Talk:Richard Lindzen

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More information about this article... The following comments have been left for this page: This page needs review by the Biography Project. Rather than simply presenting Richard Lindzen, is it filled with opinions for and against, mostly against, Linzden's views on Climate Change....refer to the Talk portion, where arguments go on forever, about Climate Change. Lindzen is a senior scientist, with a long and successful career having made many real lasting contributions to mankind's knowledege in his field. His biography has been hijacked by those who wish only to attack his position on Climate Change, with which they disagree. There is a silly and self-serving segment about "The Bet" - in which a minor player in climate science has attempted to make himself famous, with some success, by "betting" senior scientists about their personal views on Climate Change -- kind of like a bantam boxer from the local YMCA challenging Ali to a fight to make a name for himself -- just on the challenge itself, not a real fight -- like these much publicized bets rather than a public debate, discussion of the science involved, or heaven forbid, doing some real science to disprove Lindzen's hypothesis. Mr. Annan would like to be famous, he ought to try making some substantial contributions to science, not just making a cheap grab at his allotted fifteen minutes. This whole section ought to be deleted. (edit)

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Help with this template Comments: edit – history – watch – refresh This page needs review by the Biography Project. Rather than simply presenting Richard Lindzen, is it filled with opinions for and against, mostly against, Linzden's views on Climate Change....refer to the Talk portion, where arguments go on forever, about Climate Change. Lindzen is a senior scientist, with a long and successful career having made many real lasting contributions to mankind's knowledege in his field. His biography has been hijacked by those who wish only to attack his position on Climate Change, with which they disagree. There is a silly and self-serving segment about "The Bet" - in which a minor player in climate science has attempted to make himself famous, with some success, by "betting" senior scientists about their personal views on Climate Change -- kind of like a bantam boxer from the local YMCA challenging Ali to a fight to make a name for himself -- just on the challenge itself, not a real fight -- like these much publicized bets rather than a public debate, discussion of the science involved, or heaven forbid, doing some real science to disprove Lindzen's hypothesis. Mr. Annan would like to be famous, he ought to try making some substantial contributions to science, not just making a cheap grab at his allotted fifteen minutes. This whole section ought to be deleted.

[edit] CNN quotation

"You have these news events where people are taken to Glacier National Park or to Alaska, and they are shown a glacier that has been retreating," says Professor Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The assumption is it's global warming.

"But then you look at the markers and you see that the retreat began around 1820. That's not due to global warming, at least not from man." http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1997/global.warming/hot.air/

Ed Poor

[edit] Reduction of career

Poor RL. His entire career reduced to greenhouse skepticism... (William M. Connolley 22:51 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC))

Frankly, I will remember him as the distinguished professor who developed the Earth Adaptive Iris theory. which will at the end of the day, become a milestone in attribution of climate change while others waste their time in Antarctica melting ice.

There is evidence against Iris Hypothesis. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Iris/iris2.html.

[edit] Most scientists?

Revert comment re his views disagreeing: this is undisputed factual information and there was no reason to remove it. (William M. Connolley 16:13, 11 Aug 2003 (UTC))

(SEWilco 06:54, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)) "Most scientists" is opinion, not factual.

This leaves "his views diverge from those who believe otherwise".

Tautology removed.

This leaves the factual "He frequently speaks out against the global warming theory."

Stop playing silly word games. William M. Connolley 16:55, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC))

[edit] Lindzen considers himself embattled

To SEWilco: If you had read anything Lindzen has written other than sound bites extracted for use in cranks' web pages, you would know that he considers himself an embattled figure within his own profession. He wouldn't be paraded about by "greenhouse sceptics", if he wasn't the only good meteorologist they could find. (Anon)

(cutting in) This is precisely correct: he *is* embattled and he *is* the only figure of any stature that the skeptics have. Which is precisely why saying "his views diverge from most other climate scientists" is correct ((William M. Connolley 16:55, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)).

I have known his work for about 30 years, though I don't know him personally. He has had a brilliant career, and his work on non-climate related subjects, such as atmospheric tides, is very highly regarded. But science isn't run on the guru system, and he simply cannot convince his colleagues about his climate ideas. (Just try to find a paper supporting his climate ideas in the scientific literature.) As William (a climate researcher of good reputation himself) pointed out, it's a pity to see a great scientist reduced to a one-trick pony in the popular press. BTW, he doesn't seem to think much of other "global warming sceptics". He never mentions their work in his writings, and he avoids contact with them. He wants approval from his peers, not "sceptics." (Anon)

Lindzen's Wall Street Journal op ed of July 19, 2006 mentions (adversely) the work of social scientist Naomi Oreskes of University of San Diego (correction: UC San Diego, not University of San Diego) and (favorably) the countervailing work of social scientist Benny Peiser of Moore University of Liverpool. He also mentions commentary of climate scientist Greg Holland. Joe 17:22, 23 July 2006 (UTC) 23 July 2006

[edit] If Lindzen agrees he is not mainstream, accept that

If Lindzen agrees that he is non-mainstream, then we're done. Michael Behe, to pick another controversial scientist, does, so I'd expect he would too. Martin 23:00, 1 Sep 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Testimony reference

I hope it will become clear that the designation, ‘skeptic,’ simply confuses an issue where popular perceptions are based in significant measure on misuse of language as well as misunderstanding of science. Indeed, the identification of some scientists as ‘skeptics’ permits others to appear ‘mainstream’ while denying views held by the so-called ‘skeptics’ even when these views represent the predominant views of the field. [1]

Lindzen thinks he is mainsteam SEWilco 22:17, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

(William M. Connolley 19:11, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)) Very good. But inconsistent with "Lindzen considers himself embattled"... if he is only saying what the mainstream/majority says, why is he embattled? The asnwer, of course, is that he *isnt* saying what the mainstream is saying.

The quote has Lindzen saying that mainstream/skeptic language is unhelpful and confusing, which is quite different from Lindzen saying that he is mainstream. Martin 13:52, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

The language issue is the subject. The end, from the last mention of skeptics, says they are mainstream. SEWilco 05:13, 22 Sep 2003 (UTC)

He could be "emabattled" because he is discriminating against when applying for funding. His ideas could still be mainstream thought.

[edit] Lindzen testimony with visuals

Talking of which, can someone find a version of Lindzen's evidence that:

1. includes both the visuals (preferably appropriately marked as such)
2. doesn't include extraneous editorial markup?

Martin 16:53, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

[edit] naming conventions

According to wikipedia:naming conventions, this should be at Richard Lindzen... Martin 22:51, 1 Sep 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Divergence of views

his views diverge from those of most atmospheric scientists.

