MIT’s Richard Lindzen, the unalarmed climate scientist
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 him—variously, a liar, a lunatic, a charlatan, a
denier, a shyster, a crazy person, corrupt—you 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 debate—on which hinge far-reaching questions of public
policy—them’s fightin’ words.