Science can accommodate Richard Lindzen's global warming skepticism. It can even be said to require it.
Since 1988, when Jim Hansen's testimony before Congress during a sweltering summer triggered the first major wave of global warming reports, Lindzen has sought the center of the public debate. Upset by what he saw as the media's rush to judgment, the MIT meteorologist began arguing that opinion on global warming was far from consensus. Newsweek and Forbes published his criticisms, as did newspapers across the country. A 1989 profile in Science dubbed him "a top general" in the skepticism movement.
An Inconvenient Truth and the turning tide of public opinion notwithstanding, Lindzen is still at it. Since April, he's written two impassioned editorials for The Wall Street Journal, both of which caused a stir in the conservative and mainstream press. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), chairman of the Senate's Environmental & Public Works Committee, quotes him from the Senate floor and in the pages of USA Today. Jack Kelly, a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, saw fit to crown him "America's leading climatologist."
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If Lindzen is a scientific leader, it's difficult to pick out his acolytes. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a committee of hundreds of climate scientists from around the world, concluded in 2001 that the Earth would warm significantly over the next century and that most of this change will be caused by human activities. (Lindzen contributed to the IPCC's first report, in 1996, but says he now "assiduously avoids" the panel's proceedings.)
The conclusions of the IPCC and most other climate researchers are based in part on projections from hundreds of mathematical models. While these models differ in degree, all point to a warmer planet in the near future. These models are tested extensively against existing weather data, as well as the paleoclimatology record drawn from ice cores and tree rings.
In his recent statements, Lindzen rails against what he sees as a conformist and self-reinforcing "iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers" with a "vested interest in alarm."
"To a certain extent, how much confidence you have in any of the evidence is a matter of taste," said Ron Miller, a NASA climatologist who worked with Lindzen at MIT in the late 1980s. "If you look at any individual piece of evidence—the surface temperature record or the climate models—they all have some uncertainties associated with them. But when I look at it, it seems like everything's pointing in the same direction, and I find that pretty convincing. I guess Dick doesn't."
Lindzen has been researching the Earth's climate since the 1960s. He is credited with doing fundamental work in atmospheric dynamics. In 1977, he was elected into the geophysics section of the National Academy of Sciences. His former graduate students describe him as fiercely intelligent, with a deep contrarian streak.
Because of his credentials, the scientific community took heed of his early arguments against climate modeling and global warming in general.
"I think his point was legitimate, at the time—the models really hadn't been tested very thoroughly," said Miller. "But there's been a lot of improvement, I think, in large part in response to his criticism. The upshot, at least from my point of view, was that I ended up pretty convinced the models were actually doing the right thing."
But Lindzen's complaint wasn't with the models' performance or their development. He dismisses the very idea of climate modeling as a scientific endeavor.
"It's a kind of replacement for theory," Lindzen said. "We're finding students taking the model developed by someone else—never tested by them—and just turning knobs and calling that research. That's akin to using a Ouija board."