Richard Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist. He is a former senior fellow of the Cato Institute, and has a page on the Heartland Institute’s website. From 1983 to his retirement in 2013, he worked as the Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and previously taught Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard University.
On Climate Change
In 2021, Lindzen wrote “China Warming” for Tablet Magazine, where . Lindzen argued that despite the many calls to action “the increase in C02 in the atmosphere continues unabated.” Lindzen also says that claims that rising sea levels and extreme weather are tied to global warming“ are based on the illegitimate cherry picking of starting dates for the trends.”
In this same article, Lindzen says that one would think that in the face of “an existential threat over which we, in fact, have almost no influence, it seems obvious that the correct policy would be to increase resilience against disasters.”
During Donald Trump’s presidency in 2017 InsideClimate News wrote an article titled, “Climate Contrarian Gets Fact-Checked by MIT Colleagues in Open Letter to Trump.” The article notes that Lindzen sent a letter to Trump “urging him to pull the United States out of the United Nations’ climate change regime because global climate action is ‘not scientifically justified’.” In reply, Lindzen wrote a letter echoing the statements made in his letter to Trump and criticizing MIT. He also included a petition which he claimed was signed by qualified scientists, but was in truth mostly made up of climate change deniers.
An International Business Times’ 2015 article titled “Climate change: Richard Lindzen and the ‘cult’ of global warming,” discusses Lindzen’s remarks made on a radio show. The article quotes him as saying about climate change, “As with any cult, once the mythology of the cult begins falling apart, instead of saying, oh, we were wrong, they get more and more fanatical. I think that’s what’s happening here. Think about it.”
See Also
Willie Soon
Climate of Denial