Please provide a reference cataloguing the views of "most atmospheric scientists" -- otherwise, I have to conclude that Anonymous is just GUESSING that most atmospheric scientists' views are divergent from Lindzen's.

As I recall, one of the hottest points in the whole global warming controversy is whether or not there is a "scientific consensus" on the global warming hypothesis. Democrats, like Al Gore, said that "the science is settled" -- but the only polls I've heard about indicate otherwise.

Please provide evidence that someone, somewhere -- aside from the WikiCommunity -- agrees with your POV, and we can put the statement back in: Mr. X of organization Y says Z. Otherwise, it's probably better to omit it. Ed Poor

Kindly refer to http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-oreskes24jul24,0,823343.story

Quoting the author, Naomi Oreskes [History of Science professor at UC San Diego]:

Papers that continue to rehash arguments that have already been addressed and questions that have already been answered will, of course, be rejected by scientific journals, and this explains my findings. Not a single paper in a large sample of peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 refuted the consensus position, summarized by the National Academy of Sciences, that "most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."

And again:

In 1988, the World Meteorological Assn. and the United Nations Environment Program joined forces to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action. The panel has issued three assessments (1990, 1995, 2001), representing the combined expertise of 2,000 scientists from more than 100 countries, and a fourth report is due out shortly. Its conclusions — global warming is occurring, humans have a major role in it — have been ratified by scientists around the world in published scientific papers, in statements issued by professional scientific societies and in reports of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society and many other national and royal academies of science worldwide. Even the Bush administration accepts the fundamental findings. As President Bush's science advisor, John Marburger III, said last year in a speech: "The climate is changing; the Earth is warming."

"Not disputing" doesn't mean "agreeing". Editorials and Op-Ed writings are not any more reliable than are decisions by government panels. One would do well to take it all with a grain of salt. Sln3412 04:08, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

There is virtually no disagreement that both the Earth is getting warmer, and that there is more CO2 and methane is in the atmosphere. There is not really any disagreement as to that humans affect the environment. There is not really any disagreement that we should do "something" about all of it. There is disagreement as to what should be done, how much should be spent, and the specifics of how much what influences what else. Climate science, or more specifically politically charged climate science policy decisions, are not really any different than any other politically charged subject or policy debate. Or any different than anything else involving money, or direction, or funding, or world-view based upon opinion or culture or....

There is disagreement as to exactly what scientists think, but less as to what they say; which is in general qualified but usually benign and neutral statements. There is also disagreement as to the focus, agenda and views of publications such as Science and Nature. In addition, there is disagreement on the policy and position of organizations such as the IPCC, variations of such involving the difference between policy summary sections and the reports themselves. Lastly, the nature and rhetoric of the press in general has also been called into question. While these are all as they are, and don't mean anything in and of themselves. The disagreements don't really speak to what a consensus (or lack thereof) or anything else really is in reality, other than as a battle between conflicting ideologies.

This seems more about sociology than about science. Lindzen summed it up pretty well I think when he wrote: "Such weak predictions feed and contribute to what I have already described as a societal instability that can cascade the most questionable suggestions of danger into major political responses with massive economic and social consequences. I have already discussed some of the reasons for this instability: the existence of large cadres of professional planners looking for work, the existence of advocacy groups looking for profitable causes, the existence of agendas in search of saleable rationales, and the ability of many industries to profit from regulation, coupled with an effective neutralization of opposition. It goes almost without saying that the dangers and costs of those economic and social consequences may be far greater than the original environmental danger. That becomes especially true when the benefits of additional knowledge are rejected and when it is forgotten that improved technology and increased societal wealth are what allow society to deal with environmental threats most effectively. The control of societal instability may very well be the real challenge facing us. " --Sln3412 02:07, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Currents of thought

Maybe what we should do then, is take another step back from it all. Rather than try to "settle" the issue of who's right and who's wring, I suggest we DESCRIBE the views of any major advocates or other sources we can locate. Professor Lindzen's name keeps popping up, so I consider him "major" enough for an article.

As to whether his views are "mainstream" or not, without a reliable survey of scientists' views, I don't see how we can say who or what is mainstream. So how can we say that someone is or is not part of the mainstream?

Even in a topic like evolution, where surveys clearly show where people are at -- biologists virtually all take a Darwinist stance; while only about 1 out of 10 US laymen do -- it's not really clear what the "mainstream" view is. Public schools tend to take the biologists' side, even though Creationists and other evolution skeptics are an 85% to 90% majority. Maybe there isn't any MAIN stream at all, but two strong currents fighting each other, eh?

In conclusion, I think the Wikipedia should be very careful about identifying any view as "mainstream" or "consensus". --Uncle Ed 14:25, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

(Catskul 2004 Feb 15) -- " biologists virtually all take a Darwinist stance; while only about 1 out of 10 US laymen do" What? Where do you get that number... I know very few people who take a Creationist stance. " evolution skeptics are an 85% to 90% majority" Again.. what? Where did you find these numbers? I hope you havent put your trust in the numbers from a fundamentalist Christian website.

(William M. Connolley 20:14, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)) The mainstream is represented by IPCC, but the chances of getting you to accept that are small, so...

In "He frequently speaks out against the popular environmentalist position that significant global warming is caused by humans (see anthropogenic global warming)." I've replaced "popular environmentalist" with IPCC: since this clearly *is* the IPCC position. It also neatly encapsulates the other change I was going to make, ie swapping "he disgarees with the consensus" to "he disagrees with IPCC".

is -> was: ch 7 is in the past...

I've stripped a lot out of "IPCC Summary does not match full report" section since its (a) dodgy and (b) better on the IPCC pages, where (I think) the existing text covers it.

(Catskul 2004 Feb 13) -- I removed the letter to the mayor section, as it is unsubstantiated. Furthermore, person composing the section arbitrarily picked a model which to compare Lindzens claim. I found the claim in one of his published articles (which are available on his website) and he in fact states the specific model to which he is refering, which by no supprise is not the same model which has a wikipedia article.

(William M. Connolley 17:08, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)) Unsubstantiated? Rubbissh. Its well referenced. Unlike what you've written above, which has none. As to the models used: if L wants to write articles saying "out of date climate models show results that are not up to date", then thats fine, but if he writes "models show..." it will be assumed that he (as an IPCC paricipant) is talking about state-of-the-art models - so it should be pointed out (again, by hard references) that he is correct. You are using NPOV to try to censor stuff you disagree with.

