Who can spot the fallacy in Richard Lindzen's reasoning here?

Lindzens remarks are accurate as far as they go, but you did not get the entire thought being expressed through your short quoting him. The complete explanation requires understanding that heat and humidity on their own will not generate a sustainable high intensity storm system and this is what he was pointing out. You need high level cold dry air in combination with low level turbulence to achieve this. The below link leads to a decent but not great explanation of how storm systems form and operate.

http://www.weatheranswer.com/public/Thunderstorm.p...

But then I gave up years ago expecting decent understanding of science from anyone that will accept any part of the AGW myth as real and possible. I have over the last year redone all of the experiments quoted as evidence that co2 instead of water vapor causes the greenhouse effect and in every case I have discovered that none of those experiments were valid because they first did not include a hygrometer in the instrumentation and second they did not dehydrate their samples to level the playing field to get scientifically accurate results.

I did instrument correctly and discovered that the procedure quoted automatically hydrates the samples to the maximum the sample will support and that during the cool down part of the experiment moisture condensed out of the sample to the point it was running down the sides of the sample jar. So the much vaunted proof that co2 is a greenhouse gas is a complete farce created through one of the worst examples of unscientific sloppiness I have ever seen in my life. Added experiments with co2 obtained without the use of water and with both air and co2 samples at less than 10% relative humidity the co2 sample was less capable of greenhouse effect performance than the control air sample.

So any and all experiments quoted as evidence that co2 is a greenhouse gas are scientifically false and thus invalid because they were not performed through proper scientific method that would have found and corrected the errors in procedure. That clown who first made this error should have all of his awards stripped from him and the world informed of this fraud.

I will tease some more,

Clausius–Clapeyron relation

Precipitable water

specific humidity

Equivalent potential temperature

Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE)

NOTE TO BRAVOZULU:

Moist air is lighter than dry air

A little shear is a good thing, if you are a thunderstorm, so you don't kill your own updraft.

NOTE TO JAMES E:

No one claims water vapor not to be the primary greenhouse gas. It is. It is not and can not be the driver of climate change however. It carries no Global Warming Potential as its atmospheric life time is only 11 days. Its atmospheric concentration is dependent mainly on the ambient temperature produced by the Sun and the long lived greenhouse gases such as CO2.

There are a number of "tricks" you might pick on besides someone opting to keep their Q & A private including, inability to contact, multiple accounts, new accounts, unused accounts ( often from the fall of 2006,) as well as the privacy settings. There are many abuses that might not rise to the level of T o S violations.

I think your posting may be a little naive to expect some sort of "mea maxima culpa" from conservative or others. Yours is a question that requires some thought or experience and this is not going to be behavior you typically might expect from an attack dog. It is probably asking too much. (Attack dogs can be useful but they do have their methods of operation.)

I first noticed an interesting phenomena after I built a sun room / greenhouse last winter and set up a USB temperature / humidity probe to graph the daytime changes. Outside temperatures were freezing and daytime temperatures would vary from just above freezing to around 85 deg F. What I found shocking was the extent of the inverse relationship of the graph of humidity to temperature. I realized that my probe was picking up relative humidity and not some absolute humidity. The typical night time humidity was around 30% but daytime humidity would drop to near zero. I had created a "desert."

To explain this I did remember some high school science about relative humidity dropping on temperature rise as the air can then hold a higher moisture content. (But I am still shocked about the extent.) This is why our heated houses are overly dry in the winter and what the quoted author fails to take into consideration. I wonder if Richard Zinden lives in a constantly warm climate.

Did he really say that? So I guess Lindzen is looking for very dry air with a high latent heat content...hmm, don't know where he's going to find that.

EDIT: Nice try at saving him Bravozulu...but it's clear from the context that Lindzen was talking about evaporation from the sea surface, THAT is the source of latent heat that fuels hurricanes--there are no bodies of water aloft to provide the source for evaporation.

EDIT for caerbannog: I think you might be giving Lindzen too much credit. He seems to think it's the rate of evaporation that matters rather than the absolute humidity. That's just silly, dry air entrained into tropical cyclones is a sure way to kill them. There is evidence to believe that the relative humidity will stay relatively constant at about 80% over the tropical oceans regardless of SST. Whatever Lindzen was trying to say was just bizarre and doesn't make much sense. It sounds like even he doesn't know what he's saying anymore.

It is fairly common knowledge that you get powerful thunderstorms and hurricanes from colder dryer air aloft. He was obviously talking about that and the tendency of greenhouse gases to equalize the temperature differences. It seems that there is an effort by alarmists to take things out of context and try to confuse people. Either that or they are ignorant.

The reason is probably that storms are driven by the warming of the air as the water condenses. If there is too much water, the weight of the water stops that upward push and you get less powerful storms. This is sufficiently complicated that it probably requires more thought to give you a better explanation but I don't have the time right now to say much beyond the fact that it is common knowledge that thunderstorms and hurricanes normally require colder dryer air aloft to become powerful storms. Warmer humid air aloft doesn't translate to more powerful storms.

That should be enough time.

Ok, let's take a look.

"The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well,"

In an elementary sort of way, so far so good, I suppose.

"and calls for drier, less humid air."

Ok now he's lost it.

"Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less"

Hmm, maybe he was drinking before he wrote that. Either that or maybe he's dyslexic

"--hardly a case for more storminess with global warming."

Hardly a case for Lindzen "Professor of Meteorology"

You can tell by his language "less difference in temperature" rather than gradient or "humidity" rather than "vapour content" that he is writing to the lowest level of understanding.

Warm moist air aloft "caps" storm development.

Really looking forward to the answers from the "scientific experts" though.

What''s your problem with it? We're dying to hear you make a fool of yourself.

"I'm going to ask "Dana1981", "Paul", and "Dawei" to hold off here "

I can't wait to hear the Three Stooges answer.

I'm not afraid of anything. The whole argument goes to the effect of pushing a single dependant variable in one direction.

Climate scientists should play the horse races. They would know how the horses would finish based on how high the turf was mowed.

I'm just gonna go ahead and deny global warming - see what happens. lol