Richard Lindzen

From ClimateWiki

A vocal climate change opponent, Dr. Richard Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist. He is also a Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a member of the Science, Health, and Economic Advisory Council based in Maryland. Lindzen has published over 200 scientific research papers and books. He was also a lead author of "Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks" - Chapter 7 of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change.

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, and provided accepted explanations for atmospheric tides and the quasi-biennial oscillation of the tropical stratosphere.

He is a recipient of the AMS's Meisinger, and Charney Awards, the AGU's Macelwane Medal, and the Leo Huss Walin Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. He is a corresponding member of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, and has been a member of the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and the Council of the AMS. He has also been a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Lindzen believes climate change alarmism is stimulated and continued by political pressures on climate scientists to adhere to the concept: "I think it's [concern about global warming] mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves."

Lindzen often speaks publicly against the global warming theory. The following are various quotes about his position on the topic:

In a 2007 interview on the Larry King Show, Lindzen said: "We're talking of a few tenths of a degree change in temperature. None of it in the last eight years, by the way. And if we had warming, it should be accomplished by less storminess. But because the temperature itself is so unspectacular, we have developed all sorts of fear of prospect scenarios -- of flooding, of plague, of increased storminess when the physics says we should see less. I think it's mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves."

In a 2009 editorial in the Wall Street Journal: "Based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc. Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false."

2009 International Conference on Climate Change: "There is no substantive basis for predictions of sizeable global warming due to observed increases in minor greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons."