Richard Lindzen

Richard Lindzen   (academic)
Born	February 8, 1940 Webster, Massachusetts
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard University
Children	sons
Spouse	Nadine Lindzen
Interests	• Atmospheric physics • “climate change”
Scientist with opinions outside the scientific consensus about climate change

Richard Siegmund Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books. From 1983 until his retirement in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of Chapter 7, "Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks," of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report on climate change. He has criticized the scientific consensus about climate change and what he has called "climate alarmism."

Views on climate change

In June, 1992, a year after the Cato Institute conference, Lindzen signed the Heidelberg Appeal.

He has criticized the scientific consensus on global climate change, pointing out that scientists are just as liable to err when the science appears to point in just one direction, (see the document at bottom of page)

Full article: File:Global Climate Alarmism and Historical Precedents.pdf

He drew an analogy in 1996 between the consensus in the early and mid-twentieth century on eugenics and the current consensus about global warming. 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, Lindzen said that the earth was just emerging from the "Little Ice Age" in the 19th century and says that it is "not surprising" to see warming after that. He goes on to state that the IPCC claims were

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 Niño, 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.

 

A Document by Richard Lindzen

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)	Description
File:Global Climate Alarmism and Historical Precedents.pdf	paper	September 2013	"Climate change" Science History of Science	Authoritative opinion from one of the world's leading climate scientists and IPCC member working on the 1995 and 2001 Assessment reports

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