Interview with Richard Lindzen ____________________________________________________________ ___ This Earth Day, Professor Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, wants you to calm down. The Earth, he says, is in good shape. "Forests are returning in Europe and the United States. Air quality has improved. Water quality has improved. We grow more food on less land. We've done a reasonably good job in much of the world in conquering hunger. And yet we're acting as though: "How can we stand any more of this?" A leading critic on the theory of man-made global warming, Professor Lindzen has developed a reputation as America's anti-doom-and gloom scientist. And he's not, he says, as lonely as you might think. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q You don't dispute that the globe is warming? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A It has never been an issue of whether the Earth is warming -- because it's always warming or cooling. The issue is: What are the magnitudes involved? It's a big difference if it's warming a degree or two or 10, or if it's warming a few tenths of a degree. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q And it's inconclusive how much it's warming? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A Sure it's inconclusive. It's a very hard thing to analyze because you have to average huge fluctuations over the whole Earth, and 70% of the Earth is oceans where you don't have weather stations. So you get different groups analyzing this. And they're pretty close. One group gets over the last century a warming of about .55 degrees centigrade. Another group says it's .75 degrees. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q Is there any scenario in which global warming could be beneficial for the planet? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A Of course. Canada looks like it will benefit considerably if it were to happen. And it might very well happen -- but it won't be due to man. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q You charge that the hysteria that's been created around global warming is an enormous financial scam. It's all about money? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A Well, how shall I put it? It's not all about money, but boy, there's a lot of money floating in it. I mean, emissions trading is going to be a multi-trillion dollar market. Emissions alone would keep small countries in business. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q Are you suggesting that scientists manipulate their findings to get in on the gravy train? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A You have to differentiate the interests of different groups. In the scientific community, your interest is for your field to be recognized so that it will have priority in government funding. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q So you are not accusing your scientific colleagues of corruption? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A No, I'm accusing them of behaving the way scientists always behave. In other words, some years ago, when Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, almost all the biological sciences then became cancer research. I mean, I don't call that corruption, I'm saying you orient your research so that it has a better chance to get resources. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q And it helps if your findings suggest something catastrophic is about to happen? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A In this case it certainly has helped. First of all, the funding increased so greatly that it exceeded the capacity of the existing field to absorb it. You'll notice that Working Group 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came up with lots of scary things, but everything was always preceded by could, might, may, all these qualifiers. And the reason it was is those studies start out assuming there's a lot of warming. They assume all the science is in, and then they say, 'Well, how will this impact my field of insect-borne diseases, or agriculture, or health?' So they are almost, by definition, going to generate catastrophic scenarios, but they will never be based on anything other than the hypothesis that this will already happen. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q I read that you bet one of your colleagues that the Earth will actually be colder 20 years from now? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A I haven't bet on it, but I figure the odds are about 50-50.If you look at the temperature record for the globe over the last six years, it's gone no place. That's usually the way it behaves before it goes down. In fact, I suspect that's why you have this tsunami of exposure the last two years, with Gore's movie and so on. I think that this issue has been around long enough to generate a lot of agendas, and looking at the temperature records there must be a fear that if they don't get the agendas covered now, they may never get them. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q Did you watch Al Gore get his Academy Award? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A No! Bad enough I watched his movie. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q He would appear to have the support of the majority of your scientific colleagues. ____________________________________________________________ ___ A Not really. This is an issue that has hundreds of aspects. The very thought that a large number of scientists all agree on everything is inconceivable. Among my colleagues, I would say, almost no one thinks that Gore's movie is reasonable. But there will be differences. Some believe it is possible that warming could be a serious problem. Others think it's very unlikely. People are all over the place. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q Some suggest that Roger Revelle, Gore's scientific mentor, would not have agreed with the movie? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A Well, he's dead. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q Yes. So that makes it harder for him to speak out. ____________________________________________________________ ___ A It's a horrible story. Before he died, Roger Revelle co-authored a popular paper saying, 'We know too little to take any action based on global warming. If we take any action it should be an action that we can justify completely without global warming.' And Gore's staffers tried to have his name posthumously removed from that paper claiming he had been senile. And one of the other authors took it to court and won. It's funny how little coverage that got. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q How cynical do you think Gore is? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A It's hard for me to tell. I think he's either cynical or crazy. But he has certainly cashed in on something. And 'cash in' is the word. The movie has cleared $50-million. He charges $100,000-$150,000 a lecture. He's co-founder of Global Investment Management, which invests in solar and wind and so on. So he is literally shilling for his own companies. And he's on the on the board of Lehman Brothers who want to be the primary brokerage for emission permits. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q That sounds more cynical, less crazy. ____________________________________________________________ ___ A I think his aim is not to be president. It's to be a billionaire. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q What do you find to be the attitude among your MIT undergraduates on global warming? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A I find that they realize they don't know enough to reach judgments. They all realize that Gore's book was a sham. They appreciate that Michael Crichton at least included references. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q That's encouraging. Because I find the indoctrination at schools to be pretty relentless. On a recent Grade 7 test my daughter was asked something to the effect of, "How are you going to educate your parents about global warming?" ____________________________________________________________ ___ A I know. It's straight out of Hitlerjugend. ____________________________________________________________ ___ Q Having said that, are there any behaviors we should be changing, as a society, in order to protect our planet? ____________________________________________________________ ___ A Yes. We should learn math and physics so we don't get fooled by this idiocy. ____________________________________________________________ ___ As was added to his post-article description in 'Newsweek', Richard Lindzen receives all his research funding from the Federal Government. He does not, and has never, received any funding from oil companies
