land surface. As air passes over mountain ranges, the flow is greatly distorted. Topography therefore plays a major role in modifying regional climate. These distorted air-flows even generate fluid waves that can alter climate at distant locations. Computer simulations of the climate generally fail to adequately describe these effects.A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast impacts on energy flows. Each component also has important radiative impacts. You all know that it takes heat to melt ice, and it takes further heat for the resulting water to become vapor or, as it is sometimes referred to, steam. The term humidity refers to the amount of vapor in the atmosphere. The flow of heat is reversed when the phase changes are reversed; that is, when vapor condenses into water, and when water freezes. The release of heat when water vapor condenses drives thunder clouds (known as cumulonimbus), and the energy in a thundercloud is comparable to that released in an H-bomb. I say this simply to illustrate that these energy transformations are very substantial. Clouds consist of water in the form of fine droplets and ice in the form of fine crystals. Normally, these fine droplets and crystals are suspended by rising air currents, but when these grow large enough they fall through the rising air as rain and snow. Not only are the energies involved in phase transformations important, so is the fact that both water vapor and clouds (both ice- and water-based) strongly affect radiation. Although I haven’t discussed the greenhouse effect yet, I’m sure all of you have heard that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that this explains its warming effect. You should, therefore, understand that the two most important greenhouse substances by far are water vapor and clouds. Clouds are also important reflectors of sunlight.The unit for describing energy flows is watts per square meter. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. The Earth receives about 340 watts per square meter from the sun, but about 140 watts per square meter is simply reflected back to space, by both the Earth’s surface and, more importantly, by clouds. This leaves about 200 watts per square meter that the Earth would have to emit in order to establish balance. The sun radiates in the visible portion of the radiation spectrum because its temperature is about 6000K. ‘K’ refers to Kelvins, which are simply degrees Centigrade plus 273. Zero K is the lowest possible temperature (−273◦C). Temperature determines the spectrum of the emit- ted radiation. If the Earth had no atmosphere at all (but for purposes of argument still was reflecting 140 watts per square meter), it would have to radiate at a temperature of about 255K, and, at this temperature, the radiation is mostly in the infrared.Of course, the Earth does have an atmosphere and oceans, and this introduces a host of complications. So be warned, what follows will require a certain amount of concentration. Evaporation from the oceans gives rise to water vapor in the atmosphere, and water vapor very strongly absorbs and emits radiation in the infrared. This is what we mean when we call water vapor a greenhouse gas. The water vapor essentially blocks infrared radiation from leaving the surface, causing the surface and (via conduction) the air adjacent to the surface to heat, and, as in a heated pot of water, convection sets on. Because the density of air decreases with height, the buoyant elements expand as they rise. This causes the buoy- ant elements to cool as they rise, and the mixing results in decreasing temperature with height rather than a constant temperature. To make matters more complicated, the amount of water vapor that the air can hold decreases rapidly as the temperature decreases. At some height there is so little water vapor above this height that radiation from this level can now escape to space. It is at this elevated level (around 5 km) that the temperature must be about 255K in order to balance incoming radiation. However, because convection causes temperature to decrease with height, the surface now has to actually be warmer than 255K. It turns out that it has to be about 288K (which is the average temperature of the Earth’s surface). This is what is known as the greenhouse effect. It is an interesting curiosity that had convection produced a uniform temperature, there wouldn’t be a greenhouse effect. In reality, the situation is still more complicated. Among other things, the existence of upper-level cirrus clouds, which are very strong absorbers and emitters of infrared radiation, effectively block infrared radiation from below. Thus, when such clouds are present above about 5 km, their tops rather than the height of 5 km determine the level from which infrared reaches space. Now the addition of other greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide) elevates the emission level, and because of the convective mixing, the new level will be colder. This reduces the outgoing infrared flux, and, in order to restore balance, the atmosphere would have to warm. Doubling carbon dioxide concentration is estimated to be equivalent to a forcing of about 3.7 watts per square meter, which is little less than 2% of the net incoming 200 watts per square meter. Many factors, including cloud area and height, snow cover, and ocean circulations, commonly cause changes of comparable magnitude.It is important to note that such a system will fluctuate with time scales ranging from seconds to millennia, even in the absence of an explicit forcing other than a steady sun. Much of the popular literature (on both sides of the climate debate) assumes that all changes must be driven by some external factor. Of course, the climate system is driven by the sun, but even if the solar forcing were constant, the climate would still vary. This is actually something that all of you have long known – even if you don’t realize it. After all, you have no difficulty recognizing that the steady stroking of a violin string by a bow causes the string to vibrate and generate sound waves. In a similar way, the atmosphere–ocean system responds to steady forcing with its own modes of variation (which, admittedly, are often more complex than the modes of a violin string). Moreover, given the massive nature of the oceans, such variations can involve timescales of millennia rather than milliseconds. El Niño is a relatively short ex- ample, involving years, but most of these internal time variations are too long to even be identified in our relatively short instrumental record. Nature has numerous examples of autonomous variability, including the approximately 11-year sunspot cycle and the reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field every couple of hundred thousand years or so. In this respect, the climate system is no different from other natural systems.Of course, such systems also do respond to external forcing, but such forcing is not needed for them to exhibit variability. While the above is totally uncontroversial, please think about it for a moment. Consider the massive heterogeneity and complexity of the system, and the variety of mechanisms of variability as we consider the current narrative that is commonly presented as ‘settled science.’The popular narrative and its political originsNow here is the currently popular narrative concerning this system. The climate, a complex multifactor system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged tempera- ture change, and is primarily controlled by the 1-2% perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable – carbon dioxide – among many variables of comparable importance.This is an extraordinary pair of claims based on reasoning that borders on magical think- ing. It is, however, the narrative that has been widely accepted, even among many sceptics. This acceptance is a strong indicator of the problem Snow identified.Many politicians and learned societies go even further: They endorse carbon dioxide as the controlling variable, and although mankind’s CO2 contributions are small compared to the much larger but uncertain natural exchanges with both the oceans and the biosphere, they are confident that they know precisely what policies to implement in order to control carbon dioxide levels.While several scientists have put forward this view over the past 200 years, it was, until the 1980s, generally dismissed. When, in 1988, the NASA scientist James Hansen told the US Senate that the summer’s warmth reflected increased carbon dioxide levels, even Science magazine reported that the climatologists were sceptical. The establishment of this extreme position as dogma during the present period is due to political actors and others seeking to exploit the opportunities that abound in the multi-trillion dollar energy sector. One example was Maurice Strong, a global bureaucrat and wheeler-dealer (who spent his final years in China apparently trying to avoid prosecution for his role in the UN’s Oil for Food program scandals). Strong is frequently credited with initiating the global warming movement in the early 1980s, and he subsequently helped to engineer the Rio Conference that produced the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Others like Olaf Palme and his friend, Bert Bolin, who was the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were also involved as early as the 1970s.Political enthusiasm has only increased since then as political ideology has come to play a major role. A few years ago, Christiana Figueres, then executive secretary of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that mankind was, for the first time in history, setting itself the task of intentionally changing the economic system.1Ms. Figueres is not alone in believing this. Pope Francis’ closest adviser castigated con-servative climate change skeptics in the United States, blaming capitalism for their views.Speaking with journalists, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga criticized certain ‘movements’ in the United States that had preemptively come out in opposition to Francis’s planned en- cyclical on climate change. ‘The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits’, he said.This past August, a paper appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Littered with ‘could be’s’ and ‘might be’s’, it conclude that ‘Collective human action’ is required to ‘steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold’ and keep it habitable. The authors said that this would involve ‘stewardship of the entire Earth System – biosphere, climate, and societies’, and that it might involve ‘decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values’.Remember, in a world that buys into the incoherent ‘precautionary principle,’ even the mere claim of remote possibility justifies extreme action.Presumably, the