Richard Lindzen

Richard Siegmund Lindzen (born February 8, 1940) is an atmospheric physicist and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT. Lindzen is known for his research in dynamic meteorology - especially atmospheric waves.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Science and Economic Advisory Council of the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy. He previously held positions at the University of Chicago and Harvard University.

Lindzen was a contributer to Chapter 4 of the "IPCC Second Assessment", "Climate Change 1995".

He has been a critic of some anthropogenic global warming theories and the political pressures surrounding climate scientists. He wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in April, 2006, in which he wrote: "In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions."

Professional Research

Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability. His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity.

He has made major contributions to the development of the current theory for the Hadley Circulation, which dominates the atmospheric transport of heat and momentum from the tropics to higher latitudes, and has advanced the understanding of the role of small scale gravity waves in producing the reversal of global temperature gradients at the mesopause. He pioneered the study of how ozone photochemistry, radiative transfer and dynamics interact with each other.

He is currently studying the ways in which unstable eddies determine the pole to equator temperature difference, and the nonlinear equilibration of baroclinic instability and the contribution of such instabilities to global heat transport. He has also been developing a new approach to air-sea interaction in the tropics, and is actively involved in parameterizing the role of cumulus convection in heating and drying the atmosphere.

He has developed models for the Earth's climate with specific concern for the stability of the ice caps, the sensitivity to increases in CO₂, the origin of the 100,000 year cycle in glaciation, and the maintenance of regional variations in climate. In cooperation with colleagues and students, he is developing a sophisticated, but computationally simple, climate model to test whether the proper treatment of cumulus convection will significantly reduce climate sensitivity to the increase of greenhouse gases.

Criticism of IPCC

He frequently speaks out against the IPCC position that significant global warming is caused by humans (see global warming) although he accepts that the warming has occurred, saying global mean temperature is about 0.6 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago.

His position with regard to the IPCC can be summed up with this quotation: "Picking holes in the IPCC is crucial. The notion that if you’re ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don’t have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing, it’s like quackery in medicine – if somebody says you should take jelly beans for cancer and you say that’s stupid, and he says, well can you suggest something else and you say, no, does that mean you have to go with jelly beans?"

National Academy of Sciences Climate Change Science report

Lindzen's role in preparing the report

Lindzen served on an 11-member panel organized by the National Academy of Sciences. The panel's report, titled Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, has been widely cited.

The first paragraph of the summary states,

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability.

Lindzen's criticism of the report

In an article for the Wall Street Journal (June 11 2001), Lindzen stated that "there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them" and "I cannot stress this enough -- we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions."

Lindzen wrote that

As usual, far too much public attention was paid to the hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the report. The summary began with a zinger -- that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise, etc., before following with the necessary qualifications. For example, the full text noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating long-term trends, but the summary forgot to mention this.

Here is the context in which the warning about long-term trends occurred:

Although warming at Earth's surface has been quite pronounced during the past few decades, satellite measurements beginning in 1979 indicate relatively little warming of air temperature in the troposphere. The committee concurs with the findings of a recent National Research Council report, which concluded that the observed difference between surface and tropospheric temperature trends during the past 20 years is probably real, as well as its cautionary statement to the effect that temperature trends based on such short periods of record, with arbitrary start and end points, are not necessarily indicative of the long-term behavior of the climate system.

IPCC Policymakers Summary criticism

Lindzen stated in May 2001 that the IPCC summary does not support the full document: see IPCC.

Lindzen worked on Chapter 7 of IPCC Working Group 1, which considers the physical processes that are active in real world climate. He has described the full IPCC report as an admirable description of research activities in climate science although he has criticised the Summary for policymakers. Lindzen further criticized the IPCC for alterations to the Policymakers Summary of its 2001 global warming report, saying:

The draft of the Policymakers Summary was significantly modified at Shanghai. The IPCC, in response to the fact that the Policymakers Summary was not prepared by participating scientists, claimed that the draft of the Summary was prepared by a (selected) subset of the 14 coordinating lead authors. However, the final version of the summary differed significantly from the draft. For example the draft concluded the following concerning attribution:

From the body of evidence since IPCC (1996), we conclude that there has been a discernible human influence on global climate. Studies are beginning to separate the contributions to observed climate change attributable to individual external influences, both anthropogenic and natural. This work suggests that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are a substantial contributor to the observed warming, especially over the past 30 years. However, the accuracy of these estimates continues to be limited by uncertainties in estimates of internal variability, natural and anthropogenic forcing, and the climate response to external forcing.

The version that emerged from Shanghai concludes instead:

In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

Editorial note: The "30 years" period begins at 1970, near the start of the warming trend. The IPCC Shanghai version's "50 years" period of "observed warming" begins in the midst of the 1945-1975 cooling period before the warming trend.

However, the NAS panel on which Lindzen served (see above) said:

"The committee finds that the full IPCC Working Group I (WGI) report is an admirable summary of research activities in climate science, and the full report is adequately summarized in the Technical Summary. The full WGI report and its Technical Summary are not specifically directed at policy. The Summary for Policymakers reflects less emphasis on communicating the basis for uncertainty and a stronger emphasis on areas of major concern associated with human-induced climate change. This change in emphasis appears to be the result of a summary process in which scientists work with policy makers on the document. Written responses from U.S. coordinating and lead scientific authors to the committee indicate, however, that (a) no changes were made without the consent of the convening lead authors (this group represents a fraction of the lead and contributing authors) and (b) most changes that did occur lacked significant impact."

Letter to his town mayor, 2003

In September 2003 Lindzen wrote an open letter to the mayor of Newton, Massachusetts (Lindzen's home), his views on global warming and the Kyoto Accord. He says "... [T]he impact of CO₂ on the Earth's heat budget is nonlinear. What this means is that although CO₂ has only increased about 30% over its pre-industrial level, the impact on the heat budget of the Earth due to the increases in CO₂ and other man influenced greenhouse substances has already reached about 75% of what one expects from a doubling of CO₂, and that the temperature rise seen so far is much less (by a factor of 2-3) than models predict (assuming that all of the very irregular change in temperature over the past 120 years or so—about 1 degree F—is due to added greenhouse gases—a very implausible assumption).".

Of the Kyoto Accord, he claims there is no "controversy over the fact that the Kyoto Protocol, itself, will do almost nothing to stabilize CO₂. Capping CO₂ emissions per unit of electricity generated will have a negligible impact on CO₂ levels"

James Annan wager

The November 10 2004 online version of Reason magazine reported that Lindzen is "willing to take bets that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now." Climatologist James Annan, who has offered multiple bets that global temperatures will increase, contacted Lindzen to arrange a bet. Annan offered to pay 2:1 odds in Lindzen's favor if temperatures declined, but said that Lindzen would only accept a bet if the payout was 50:1 or better in his favor and that no bet occurred.

Lindzen replied to Annan "The quote [at Reason Online] was out of context. I think the odds are about 50-50. I said that if anyone were willing to give warming much higher odds than that, I would be tempted to take the bet."

According to Lindzen, he and Annan exchanged proposals for bets, but were unable to agree. (Annan subsequently responded to Lindzen's response.).

Claims on funding sources

In a 1995 article in Harper's Magazine, Ross Gelbspan asserted that Lindzen "charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; [and] his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels and a speech he wrote, entitled 'Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,' was underwritten by OPEC."

See also

• List of scientists opposing global warming consensus

External links

• Richard Lindzen's Home page at MIT
• A List of Publications
• Profile at Physics Today
• Wall Street Journal editorial (June 11, 2001)
• Testimony of Richard S. Lindzen Before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works 2001
• Testimony of Richard S. Lindzen before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee
• http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Lindzen/canadian_reactions_to_sir_david_king.html
• Climate of Fear: Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence - Wall Street Journal op-ed (April 12, 2006)
• Lindzen: point by point (reply to WSJ op-ed)
• [1] A video interview (and a transcript [2]) of Lindzen on Fox News about global warming, presenting the view that people like Al Gore are overstating the case.
• Wall Street Journal op-ed (July 2, 2006)
• Logical Science's analysis of Richard Lindzen
• Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus at Cato's Regulation site.
• Richard Lindzen's links to money from fossil fuel industry (from exxonsecrets.org)