Here is the Intelligence Squared debate held in New York on Global Warming. Intelligence Squared holds several debates a year on various topics asking the audience for their opinion on the topic before the debate and then after the debate. All have seen very little change in the audiences opinion...Until now.The audience was asked do you believe "Climate change is not a crisis". At the beginning only 30% agreed with that statement with 57% disagreeing and 13% saying "don't know". After the debate 46% agreed that "Climate change is not a crisis" and only 42% disagreed. The "don't know" dropped to 12%.Full 92 minute debate
Timothy F. Ball, former Professor of Geography, University of Winnipeg: "(The world's climate) warmed from 1680 up to 1940, but since 1940 it's been cooling down. The evidence for warming is because of distorted records. The satellite data, for example, shows cooling." (November 2004) "The temperature hasn't gone up. ... But the mood of the world has changed: It has heated up to this belief in global warming." (August 2006) "Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970's global cooling became the consensus. ... By the 1990's temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus. It appears I'll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling." (Feb. 5, 2007) __________________________________________________________ Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks: "Thus, there is a possibility that only a fraction of the present warming trend may be attributed to the greenhouse effect resulting from human activities. This conclusion is contrary to the IPCC (2007) Report, which states that “most†of the present warming (+0.7°C/100 years) is due to the greenhouse effect." __________________________________________________________ Claude Allègre, geochemist, Institute of Geophysics (Paris): "The increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere is an observed fact and mankind is most certainly responsible. In the long term, this increase will without doubt become harmful, but its exact role in the climate is less clear. Various parameters appear more important than CO2. Consider the water cycle and formation of various types of clouds, and the complex effects of industrial or agricultural dust. Or fluctuations of the intensity of the solar radiation on annual and century scale, which seem better correlated with heating effects than the variations of CO2 content." (Translation from the original French version in L'Express, May 10, 2006 __________________________________________________________ Robert C. Balling, Jr., director of the Office of Climatology and a professor of geography at Arizona State University: "[I]t is very likely that the recent upward trend [in global surface temperature] is very real and that the upward signal is greater than any noise introduced from uncertainties in the record. However, the general error is most likely to be in the warming direction, with a maximum possible (though unlikely) value of 0.3 °C. ... At this moment in time we know only that: Global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. Mid-tropospheric temperatures have warmed little over the same period. This difference is not consistent with predictions from numerical climate models." (George C. Marshall Institute, Policy Outlook, September 2003 __________________________________________________________ Paal Brekke, solar physicist, European Space Agency: "There are are so many uncertainties we really can't tell what contributes most [to climate change]. __________________________________________________________ John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, contributor to several IPCC reports (answering to "If global temperatures are increasing, to what extent is the increase attributable to greenhouse gas emissions from human activity as opposed to natural variability or other causes?") : "No one knows. Estimates today are given by climate model simulations made against a backdrop of uncertain natural variability, assumptions about how greenhouse gases affect the climate, and model shortcomings in general. The evidence from our work (and others) is that the way the observed temperatures are changing in many important aspects is not consistent with model simulations. __________________________________________________________ Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland: "There is evidence of global warming. ... But warming does not confirm that carbon dioxide is causing it. Climate is always warming or cooling. There are natural variability theories of warming. To support the argument that carbon dioxide is causing it, the evidence would have to distinguish between human-caused and natural warming. This has not been done." (The New Zealand Herald, May 9, 2006) __________________________________________________________ Peter Chylek, Adjunct Professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University :"You really cannot say for certain what is causing current climate change". __________________________________________________________ David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma: "The amount of climatic warming that has taken place in the past 150 years is poorly constrained, and its cause--human or natural--is unknown. There is no sound scientific basis for predicting future climate change with any degree of certainty. If the climate does warm, it is likely to be beneficial to humanity rather than harmful. In my opinion, it would be foolish to establish national energy policy on the basis of misinformation and irrational hysteria." (Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, December 6, 2006) __________________________________________________________ Richard Lindzen, MIT meteorology professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences: "We are quite confident that global mean temperature is about 0.5 °C higher than it was a century ago; that atmospheric levels of CO2 have risen over the past two centuries; and that CO2 is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds). But--and I cannot stress this enough--we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to CO2 or to forecast what the climate will be in the future." "There has been no question whatsoever that CO2 is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas — albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in CO2 should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed." (San Francisco Examiner, July 12, 2006 and in Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2006, Page A14) __________________________________________________________ Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville: "We need to find out how much of the warming we are seeing could be due to mankind, because I still maintain we have no idea how much you can attribute to mankind." (George C. Marshall Institute Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, April 17, 2006) __________________________________________________________ Khabibullo Ismailovich Abdusamatov, mathematician and astronomer at Pulkovskaya Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the supervisor of the Astrometria project of the Russian section of the International Space Station: "Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy - almost throughout the last century - growth in its intensity...Ascribing 'greenhouse' effect properties to the Earth's atmosphere is not scientifically substantiated...Heated greenhouse gases, which become lighter as a result of expansion, ascend to the atmosphere only to give the absorbed heat away." (Russian News & Information Agency, Jan. 15, 2007) __________________________________________________________ Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "[T]he recent warming trend in the surface temperature record cannot be caused by the increase of human-made greenhouse gases in the air." (Capitalism Magazine, August 22, 2002)[22] Baliunas and Soon wrote that "there is no reliable evidence for increased severity or frequency of storms, droughts, or floods that can be related to the air’s increased greenhouse gas content." (Marshall Institute, March 25, 2003) __________________________________________________________ Robert M. Carter, geologist, researcher at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia: "The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown." (Telegraph, April 9, 2006) __________________________________________________________ George V. Chilingar, Professor of Civil and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California, and Leonid F. Khilyuk: "The authors identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate: solar radiation ..., outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, microbial activities ... . The writers provide quantitative estimates of the scope and extent of their corresponding effects on the Earth’s climate [and] show that the human-induced climatic changes are negligible." (Environmental Geology, vol. 50 no. 6, August 2006) __________________________________________________________ Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: "That portion of the scientific community that attributes climate warming to CO2 relies on the hypothesis that increasing CO2, which is in fact a minor greenhouse gas, triggers a much larger water vapour response to warm the atmosphere. This mechanism has never been tested scientifically beyond the mathematical models that predict extensive warming, and are confounded by the complexity of cloud formation - which has a cooling effect. ... We know that [the sun] was responsible for climate change in the past, and so is clearly going to play the lead role in present and future climate change. And interestingly... solar activity has recently begun a downward cycle." (The Hill Times, March 22, 2004) __________________________________________________________ Lee C. Gerhard, formerly Principal Geologist of the Kansas Geological Survey, currently with oil and gas explorationists Thomasson Partner Associates, Inc.[28]: "There is no clear discernible effect of human activities on global temperature...There is little or no correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature change." __________________________________________________________ William M. Gray, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University: "This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential." "I am of the opinion that [global warming] is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people." "So many people have a vested interest in this global-warming thing—all these big labs and research and stuff. The idea is to frighten the public, to get money to study it more." __________________________________________________________ Zbigniew Jaworowski, chair of the Scientific Council at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw: "The atmospheric temperature variations do not follow the changes in the concentrations of CO2 ... climate change fluctuations comes ... from cosmic radiation." (21st Century Science & Technology, Winter 2003-2004, p. 52-65) ___________________________________________________________ David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware: "About half of the warming during the 20th century occurred prior to the 1940s, and natural variability accounts for all or nearly all of the warming." (May 15, 2006) __________________________________________________________ Marcel Leroux, former Professor of Climatology, Université Jean Moulin: "The possible causes, then, of climate change are: well-established orbital parameters on the palaeoclimatic scale, ... solar activity, ...; volcanism ...; and far at the rear, the greenhouse effect, and in particular that caused by water vapor, the extent of its influence being unknown. These factors are working together all the time, and it seems difficult to unravel the relative importance of their respective influences upon climatic evolution. Equally, it is tendentious to highlight the anthropic factor, which is, clearly, the least credible among all those previously mentioned." (M. Leroux, Global Warming - Myth or Reality?, 2005, p. 120) __________________________________________________________ Fred Michel, Associate Professor, Institute of Environmental Science and Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University:"'Global Warming' is a natural phenomenon to which the human contribution is negligible". __________________________________________________________ Garth Paltridge, Professor Emeritus of the Antarctic CRC at the University of Tasmania:"The instrumental record of the past hundred years suggests that the Earth has warmed by a few tenths of a degree over that time. This is consistent with calculations about global warming and the enhanced greenhouse effect, but is certainly far from proof of them. The warming is still well within the range of what seems to have been natural fluctuation over the last ten thousand years – or indeed over the last thousand years." __________________________________________________________ Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada: "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?" __________________________________________________________ Ian Plimer, Professor, School of Earth & Environmental Sciences, The Mawson Laboratories, The University of Adelaide: "We only have to have one volcano burping and we have changed the whole planetary climate... It looks as if carbon dioxide actually follows climate change rather than drives it". __________________________________________________________ Frederick Seitz, retired, former solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences: "So we see that the scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities." (Environment News, 2001) __________________________________________________________ Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia: "The greenhouse effect is real. However, the effect is minute, insignificant, and very difficult to detect." (Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 2005) "The Earth currently is experiencing a warming trend, but there is scientific evidence that human activities have little to do with it.", NCPA Study No. 279, Sep. 2005. “It’s not automatically true that warming is bad, I happen to believe that warming is good, and so do many economists.â€