power these people desperately seek includes the power to roll back the status and welfare that the ordinary person has acquired and continues to acquire through the fossil fuel generated industrial revolution and return them to their presumably more appropriate status as serfs. Many more among the world’s poorest will be forbidden the opportunity to improve their condition.Nevertheless, when these claims are presented to the leaders of our societies, along with the bogus claim that 97% of scientists agree, our leaders are afraid to differ, and proceed, lemming-like, to plan for the suicide of industrial society. Again, nothing better illustrates the problem that Snow identified.Interestingly, however, ‘ordinary’ people (as opposed to our ‘educated’ elites) tend to see through the nonsense being presented. What is it about our elites that makes them so vulnerable, and what is it about many of our scientists that leads them to promote such foolishness? The answers cannot be very flattering to either. Let us consider the ‘vulnerable’ elites first.They have been educated in a system where success has been predicated on their ability to please their professors. In other words, they have been conditioned to rationalize anything.While they are vulnerable to false narratives, they are far less economically vulnerable than are ordinary people. They believe themselves wealthy enough to withstand the economic pain of the proposed policies, and they are clever enough to often benefit from them.The narrative is trivial enough for the elite to finally think that they ‘understand’ science.For many (especially on the right), the need to be regarded as intelligent causes them to fear that opposing anything claimed to be ‘scientific’ might lead to their being regarded as ignorant, and this fear overwhelms any ideological commitment to liberty that they might have.None of these factors apply to ‘ordinary’ people. This may well be the strongest argument for popular democracy and against the leadership of those ‘who know best.’What about the scientists?Scientists are specialists. Few are expert in climate. This includes many supposed ‘climate scientists’ who became involved in the area in response to the huge increases in funding that have accompanied global warming hysteria.Scientists are people with their own political positions, and many have been enthusiastic about using their status as scientists to promote their political positions (not unlike celebrities whose status some scientists often aspire to). As examples, consider the movements against nuclear weapons, against the Strategic Defense Initiative, against the Vietnam War, and so on.Scientists are also acutely and cynically aware of the ignorance of non-scientists and the fear that this engenders. This fear leaves the ‘vulnerable’ elites particularly relieved by assurances that the theory underlying the alarm is trivially simple and that ‘all’ scientists agree. Former senator and Secretary of State John F. Kerry is typical when he stated, with reference to greenhouse warming, ‘I know sometimes I can remember from when I was in high school and college, some aspects of chemistry or physics can be tough. But this is not tough. This is simple. Kids at the earliest age can understand this’. As you have seen, the greenhouse effect is not all that simple. Only remarkably brilliant kids would understand it. Given Kerry’s subsequent description of climate and its underlying physics, it was clear that he was not up to the task.The evidenceAt this point, some of you might be wondering about all the so-called evidence for dangerous climate change. What about the disappearing Arctic ice, the rising sea level, the weather extremes, starving polar bears, the Syrian Civil War, and all the rest of it? The vast variety of the claims makes it impossible to point to any particular fault that applies to all of them. Of course, citing the existence of changes – even if these observations are correct (although surprisingly often they are not) – would not implicate greenhouse warming per se. Nor would it point to danger. Note that most of the so-called evidence refers to matters of which you have no personal experience. Some of the claims, such as those relating to weather extremes, contradict what both physical theory and empirical data show. The purpose of these claims is obviously to frighten and befuddle the public, and to make it seem like there is evidence where, in fact, there is none. If there is evidence of anything, it is of the correctness of C.P. Snow’s observation. Some examples will show what I mean.First, for something to be evidence, it must have been unambiguously predicted. (This is a necessary, but far from sufficient condition.) Figure 1 shows the IPCC model forecasts for the summer minimum in Arctic sea ice in the year 2100 relative to the period 1980–2000. As you can see, there is a model for any outcome. It is a little like the formula for being an expert marksman: shoot first and declare whatever you hit to be the target.Turning to the issue of temperature extremes, is there any data to even support concern? As to these extremes, the data shows no trend and the IPCC agrees. Even Gavin Schmidt, Jim Hansen’s successor at NASA’s New York shop, GISS, has remarked that ‘general statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media’. He went on to say that it takes only a few seconds’ thought to realise that the popular