What Catastrophe?

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The Weekly Standard:

MITs Richard Lindzen, the unalarmed climate scientist

ETHAN EPSTEIN

Jan 13, 2014

 

When you first meet Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, leading climate skeptic, and all-around scourge of James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and sundry other climate alarmists, as Lindzen calls them, you may find yourself a bit surprised. If you know Lindzen only from the way his opponents characterize himvariously, a liar, a lunatic, a charlatan, a denier, a shyster, a crazy person, corruptyou might expect a spittle-flecked, wild-eyed loon. But in person, Lindzen cuts a rather different figure. With his gray beard, thick glasses, gentle laugh, and disarmingly soft voice, he comes across as nothing short of grandfatherly.

 

Granted, Lindzen is no shrinking violet. A pioneering climate scientist with decades at Harvard and MIT, Lindzen sees his discipline as being deeply compromised by political pressure, data fudging, out-and-out guesswork, and wholly unwarranted alarmism. In a shot across the bow of what many insist is indisputable scientific truth, Lindzen characterizes global warming as small and .  .  . nothing to be alarmed about. In the climate debateon which hinge far-reaching questions of public policythems fightin words.

 

In his mid-seventies, married with two sons, and now emeritus at MIT, Lindzen spends between four and six months a year at his second home in Paris. But that doesnt mean hes no longer in the thick of the climate controversy; he writes, gives myriad talks, participates in debates, and occasionally testifies before Congress. In an eventful life, Lindzen has made the strange journey from being a pioneer in his field and eventual IPCC coauthor to an outlier in the disciplineif not an outcast.

 

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