Friday » February 9 » 2007
The original denier:
into the cold
The Deniers -- Part V
Financial Post
Friday, February 02, 2007
December 22, 2006
Most scientists who are labelled as "deniers" for their views on
global warming don't embrace this role. They cringe at the thought of
disagreeing with colleagues who think that the science is settled, they do
their best to avoid making waves, and they fear being marginalized as cranks
who disagree with the scientific consensus. Dr. Richard Lindzen is an
exception.
Dr. Lindzen is one of the original deniers -- among the first to criticize the
scientific bureaucracy, and scientists themselves, for claims about global
warming that he views as unfounded and alarmist. While he does not welcome the
role he's acquired, he also does not shrink from it. Dr. Lindzen takes his
protests about the abuse of science to the public, to the press, and to
government.
His detractors can't dismiss him as a crank from the fringe, however, much as
they might wish. Dr. Lindzen is a critic from within, one of the most
distinguished climate scientists in the world: a past professor at the
University of Chicago and Harvard, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of the National Academy
of Sciences, and a lead author in a landmark report from the United Nations'
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the very organization that
established global warming as an issue of paramount importance.
Dr. Lindzen is proud of his contribution, and that of his colleagues, to the
IPCC chapter they worked on. His pride in this work matches his dismay at
seeing it misrepresented. "[Almost all reading and coverage of the IPCC is
restricted to the highly publicized Summaries for Policymakers which are
written by representatives from governments, NGOs and business; the full
reports, written by participating scientists, are largely ignored," he
told the United States Senate committee on environment and public works in
2001. These unscientific summaries, often written to further political or
business agendas, then become the basis of public understanding.
As an example, Dr. Lindzen provided the committee with the summary that was
created for Chapter 7, which he worked on. "Understanding of climate
processes and their incorporation in climate models have improved, including
water vapour, sea-ice dynamics, and ocean heat transport," the summary
stated, creating the impression that the climate models were reliable. The
actual report by the scientists indicated just the opposite. Dr. Lindzen
testified that the scientists had "found numerous problems with model
treatments -- including those of clouds and water vapor."
When the IPCC was stung by criticism that the summaries were being written with
little or no input by the scientists themselves, the IPCC had a subset of the
scientists review a subsequent draft summary -- an improvement in the process.
Except that the final version, when later released at a
The version that emerged from
The summaries' distortion of the IPCC chapters compounds another distortion
that occurred in the very writing of the scientific chapters themselves. Dr.
Lindzen's description of the conditions under which the climate scientists
worked conjures up a scene worthy of a totalitarian state: "throughout the
drafting sessions, IPCC 'coordinators' would go around insisting that criticism
of models be toned down, and that 'motherhood' statements be inserted to the
effect that models might still be correct despite the cited faults. Refusals
were occasionally met with ad hominem attacks. I personally witnessed coauthors
forced to assert their 'green' credentials in defense of their
statements."
To better understand the issue of climate change, including the controversies
over the IPCC summary documents, the White House asked the National Academy of
Sciences, the country's premier scientific organization, to assemble a panel on
climate change. The 11 members of the panel, which included Richard Lindzen,
concluded that the science is far from settled: "Because there is
considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system
varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols,
current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as
tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward)."
The press's spin on the NAS report? CNN, in language typical of other
reportage, stated that it represented "a unanimous decision that global
warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle
room."
Despite such obtuseness Lindzen fights on, defending the science at what is
undoubtedly a very considerable personal cost. Those who toe the party line are
publicly praised and have grants ladled out to them from a funding pot that
overflows with US$1.7-billion per year in the
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and
Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.
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CV OF A DENIER:
Richard Lindzen received his PhD in applied mathematics in 1964 from