April 8th, 2022 Friday - Richard Lindzen - Climate Change

In this presentation, Richard Lindzen, Professor (Emeritus) of Meteorology in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT will speak about climate change. Dick is not skeptical about greenhouse warming per se, but he considers the contribution of CO2 to greenhouse warming to be small. Also, there are other contributors to climate that are much more significant. In his view, in promoting any issue, it is important (in a propagandistic sense) to establish ones preferred narrative. In the case of “Dangerous Climate Change”, the narrative is that climate is defined by some global temperature that is, in turn, controlled by carbon dioxide via the greenhouse effect. Unfortunately, most of us accepted the narrative while pointing out the incorrectness of its details such as the assumption of positive feedbacks, the attribution of changes to CO2, and the ignoring of natural internal variability. However, the narrative itself is absurd. Nobody knows what the temperature of the earth refers to. What is actually presented is something referred to as the average temperature anomaly. The variations in this quantity are tiny compared to the scatter of the data points being averaged. At any given time, there are almost as many stations cooling as warming. The earth is characterized by numerous different climate regimes, and it would defy scientific practice to assign the behavior of these numerous climate regimes to this small residue. That said, the earth has been warmer and colder than it is now (viz the ice ages and the Eocene), and there has been no evidence of CO2 causality.

Richard Lindzen received all his degrees from Harvard. His undergraduate major was physics, and his Ph.D. was in applied mathematics, but his thesis dealt with the interaction of radiation, photochemistry and dynamics in the stratosphere. For the remainder of his career he continued to work in the atmospheric sciences. He has held professorships at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.