Richard Lindzen

[John Reece]

Sorry, I should have made that clear, I am not a subscriber.

Thank you very much!

[Kristian Joensen]

Sorry, I should have made that clear, I am not a subscriber.

[John Reece]

That link works here.

Thanks for your response.

Are you a subscriber to The Weekly Standard?

The link works for me too; however, I have wondered it that's only because I have a subscription.

The reason I ask is that the article was originally in the print magazine ― not online ― when it was published in January.

[Kristian Joensen]

That link works here.

[John Reece]

Thanks, John.

Jed, please tell me if this link works for you; and, if so, whether or not you are a subscriber to The Weekly Standard.

I need to know whether or not it is still behind a pay wall, and I cannot tell by myself because I am a subscriber and therefore have access whether it is or isn't pay wall sequestered.

[Jedidiah]

Additional evidence that this is a political effort, not a scientific one. Who is profiting from all this?

Thanks, John.

[John Reece]

I am starting this thread to be a catchall repository of information about Richard Lindzen.

Lindzen is grossly underestimated, mischaracterized, and defamed by such as these two writers hosted by the Guardian: John Abraham and Dana Nuccitelli, who have this paragraph in a Guardian article:

Richard Lindzen is one of the approximately 3 percent of climate scientists who believe the human influence on global warming is relatively small (though Lindzen is now retired, no longer doing scientific research). More importantly, he's been wrong about nearly every major climate argument he's made over the past two decades. Lindzen is arguably the climate scientist who's been the wrongest, longest.

The Guardian writers were responding to the three-page article featuring Lindzen in The Weekly Standard ― read it!

Skeptical Science has an entire page listing about 25 different articles devoted to smearing "Climate Misinformer: Richard Lindzen".

In a video, Lindzen says that catastrophic AGW alarmists and skeptics cannot discuss the issue because they speak different languages.

Unlike fellow "climate misinformer" [as she is mischaracterized by those who also mischaracterize Lindzen] Judith Curry, Lindzen does not attempt the impossible: that is, to engage in fruitful communication with those who defame him.

Journalist James Delingpole reports on Lindzen's appearance before the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee in January 2014.

Popcorn time in Westminster this week, where the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee met to grill two sets of witnesses on the pros and cons of the IPCC's 5th Assessment review.

Three things stood out for me: the bullying, bluster and arrogance of the committee's chairman Tim Yeo; the unnecessary rudeness of John Robertson MP ("Not a lot of people agree with you. You've had your chance to sell your book," he told Donna Laframboise who had flown over from Canada especially to testify); and the wearied patience teetering on the brink of Olympian contempt of Dr Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric physics at MIT.

Lindzen, you rather felt, has really had quite enough of trying explain to idiots why it's perfectly possible to "believe" in the existence of anthropogenic global warming without feeling the urge to bomb the global economy back to the dark ages in order to mitigate it.

This is – and always has been – the position of all the climate sceptics I've ever met. We take our cue from Lindzen because no scientist with expertise in the relevant field makes this point quite so eloquently or persuasively. But a decade or more spent repeating the obvious has begun to tax Lindzen's patience, as became clear after a testy interrogation from Tim "Trougher" Yeo.

The Trougher was trying to bludgeon Lindzen into proving the point that climate change IS a problem because the decade from 2000 to 2010 was the hottest in history. Lindzen maintained that this proves nothing other than that temperatures at the end of a warming period are almost inevitably going to be higher than those in the beginning or middle. But the Trougher looked well pleased with what he clearly considered a "gotcha" exchange.

Then Lindzen was asked what he thought of the "consensus" – at which point he got his manicured claws out:

"I think the majority of people working in climate science will go with the view that climate science is serious. I don't think that would be surprising to anyone. There are very few people in any scientific field who say 'My field is not serious'. Other than that there is so much penalty for saying that this is not an important problem that I don't think people would go out on that limb, either."

(Ouch!)

He went on:

"I've asked very frequently at universities: 'Of the brightest people you know, how many people were studying climate [...or meteorology or oceanography...]?' And the answer is usually 'No one.'"

And – warming to his theme:

"You look at the credentials of some of these people [on the IPCC] and you realise that the world doesn't have that many experts, that many 'leading climate scientists'".

Was Lindzen suggesting, asked Tim Yeo at this point, that scientists in the field of climate were academically inferior.

"Oh yeah," said Lindzen. "I don't think there's any question that the brightest minds went into physics, math, chemistry…"