(Catskul 2004 Feb 15) -- Do you claim that the IPCC model that you have linked to is the only contemporary model which makes predictions of average temperature rise? It seems that only if you do, could you claim that you know which model he was refering to. At most, without knowing which models he was referring to, you can only jump on the fact that he was (possibly intentionally?) ambiguous with which models he was comparing to. Also, the wikipedia link which is the only one you originally had is irrlevant because we cant use it to confirm or refute whether or not Lindzens claims were false. The original Letter to Mayor section did not have any hard references.
Furthermore upon google'ing around this letter, I found this [2] which seems to contain some climate models which he may have been referring to. When I have time to read it in depth, I may attempt to merg this information into the Letter to Mayor section

(William M. Connolley 21:32, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)) No, several other models also make similar predictions. So when Lindzen says "models" (note the S: not just one model) get it wrong by a factor of 2-3, he is being deliberately misleading. L is trying to say that GCMs get it wrong, by referring to out-of-date models, whereas (as he perfectly well knows) the best models get it right. I didn't find your models in your tech ref above: could you be more precise?

(Catskul 2004 Feb 15) -- The reference has mention of some "Canadian" and "Hadley" models. I am not familiar with them, but it seems like something to consider he may have been referring to. Also "Without urgent action, average temperatures in the state could rise by 6 to 10 degrees during this century" -- from original op-ed piece which lindzen was responding to. It is quite possible that he was referring to what ever model the mayors 6-10 degree prediction used. Furthermore criticizing current models would be rather irrelivant as any one which would be still be being considered would have taken in to account all current data... That is to say It would be *fitted* to all up-to-date data, and therefore not really making predictions.

(William M. Connolley 22:24, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)) Hadley would be hadcm3, is the one referred to in the IPCC link. You could have found this out yourself (link http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-4.htm leads you to http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/450.htm#fig127 which leads you to look up Stott in the reference list http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/473.htm from where you could have found Hadley Centre. But while a direct chain I admit its not so easy for a non-expert to follow. However, all that is irrelevant. L is saying that models - with an s - overpredict warming by a factor of 2-3. L is perfectly well aware that this isn't true for the best models. He is deliberately being misleading (and note that I *don't* say that in the article - that *would* be POV - all I'm sying is that L's statement is wrong).

You're starting a red herring with "*fitted*" - L doesn't complain about that, lets stick to what he says.

ps: have you considered creating a user page?

(Catskul 2004 Feb 15) -- What would be his motovation for being deliberately misleading. He is not a lobbiest for Texico or a politician. What would he have to gain? Saying that a scientist is being deliberately misleading is a rather serious accusation.

(William M. Connolley 09:42, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)) Its my personal opinion. I can see no other explanation (other than carelessness, a slight possibility).

Skipping points, I think that the models are fitted is relevant. Of course he is not taking issue with the fact that they are fitted. If they didnt fit the data then they would be useless. Attempting to criticize current accepted models on the basis of that they dont fit the data would then be a paradox. Therefore its not a red herring.

"fitting" of models is a topic, for discussion if you like, but not relevant here. Lets try to keep the discussion clean not muddied.

(What is a user page? Do you mean about myself ?)

Yes indeed. Go to the "page history" and click, if you like, on me. Now go back, and click on you, and put something in...

[edit] Hysterical Censorship by The Usual Suspects

I see that certain individuals simply cannot stand anything that interrupts their own private view of the universe... I am returning the Lindzen quote because it quite eloquently sums up his view on the IPCC and happens to be the main reason why people outside his own professional circle have even heard of him.

I'd love to hear anyone try to argue why this quote shouldn't be included.

There is also some questionable writing in the old version, who starts sentances with "Indeed,"? It sounds bad.

I'm also reverting some other good changes back that were ousted for no good reason.--JonGwynne 03:34, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Biased Article

I find the entire tone of this article to be very biased. It seems that Mr. Lindzen's views are dismissed my many for dissenting from the popular view of global warming. Rather than dispute his findings, he appears to be attacked with innuendo.

I don't know if I'd call this article "very biased," but it is pretty clear that the authors of the article disagree with Lindzen. SkipSmith 01:38, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree, this is completely unacceptable for an encyclopedia entry. The number of implied ad hominem fallacies is reminiscent of the playground fights I had when I was 6.

I really don't understand what the deal is with the whole man-made global warming crowd, it is as if nobody sees the 1000lbs gorilla (i.e. the 500-800 year lag with which C02 levels follow temperature changes, clearly indicating the direction of causality). Now, I'm by no means a climate expert, but I do know a thing or two about statistical modeling (i.e. time series analysis in this case) and the simple fact that C02 is related to temperature via a LAG, clearly STATISTICALLY REJECTS the hypothesis that global warming is man-made (via emissions). Or perhaps our medieval industrial production is to blame (so we should perhaps revert our tech level to prehistoric times, in a bid to 'stop' global warming). By the way, if 'consensus' was the right way to develop scientific views, we would still be scared of falling off the earth. Vidstimac (talk) 10:33, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

While CO2 is lagging temperature rises over geological timescales, it can be proven that this is not the case now. Sorry. See Suess effect. Further the CO2 that you are talking about, would come from the Oceans - and its also provable that the Oceans do not act as a source - but rather acts as sink (removing ~50% of emissions) See: Ocean acidification. --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 16:16, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

You're right. CO2 has twice increased while temperatures have not risen, so CO2 is leading and not lagging. But published studies are needed. -- SEWilco (talk) 16:43, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

First off, it cannot be 'proved' using the Suess effect. As far as I can see, it is nothing more than a hypothetical mechanism. Methodologically speaking, posing a theory cannot prove another theory. If the oposite were the case, it would have been 'proved' already (I heard there was some $120000 prize for that). On the Ocean's, you're absolutely right, but how do we know that curren rises in CO2 level aren't primarily caused by stuff that happened a while ago? We don't...

Second, given that none of this has definetly been proven, it is completely preposterous that we are spending billions of $$$ in research aimed at 'saving the planet' (read: paying the mortgages for a bunch of opportunistic academics), while other much worse problems such as HIV/AIDs (I guess the death tolls there are 'proven') are in dire need of more funding. Hell, we could even spend the money on getting diahrea pills to infants in Africa, we know THAT saves lives.

Finally, statistically speaking, we simply do not have enough datapoints to establish your claim. Run a time series regression (lagged CO2 variable, and a variable for anthropogenic CO2) on ALL the data on CO2 and temperature we have (geohistorical series). No way in hell that your test will yield a significant result for human influence; THERE IS JUST NOT ENOUGH DATA GIVEN THE ENORMOUS VARIATION IN ALL THE VARIABLES INVOLVED. There is just speculation....

