Debating climate and securityPredictions by climate models are flawed, says MIT meteorology expert
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, a global warming skeptic, says that too much is being made of climate change by researchers seeking government funding; he said their data and their methods did not support their claims; for thirty years, climate scientists have been “locked into a simple-minded identification of climate with greenhouse-gas level. That climate should be the function of a single parameter (like CO2) has always seemed implausible. Yet an obsessive focus on such an obvious oversimplification has likely set back progress by decades,” Lindzen said
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, a global warming skeptic, told about seventy Sandia researchers in June that too much is being made of climate change by researchers seeking government funding. He said their data and their methods did not support their claims.
“Despite concerns over the last decades with the greenhouse process, they oversimplify the effect,” he said. “Simply cranking up CO2 [carbon dioxide] (as the culprit) is not the answer” to what causes climate change.
A Sandia Lab release reports that Lindzen, the ninth speaker in Sandia’s Climate Change and National Security Speaker Series, is Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology in MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and is the lead author of Chapter 7 (“Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks”) of the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Third Assessment Report. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.
For thirty years, climate scientists have been “locked into a simple-minded identification of climate with greenhouse-gas level. … That climate should be the function of a single parameter (like CO2) has always seemed implausible. Yet an obsessive focus on such an obvious oversimplification has likely set back progress by decades,” Lindzen said.
For major climates of the past, other factors were more important than carbon dioxide. Orbital variations have been shown to quantitatively account for the cycles of glaciations of the past 700,000 years, he said, and the elimination of the arctic inversion, when the polar caps were ice-free, “is likely to have been more important than CO2 for the warm episode during the Eocene 50 million years ago.”
There is little evidence that changes in climate are producing extreme weather events, he said.
“Even the IPCC says there is little if any evidence of this. In fact, there are important physical reasons for doubting such anticipations.”
The release notes that Lindzen’s views run counter to those of almost all major professional societies. For example, the American Physical Society statement of 18 Nov 2007, read, “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.” He does not feel, however, they are necessarily right. “Why did the American Physical Society take a position?” he asked his audience. “Why did they find it compelling? They never answered.”
Speaking methodically with flashes of humor — “I always feel that when the conversation turns to
