Richard Lindzen

17 April 2007

Lindzen in Newsweek

Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann

As part of a much larger discussion on Learning to live with Global Warming in Newsweek recently, the editors gave some space for Richard Lindzen to give his standard 'it's no big deal' opinion. While we disagree, we have no beef with serious discussions of the costs and benefits of various courses of action and on the need for adaption to the climate change that is already locked in.

However, Lindzen's piece is not a serious discussion.

Instead, it is a series of strawman arguments, red-herrings and out and out errors.

Lindzen claims that because we don't know what the ideal temperature of the planet should be, we shouldn't be concerned about global warming. But concern about human-driven climate change is not because this is the most perfect of possible worlds - it is because, whatever it's imperfections, it is the world that society is imperfectly adapted to. Lindzen is well aware that predictions of weather are different from climate predictions (the statistics of weather), yet cheerfully uses popular conflation of the two issues to confuse his readers.

Source: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/lindzen-in-newsweek/

14 February 2006

Richard Lindzen’s HoL testimony

Prof. Richard Lindzen (MIT) is often described as the most respectable of the climate 'skeptics' and is frequently cited in discussions here and elsewhere. Lindzen clearly has many fundamentally important papers under his belt (work on the QBO and basic atmospheric dynamics), and a number of papers that have been much less well received by the community (the 'Iris' effect etc.). Last year, he gave evidence to and answered questions from, a UK House of Lords Committee investigating the economics of climate change, in which he discoursed freely on the science. I'll try here to sort out what he said.

Firstly, it is clear that Lindzen only signs up to the first point of the basic 'consensus' as outlined here previously, that the planet has indeed warmed significantly over the 20th century. While he accepts that CO₂ and other greenhouse gases have increased due to human activities, and that this should warm the planet, he does not accept that it is necessarily an important component in the 20th century rise. His preferred option (by process of elimination) appears to be intrinsic variability, but he provides no support for this contention.

In terms of scientific content, his testimony covers a few basic topics: the greenhouse effect, climate sensitivity, aerosol forcing and water vapour feedbacks. We have discussed these topics previously (here, here and here), and so my critique of Lindzen's comments will come as no surprise. He intersperses his comments with references to 'alarmism' which I will get to at the end.

Conclusion

In some ways Lindzen's thinking on the climate change issue has not changed much since 1999, as can be seen in an older rebuttal of his position by Jim Hansen (scroll down to Table 1). However, he does seem to have become convinced that the 20th Century warming is real. What is interesting about the comparison between then and now, is that Hansen made two appeals to the data gathering community to test a) whether water vapour feedbacks can be observed, and b) whether the ocean heat content is increasing in line with the model predictions. It is quite telling that both of these data analyses have since been made and they confirm Hansen's contentions, not Lindzen's.

Source: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/04/aerosol-formation-and-climate-part-i/index.php?p=222

Links:

• http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/index.php?title=Richard_Lindzen
  
• 2007/04 realclimate.org lindzen-in-newsweek
• 2006/04 realclimate.org lindzen-point-by-point
• 2006/04 realclimate.org open-thread-on-lindzen-op-ed-in-wsj
  
• 2006/02 realclimate.org richard-lindzens-hol-testimony
  
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen
  
• http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_Lindzen