Now, I strongly agree with anybody who states that we should try to conserve energy. (in the West! not the developing world, people are actually dying there because of a lack of 'energy', and I put people above trees and critters, any day) For that reason I simply don't drive, but bike to the university every day, while I can easily afford the former. But this shouldn't be done at all costs! I think we have a word for taking speculations and presenting them as truth in order to get people to do what we believe they should do; it's called propaganda.

Coming back to the topic of the wiki entry. What I see here, is the (subtle, but certainly present) slandering of a respected researcher like Lindzen (that's why I checked out the discussion in the first place), for simply posing direly needed critical questions. I doubt he disagrees with the need for sustainable development, but the man is simply doing what is he is hired to do; knock down unscientific bogus that is being blown way out of proportions. Nobody is saving any planet by defaming him for this. In fact, once this scare has warn off (like for example the Acid rain scare... the Danes are setting up some very nice experiments for the space-ray-cloud hypothesis a.t.m.), the planet will be in much more peril than it is now. Remember the kid who yelled 'Wolf'?

This is what scares me the most. Vidstimac (talk) 18:53, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Reverts

Sorry - I forgot to explain my reverts on the main page.[3] I reverted because ScottSA didn't explain his deletion, and the material appears verifiable and notable. TheronJ 19:14, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Point of view that Lindzen is wrong

I cut two sections which argue directly that Lindzen is wrong:

National Academy of Sciences panel Lindzen served on an 11-member panel [4] organized by the National Academy of Sciences. The panel's report, titled Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions[5], has been widely cited.

The first paragraph of the Summary for policymakers (SPM) states,

"Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability."[6]

However, while the full text does warn that 20 years is too short to estimate long term trends, this does not qualify their statement about greenhouse gases causing warming as Lindzen implies. In fact, it is a warning about the satellite data, which at the time the report was written did not show much warming. Here is the context in which the warning about long-term trends occurred:

Although warming at Earth's surface has been quite pronounced during the past few decades, satellite measurements beginning in 1979 indicate relatively little warming of air temperature in the troposphere. The committee concurs with the findings of a recent National Research Council report, which concluded that the observed difference between surface and tropospheric temperature trends during the past 20 years is probably real, as well as its cautionary statement to the effect that temperature trends based on such short periods of record, with arbitrary start and end points, are not necessarily indicative of the long-term behavior of the climate system.

All of the above needs to be attributed to the person making the argument. Otherwise it violates Wikipedia:No original research. --Uncle Ed 19:32, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Ed, thats pretty feeble. You've cut text that is unarguably sourced, for the reason that it points out inconsistencies in L's position. If L is making out-of-context quotes, its quite in order for wiki to point that out. William M. Connolley 19:38, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Really? Where in the policy pages does it say that Wikipedia itself is allowed to assert that a person has made out-of-context quotes? I thought that was called Wikipedia:Advocacy and was therefore a violation of Wikipedia:NPOV. --Uncle Ed 21:16, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

The page doesn't assert that. What are you talking about? William M. Connolley 21:40, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Dr. C., have you been getting enough sleep lately? :-) You just said that "wiki" was "quite in order" to point out that "L is making out-of-context quotes". --Uncle Ed 14:56, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

The L page *doesn't* assert he has made OOC quotes William M. Connolley 21:13, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Then why did you say it was "quite in order" to do that?

You also said that "it points out inconsistencies in L's position". Isn't that a violation of WP:OR? --Uncle Ed 15:50, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

This is getting a bit desperate... the "points out" refers to the text quoted. Look, admit it, L has been misleading; why try to rescue him? William M. Connolley 17:49, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Who's trying to rescue him? If he's been misleading, then either:

1. A named source can easily be found who says "Lindzen was misleading about X"; or,
2. Wikipedia itself can endorse the view that Lindzen was misleading.

Agreed? --Uncle Ed 15:56, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

In a great number of important ways, the summary for policymakers isn't the same as the full report.

[edit] The bet

I deleted some rather inaccurate stuff. Lindzen's claim that climate scientists think that temperature should be increasing by 0.3C/decade is a trivially incorrect straw man (check the TAR). His offer of a bet which will only lose if this nonexistent prediction turns out to be a substantial underestimate can in no way be honestly considered "splitting the difference" (if you disagree, please explain what difference is being split).Jdannan 04:22, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Verifiability, not truth, my man.  ;) If Reason reported that Lindzen said X, it's not really our place not to report "Lindzen said X" because we believe that X is not true. (I have no problem with William's solution of adding a paragraph saying "Y", however) TheronJ 11:05, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

It is also not our place to report every dishonest statement that L has ever made ("verifiable" or not), or else doubtless this article would be rather larger.Jdannan 03:51, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

If there's a section about the bet between Annan and Lindzen and Lindzen has made a public comment about the bet, his comment is verifiable and notable, AFAICT. William, Ed, what do you guys think? TheronJ 11:23, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, you're arguing with James Annan, who presumably knows something about it... William M. Connolley 11:39, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Holy cow, I didn't even put that together. Hi James. I would have been a little less flippant if I realized who you were, but we're still kind of stuck with what Lindzen has said publicly versus what you have said. Are there any other sources we can look at? Thanks, TheronJ 13:19, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I think it's ok now. Note to self: don't start editing controversial articles just before going on holiday!Jdannan 20:44, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Are there any real encyclopedic editors in here? This whole section about "The Bet" is just a personal attack on Lindzen by Annan, and should be removed in its entirety. Science is not settled by childish "bets" and the public is not enlightened by knowing whether or not a senior scientist of Lindzen's stature would make a personal bet about climate change with James Annan. It is just so much schoolyard taunting and recording the silly story for all time in an encyclopedia doesn't make it any more significant. If you want to be famous Mr. Annan, get on with your work.

Both James Annan and Lindzen are climate scientists - and betting on scientific issues is actually not new. But lets assume that you are right - that Annan did it to attack Lindzen. That still doesn't make it unencyclopedic, its just part of controversy. (Btw. Lindzen was the one to suggest a bet) --Kim D. Petersen 00:21, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Kim--- I am not sure Annan qualifies as a "climate scientist" in the same way Lindzen does - Annan's Wiki entry reads "James Annan is a scientist involved in climate prediction. He is a member of the Global Warming Research Program at Frontier Research Centre for Global Change which is associated with the Earth Simulator in Japan. He also has views on disc brakes for bicycles.....He is most known for considering bets against climate sceptics."

What Annan's acknowledged level of expertise is a very open question. Lindzen, on the other hand, is a world-renown scientist who has made major contributions to human knowledge. Annan is a bit-part player at best and his personal "climate-bet hobby-horse" isn't all that interesting and certainly is neither newsworthy (well, maybe worth a comment on Saturday Night Live) nor significant to Lindzen's biography.