perceptions that ‘global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time‘ is ‘nonsense’.clip_image002Figure 1: Climate model projections of rate of Arctic sea ice loss. Source: Eisenman et al., J. Clim., 2011.At the heart of this nonsense is the failure to distinguish weather from climate. Thus, global warming refers to the welcome increase in temperature of about 1◦C since the end of the Little Ice Age about 200 years ago. On the other hand, weather extremes involve temperature changes of the order of 20◦C. Such large changes have a profoundly different origin from global warming. Crudely speaking, they result from winds carrying warm and cold air from distant regions that are very warm or very cold. These winds are in the form of waves. The strength of these waves depends on the temperature difference between the tropics and the Arctic (with larger differences leading to stronger waves). Now, the models used to project global warming all predict that this temperature difference will decrease rather than increase. Thus, the increase in temperature extremes would best support the idea of global cooling rather than global warming. However, scientifically illiterate people seem incapable of distinguishing global warming of climate from temperature extremes due to weather. In fact, as has already been noted, there doesn’t really seem to be any discernible trend in weather extremes. There is only the greater attention paid by the media to weather, and the exploitation of this ‘news’ coverage by people who realize that projections of catastrophe in the distant future are hardly compelling, and that they therefore need a way to convince the public that the danger is immediate, even if it isn’t.This has also been the case with sea-level rise. Sea level has been increasing by about 8 inches per century for hundreds of years, and we have clearly been able to deal with it. In order to promote fear, however, those models that predict much larger increases are invoked. As a practical matter, it has long been known that at most coastal locations, changes in sea level, as measured by tide gauges, are primarily due to changes in land level associated with both tectonics and land use.Moreover, the small change in global mean temperature (actually the change in temperature increase) is much smaller than what the computer models used by the IPCC have predicted. Even if all this change were due to man, it would be most consistent with low sensitivity to added carbon dioxide, and the IPCC only claims that most (not all) of the warming over the past 60 years is due to man’s activities. Thus, the issue of man-made climate change does not appear to be a serious problem. However, this hardly stops ignorant politicians from declaring that the IPCC’s claim of attribution is tantamount to unambiguous proof of coming disaster.Cherry picking is always an issue. Thus, there has been a recent claim that Greenland ice discharge has increased, and that warming will make it worse.2 Omitted from the report is the finding by both NOAA and the Danish Meteorological Institute that the ice mass of Greenland has actually been increasing.3 In fact both these observations can be true, and, indeed, ice build-up pushes peripheral ice into the sea.Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking, or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called evidence.ConclusionSo there you have it. An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct ‘knowledge,’ and is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization. What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness as well as a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays. False claims about 97% agreement will not spare us, but the willingness of scientists to keep mum is likely to much reduce trust in and support for science. Perhaps this won’t be such a bad thing after all – certainly as concerns ‘official’ science.There is at least one positive aspect to the present situation. None of the proposed policies will have much impact on greenhouse gases. Thus we will continue to benefit from the one thing that can be clearly attributed to elevated carbon dioxide: namely, its effective role as a plant fertilizer, and reducer of the drought vulnerability of plants. Meanwhile, the IPCC is claiming that we need to prevent another 0.5◦C of warming, although the 1◦C that has occurred so far has been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history. As we used to say in my childhood home of the Bronx: ‘Go figure’.This published version of the lecture contains minor editorial changes to the text as delivered by Professor Lindzen.Notes1. ‘This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.’2. KA Graeter et al. (2018) Ice core records of West Greenland melt and climate forcing.Geophysical Research Letters 45(7), 3164–3172. Ice Core Records of West Greenland Melt and Climate Forcing3. Greenland Ice Sheet's 2017 weigh-in suggests a small increase in ice massPDF version of this lecture: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/10/Lindzen-2018-GWPF-Lecture.pdfRichard S. Lindzen was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 2013. He is the author of over 200 papers on meteorology and climatology and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the Academic Advisory Council of GWPF.The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) - Common Sense on Climate Change