It may well be worth a mention in some Wiki article on the overall "climate debate" or in Annan's entry. BTW - It is not verifiable that Lindzen "was the one to suggest a bet" -- the only reference is Ronald Bailey's 2004 Reason article [ http://www.reason.com/news/show/34939.html ] in which Bailey states "Richard Lindzen says he's willing to take bets that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now." In a court of law "Bailey says he says" is hearsay and not admissible. Whether Bailey meets the encyclopedic content requirement of a reliable source is questionable. There are not writings by Lindzen, that I have been able to find, in which he makes such a suggestion himself.

Yes, there have been "scientific bets" made in the past - for the same reasons - usually a bit-player trying to gain a name for himself attacking a famous or established scientists - or sometimes between long-standing rivals. None of these bets advanced the cause of science - they only generated publicity - and certainly no bet made on "how it will all turn out in X years in the future" will advance the cause of science nor will it add to human knowledge.

I maintain - delete this Bet Section and/or move it somewhere appropriate - it is clearly not appropriate here.

KipHansen 03:34, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Academic writings vs. popular writings

Lindzen is best known to the public for his skepticism about anthropogenic global warming as reflected in Wall Street Journal Op-Eds, etc. Is this refelected in his academic research at all? I.e. do any of his academic papers or preprints make a case in this direction (like say McKitrick)? Crust 19:53, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Not much... at least not that I can think of. He had the "iris hypothesis" I suppose... Chou MD, Lindzen RS Comments on "Examination of the decadal tropical mean ERBS nonscanner radiation data for the iris hypothesis" JOURNAL OF CLIMATE 18 (12): 2123-2127 JUN 15 2005 is him complaining that people don't believe it... ; Zurita-Gotor P, Lindzen RS Baroclinic equilibration and the maintenance of the momentum balance. Part I: A barotropic analog JOURNAL OF THE ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES 61 (13): 1469-1482 JUL 2004 is more typical; Lindzen RS, Giannitsis C Reconciling observations of global temperature change GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS 29 (12): Art. No. 1583 JUN 15 2002 is him embarsassing himself by failing to realise that the upper air series were wrong in 2002: It is suggested that the much publicized discrepancy between observed surface global mean temperature and global mean atmospheric temperature from 1979 to the present may be due to.... I guess that counts as being skeptical, if you know what you're looking for William M. Connolley 20:27, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed reply. So it sounds like his public skepticism is more or less independent of his own research (unlike say McKitrick). Crust 20:44, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I think William is wrong here. He's (Lindzen) done stuff on volcanoes claiming to show that climate sensitivity is very low (but this was with an extremely simple model: more complex ones with realistic sensitivities agree closely with the obs). There was also a paper claiming that the ocean warming didn't indicate much if any support for existing models. IIRC, he has a web page with all his papers where these can easily be found.Jdannan 22:33, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

You calling me wrong, punk? OK, maybe I am. In fact I wrote the "not much" before looking up the papers, and was surprised by how many of them were almost overtly skeptical. I didn't see the volcanoes one, though - is that from a way back? William M. Connolley 07:25, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Lindzen and Giannitsis 1998 (184 on this page: http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/PublicationsRSL.html) may be the most recent. He may have given up on this line of argument once it became clear that more sophisticated models can reproduce realistic volcanic cooling with sensitivity of 2-4C or thereabouts (his simple model needs S<1 or something).Jdannan 10:31, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

That's interesting that he is or was a skeptic about volcanic cooling (or at least proposed a model in which there is a little volcanic cooling). In fairness to WMC, I meant skepticism about anthropogenic global warming; presumably skepticism about volcanic cooling is pretty much unrelated. Crust 20:38, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

You are misundserstanding. He is using the cooling to estimate climate sensitivity William M. Connolley 21:35, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Ah, I see, thanks. (His simple model was using volcanoes to estimate sensitivity to forcings in general not just sensitivity to volcanoes.) Crust 15:47, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Model fitting"

This issue was brought up earlier but called a 'red herring' (tut, tut, William). However, I recall watching a documentary a couple of years ago where Lindzen himself discussed the running of models constructed, in part, from historic temperature and CO2 data, over past time scales to see if they 'predicted' the observed temperature changes. When, unsurprisingly, their 'predictions' matched the observations, this is commonly cited as 'validation' of the models (and the underlying theories, presumably). Lindzen called this practice "at best sloppy, at worst fradulent" (I paraphrase). His basic point was that only when models are able to predict FUTURE temperature changes can they be considered valid (and so there would always be a time-lag between development and validation of a few years). This would seem to support his use of the predictions of older models regarding recent temperature changes to critique their validity (as they are predicting the future, given that whilst the changes have occured, they are not built into the model). I'm a layman on this, so don't beat up on me if I'm off base (don't know how to sign in either).—Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.10.109.131 (talk • contribs) 18:24, 6 February 2007

[edit] Please reword this unclear part or remove this original analysis (I don't know which it is)

"this does not qualify their statement about greenhouse gases causing warming as Lindzen implies." -- a statement defended (written?) by William M. Connolley

"We are quite confident ... that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth" -- Lindzen, WSJ, 2001.

love, raiph 04:06, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Do we really want his letter to his hometown mayor?

This is supposed to be an encyclopedia, guys.

Nominate this section for expedited removal. Comments?

Cheers, Pete Tillman 18:55, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Removed section, Pete Tillman 18:51, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Why shouldn't it be included? (restoring during discussion) --Lee Vonce 04:37, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

It strikes me as absurd to have a section in an encyclopedia article quoting a letter to this fellow's mayor. I suppose it's to illustrate his point, but isn't there something he's published that would serve? Cheers, Pete Tillman 01:33, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I believe the letter itself was published. --Lee Vonce 02:34, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The Scientific Community is Not Impartial

What I believe Lindzen has been saying, which I believe to be true in science, industry, academia, and politics, is that the ability to be published, to be tenured, to be promoted and to receive funding is a function of being 'politically correct'. As he states, the reason there is not more research, more papers, more recognized authorities that may provide different insights into climate change is that they can't get funded, published, or promoted.

The academic community has traditionally been one of the most intolerant. Lindzen escapes only because he was tenured and respected before global warming, and in a tenured chair by then. More recent examples include the Columbia protest to the 'Minuteman' illegal immigration prevention group and the general response to the latest book on the Middle East by for US President Jimmy Carter.

I would like to see this article enhanced with a more comprehensive piece on his overall research and contribution throughout his career.

This is his biography on the MIT site:

Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability. His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity.

He has made major contributions to the development of the current theory for the Hadley Circulation, which dominates the atmospheric transport of heat and momentum from the tropics to higher latitudes, and has advanced the understanding of the role of small scale gravity waves in producing the reversal of global temperature gradients at the mesopause. He pioneered the study of how ozone photochemistry, radiative transfer and dynamics interact with each other.

He is currently studying the ways in which unstable eddies determine the pole to equator temperature difference, and the nonlinear equilibration of baroclinic instability and the contribution of such instabilities to global heat transport. He has also been developing a new approach to air-sea interaction in the tropics, and is actively involved in parameterizing the role of cumulus convection in heating and drying the atmosphere.

He has developed models for the Earth's climate with specific concern for the stability of the ice caps, the sensitivity to increases in CO2, the origin of the 100,000 year cycle in glaciation, and the maintenance of regional variations in climate. In cooperation with colleagues and students, he is developing a sophisticated, but computationally simple, climate model to test whether the proper treatment of cumulus convection will significantly reduce climate sensitivity to the increase of greenhouse gases.

Prof. Lindzen is a recipient of the AMS's Meisinger, and Charney Awards, and AGU's Macelwane Medal. He is a corresponding member of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, a member of the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and a Fellow of the AAAS1. He is a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Ph.D., '64, S.M., '61, A.B., '60, Harvard University)

I broke it into paragraphs for easier reading. —

The preceding comment was added by DavidNJ (talk • contribs) 15:38, 4 March 2007 (UTC).

I agree with everything you said. I'm not sure we can include material taken directly from another website but I would also like to see some more discussion about his career. It seems too easy for the AGW partisans to dismiss Lindzen because he says things they don't want to hear. --Lee Vonce 02:26, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] THE NEUTRALITY OF THIS ARTICLE DOES NOT HAVE PROBLEMS.

THE NEUTRALITY OF THIS ARTICLE DOES NOT HAVE PROBLEMS. This article is a description of somebody's idea. If the article is truthly descriptive of the person's idea. It is neutral, no matter what that person say. Even if that person's word is not neutral, it can be neutral that if the article records every words that the person has said. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dnwk (talk • contribs) 05:23, 9 March 2007 (UTC). — Dnwk (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. SkipSmith 00:47, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

I completely agree. [Mαc Δαvιs] (How's my driving?) ❖ 16:17, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Funding claims

Is there any concrete proof that Lindzen charges the amounts or has received money from the sources claimed on this article? I've tried to search the Harpers monthly website to no avail.

I think the claims from The Heat Is On website and author are not reputable sources given they have a vendetta against him because he doesn't agree with their views.

Some concrete proof from reputable media sources who don't have an axe to grind against the guy wouldn't go amiss here. Not wild accusations either, proof, i.e, receipts or genuine copies from the sources' account records proving they made payments to Professor Lindzen. --Dean1970 20:35, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

You may have to go to the paper record if you dispute whether Harpers actually published the article; otherwise it's a reputable source.Brian A Schmidt 06:43, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Still can't find anything proving these claims. Maybe from a neutral point of view (the wording of $2,500.oo a day consultancy fee pro-rata 365 days a year = 900k a year) it just struck me as a clever way of saying he is paid hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year by utility corporations, whereas in truth, he has only been hired 2-5 a year to consult!

If the media source is so reputable (thorough journalism) as to research the dollar amounts to a tee and cent, why not include how many times a year he consulted for these companies? One reason could be that he didn't consult for them too many times a year - so saying he charged "x" amount a day sounds better? --Dean1970 20:45, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copyvio / former supporter / TGGWS

I remvoed the PR section as copyvio.

Zeeboid appears to think that L is a former supporter of GW [7], apparently on the naive grounds that he once contributed to an IPCC report. But he was a skeptic then - only the septics think you have to be a True Believer to contribute.

I don't find any source for the claim that L was highly critical of the IPCC methods in TGGWS. If you have a quote, please provide it William M. Connolley 22:00, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Are you claiming that not all those who contribute to the IPCC Reports are Global Warming believers, because from what I understand from reading about the IPCC Reports, is that there is concesus. He contributed to the concesus opinion with his controbution to the IPCC report, as according to the experts, there is no diffrence between those who are on the panels and their individual opinion. The IPCC is even listed under Scientific opinion on climate change, which Lindzen has contributed to.

Have you watched TGGWS? its clear in the film. The refrence is going back, because it is clearly listed in the movie. As you have stated in the past, William, just because its not available on the internet, doesn't mean its not a reputable source.--Zeeboid 13:29, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

I added refrences to the sections you had issue with. You should have no problem with them now.--Zeeboid 13:41, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

I am indeed claiming that not all those who contribute to the IPCC Reports are Global Warming believers - those who contribute and explicitly state otherwise obviously don't agree. L contributed to, and criticised, the '95 report. He has not changed his position. L has been a skeptic since long before '95.

The quote you added from L isn't a crit of IPCC or its processes William M. Connolley 13:56, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes it is. Watch the video for the full context.--Zeeboid 14:05, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Sorry - no way is it reasonable for people to have to trawl through the full thing. As your quote goes, it isn't nearly good enough. It isn't even clear *who* he is criticising: in And to build the number up to 2,500 they have to... who is "they"? This doesn't fall under "highly critical of the methods used by the IPCC" William M. Connolley 14:09, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] You deleted the authoritative work and replaced with BS?

The bio on Lindzen was used with permission, and is correct and impartial. The comments on the WSJ article and sensorship of his views was an original review.

If you have something meaningful to add, do so. If you want to remove relevant information on an MIT professor's published research because it doesn't meet your political agenda, you should consider whether you are a scientist or a politician. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by DavidNJ (talk • contribs) 00:00, 31 March 2007 (UTC).

Hmmm - what are you talking about? If its the thing about him saying that people are being forced out of the climate science field - then its not removed.. its in the intro to the article. The stub that i removed was redundant - and from an Op-ed by Tom Harris. --Kim D. Petersen 01:20, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Connolley's Edits

I am assuming that you have not watched TGGWS video. Within the first 6mn, you can hear the quote that you are Reverting for your self, but I will provide the section in context for you.

John Christy

This claim that the PICC is the world's top 1500 or 2500 scientists, you look at the bibliographies of the people and it’s simply not true. There are quite a number of non-scientists.

Richard Lindzen

"And until the number up to 2500, they have to start taking reviewers, and government people, and so on. Anyone that ever came close to them and none of them are asked to agree. Many of them disagree."

John Christy

Those people who are specialists, but don't agree with the polemic and resign, there have been a number that I know of, they are simply put on the author list and become part of this "2500 of the world's top scientists"

Richard Lindzen

People have decided, you have to convince other people, that because no scientist disagrees, you shouldn't disagree either; but whenever you hear that in science, that’s pure propaganda.--Zeeboid 03:12, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

The quotes above have nothing to do with the methods used by the IPCC. If L was criticised their data gathering; or the method of synthesis; that would be different. And... Reiter isn't prominent; and "former IPCC scientist" doesn't mean anything William M. Connolley 08:36, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

This is relevant to the global warming controversy, because the #1 argument used by Kyoto Protocol supporters is that 'the science' of the matter is supported by the overwhelming majority of the world's climate scientists; and they say or hint that the United Nations climate panel (IPCC) has polled them all - or otherwise somehow represents a "consensus" of them.

It cost me considerable effort to get Wikipedians to agree to change the title of List of scientists opposing global warming consensus so it refers only to a "mainstream ... assessment". I was accused of "violating my probation" for this. Do you have any idea how this reflects on science as an enterprise? People are watching Wikipedia and commenting on it in public now.

I suggest we continue to move in the direction of objectivity (or at least neutrality) on controversial issues such as the Anthropogenic global warming theory and stop using redirects and article titles to hide the amount of disagreement that exists in the scientific community. --Uncle Ed 11:09, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

WP:KETTLE. As for "objectivity", you have a long record of pushing your scientifically indefensible POV on articles related to global warming, creationism, and the like as shown by arbcom decisions to which you have been subject. As for article redirects and the like, you have engaged in such behavior many times. Bottom line is that you have no standing to lecture others on these matters. Raymond Arritt 05:01, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Views on health risks of smoking

Umm. What exactly is the relevance of this information aside from an obvious attempt to somehow discredit Lindzen? The machine512 04:09, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

There's a common pattern of global warming skeptics having also denied or played down the risks of smoking, for example Steven Milloy, Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, Alexis de Tocqueville Institute and so on. Obviously, as you say, this tends to discredit their views in general, suggesting either poor judgement or conflicts of interest. The general point is more relevant to global warming controversy, so I'll add it there. JQ 06:40, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

As to your claim that their position on smoking "tends to discredit their views in general", that's a clearly POV statement. A person can take the wrong side of a thousand arguments and still be right about the 1001st. Your argument is a variation on "guilt by association". --Lee Vonce 13:39, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

POV only applies to articles, not to talk pages William M. Connolley 13:56, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

As wmc says, the article just states the facts and lets readers draw their own conclusion. In that respect Lindzen's credibility is important. He is often quoted as an authority, and in this respect the fact that he is wrong about related issues reduces the extent to which he can be relied on. JQ 19:47, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm aware that POV only applies to articles, but the fact that JQ feels that one thing discredits another is an opinion. The question of Lindzen's authority on climate matters is a separate issue and not related to his opinions of other things on which he may well not be an expert. The fact is that he is known for his expertise on climate science. Trying to muddy the water here with questions about his lay opinions about smoking doesn't serve anyone. There is certainly no need to include some reporter's opinion as to whether Lindzen does or does not relish a certain role. --Lee Vonce 21:29, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Lindzen is clearly presented as an expert by Philip Morris. Whether he's properly qualified is another matter. Many of the issues regarding inference, the appropriateness of relying on consensus views and so on are the same in both cases and most of the leading experts and thinktanks on both sides take the same view in each case, as noted above, so it could be argued that his is an expert view. JQ 21:56, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Is he? I didn't see that part. You even seem to be admitting that there's no direct claim of his expertise here by saying that "it could be argued that his is an expert view". An encyclopedia isn't a good place to argue things, but rather to report statements of fact. I also don't see any actual quotes by him. There are descriptions of statements attributed to him but no direct quotes. I think it would be better to limit the entries here to actual quotes. What do you think? --Lee Vonce 15:07, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

I agree that he isn't properly qualified here, just as the great majority of scientists quoted as global warming sceptics aren't properly qualified. However, Philip Morris wants to quote Lindzen as an expert on smoking and Exxon wants to quote, say, Bob Carter, as an expert on climate. There just isn't a deep bench when it comes to denying obvious facts. If you want to go to "list of scientists opposing global warming consensus" and argue for the deletion of all the non-experts, I'll back you up. As regards a restriction to direct quotes, I don't agree. These are verifiable sources, so unless you have reason to think Lindzen has been misrepresented, their summaries of his views should stay.JQ 22:06, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Are you seriously trying to argue that a third party's opinion of Lindzen's views on an issue are relevant here? And you haven't shown where PM cited Lindzen as an "expert on smoking". As far as I can tell, they're doing basically the same thing that they did back in the days when they used to dress actors up in a doctor's coat and make TV commercials for cigarettes. They're evidently hoping that Lindzen will lend credibility because he is a respected scientist while also hoping that people will not realize that his expertise is on global climate rather than cigarette smoking. As far as the issue of the "global warming consensus" goes, I don't care very much either way. Bob Carter's opinions carry just as much weight as IPCC industry hacks who support the consensus. An opinion is an opinion. Consensus doesn't interest me as much as, say, actual evidence to support a claim. Anyone who has to fall back on the old appeal to the consensus is just admitting that they haven't got any facts to support them. But then, that's just my opinion. --Lee Vonce 13:39, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

The article's quotation of the alleged Philip Morris article is factually incorrect. It incorrectly tries to claim that Richard Lindzen is a Philip Morris spokesman. I will attempt to correct it. I find that it is incorrect for the following reasons:

1. The Wikipedia article states: "In 1991, a publication by the Philip Morris corporation entitled "Passive Smoking:How Great a Hazard?" concluded with the statement...". That is false. The article in question, http://tobaccodocuments.org/pm/2046323437-3484.html?pattern=&ocr_position=&rotation=0&zoom=750&start_page=1&end_page=48, is actually an article in Consumers' Research magazine.
2. Richard Lindzen is never directly quoted in the article. The article is neither written by him nor is he an expert on tobacco smoking for Philip Morris or anyone else. It simply quotes Richard Lindzen as a critic of the misuse of science in forming public policy.

The last statement, the conclusion of the article, is the conclusion of the article's authors, not of Richard Lindzen. For a similar treatment of another quotation by a different person, see the same article but earlier on the page, where it says, "Sir Bradford Hill of Oxford University cautioned years ago that it is important to remember that all science is subject to being reinterpreted or- to being changed and modified by advancing knowledge. As newer technologies are applied to the assessment of environmental tobacco smoke, clearer understandings will evolve." The first statement, "it is important to remember that all science is subject to being reinterpreted", is a general statement about the nature of science made by Sir Bradford Hill years ago. The second statement, "As newer technologies are applied to the assessment of environmental tobacco smoke, clearer understandings will evolve" is the argument of the pro-tobacco authors of the article.

Now compare their treatment of the Richard Lindzen statements. "Richard Lindzen, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has emphasized that problems will arise where we will need to depend on scientific judgement, and by ruining our credibility now we leave society with a resource of some importance diminished. The implementation of public policies must be based on good science, to the degree that it is avail- able, and not on emotion or on political needs. Those who develop such policies must not stray from sound scientific investigations, based only on accepted scientific methodologies. Such has not always been the case with environmental tobacco smoke." Everything up to the last statement is a general paraphrase of a public figure, Richard Lindzen, about the public treatment of scientific issues in general. Its past nature is clearly stated "Richard Lindzen...has emphasized...". The last statement is the conclusion of the pro-tobacco authors of the article, not of Richard Lindzen, whom they are not even quoting directly and who is probably unaware of his being cited in some tobacco article. LaggedOnUser 01:34, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

There's been a request for the text of the Newsweek interview, which I'm posting here for research purposes, as it's hard to get to JQ 20:44, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

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Return to Headlines | FramesNo Frames Select All Headlines 1 - 1 of 1 1. The Truth About Global Warming; The forecasts of doom are mostly guesswork, Richard Lindzen argues--and he has Bush's ear. Newsweek International, 23 July 2001, 2962 words, (English) For the past five years, Richard Lindzen and his wife have summered in Paris, always staying with family or borrowing an empty apartment from a friend. This year, however, Lindzen decided to splurge. His wife found a modest but airy flat on ... More Like This

Article 1

SE Science and Technology HD The Truth About Global Warming; The forecasts of doom are mostly guesswork, Richard Lindzen argues--and he has Bush's ear. BY By Fred Guterl WC 2962 words PD 23 July 2001 SN Newsweek International SC NEWI NGC Newsweek - Print and Online GC CTGNWK ED Atlantic Edition PG 44 LA English CY Copyright (C) 2001 Newsweek Inc. All Rights Reserved.

LP

For the past five years, Richard Lindzen and his wife have summered in Paris, always staying with family or borrowing an empty apartment from a friend. This year, however, Lindzen decided to splurge. His wife found a modest but airy flat on a noisy street near the Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise. The neighborhood is not the most fashionable, but it has other qualities. When outraged citizens declared their independence from France after the war with Prussia in 1871 and the government sent in the Army to quell the rabble-rousers, the last of them held out in Belleville, a few blocks east of Lindzen's flat. This same district of Paris, he points out, also includes the Bastille. "I think it's safe to say that this area has had more than its share of defiance," he says.

TD

Lindzen doesn't seem capable of rabble-rousing. Sitting on his sofa in black-stockinged feet, he looks like a shorter, nerdier Orson Welles. He became a meteorologist back in the 1960s, when it was a backwater among the sciences. Little did he know how fashionable a weatherman could become. These days the highest levels of government consult meteorologists and other "climatologists" on one of the most urgent issues of the day, global warming. If you believe that science is a polite, orderly march to the truth, you will be surprised at how sharp the disagreements are, and at the magnitude of Dick Lindzen's defiance.

When climate scientists got on board the global-warming movement in the late 1980s, Lindzen remained steadfastly on the fringe. Back then he took issue with the notion that the earth is headed for catastrophe, and nothing has happened in a decade of climate research to convince him otherwise. With the Kyoto plan to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions effectively dead and environmentalists up in arms, Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has become the most well-respected voice of dissent. Colleagues praise his scientific work and do not assign political motives. And yet his scientific views have led him, a Democrat, into the lonely position of defending George W. Bush's Kyoto stance. "Bush is guilty of nothing more than being honest," he says. "There's no current Western leader who's as well informed on the issue as Bush, as strange as that may seem. European politicians are just using Kyoto for cheap virtue." Lindzen was one of a handful of authors of a recent study requested by the White House. After Bush's Kyoto about-face, Lindzen was summoned to Pennsylvania Avenue. Even if you accept the doomsday forecasts, he told Bush, Kyoto would hardly touch the rise in temperatures. "Kyoto would be to do nothing at great expense," he says.

Lindzen is not a complete skeptic. He acknowledges that the earth is getting warmer, and that human activity might have something to do with it. Over the past century, cars and factories have released carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the air, trapping the sun's energy and warming the atmosphere. The key question is, how warm will it get? Lindzen doesn't think scientists have a very good handle at all on how the earth's atmosphere will respond to increased levels of carbon dioxide. He doesn't think much of the half-dozen or so gigantic computer programs, or models, that simulate what the earth's climate will be like 100 years from now--and form the basis of all the predictions of doom. Whereas most models predict a warming of 3 or 4 degrees centigrade in the next 100 years, Lindzen's calculations show less than 1 degree, a figure that makes Kyoto seem downright hysterical. Most climate scientists, it's fair to say, disagree. They stick by their models, despite the flaws. "It's easy for Lindzen to criticize," says one. "But he's a theorist, not a modeler. He points out errors, but he's not the one who necessarily has to correct them." Annoying as he may be, his defiance serves as a reminder that climate scientists, despite their newfound relevance to policy and public renown, are still grappling with huge gaps in their knowledge.

Lindzen may raise his colleagues' hackles by criticizing their science, but when it comes to politics, he strikes a chord. Last week the Independent, the British newspaper, summarized the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations-sponsored group: "Global warming is happening now, caused by human actions, and threatens the Earth with disaster, the world's leading atmospheric scientists insisted yesterday." This is news to Lindzen, who literally is one of those scientists. He was coauthor of the IPCC report, but did not participate in writing the widely cited "summary for policymakers." "The 'consensus of scientists' is a very weird thing," he says. "The summary is written by 14 of the hundreds of scientists that contributed. Is that a consensus? I don't think so." Many scientists agree that the IPCC, in its zeal to build the case for doing something about global warming, plays fast and loose with the science, glossing over uncertainty and pushing its conclusions too far.

Lindzen clearly relishes the role of naysayer. He'll even expound on how weakly lung cancer is linked to cigarette smoking. He speaks in full, impeccably logical paragraphs, and he punctuates his measured cadences with thoughtful drags on a cigarette. His parents arrived in the United States from Germany in 1938, two years before his birth. His father, a bootmaker, worked in a shoe factory in Massachusetts but eventually moved his family to the Bronx in New York City to live in a Jewish community. Lindzen won a scholarship to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and tranferred to Harvard a year later. An interest in ham radio piqued his curiosity about how the atmosphere affects radio waves, and this led him to meteorology.

Lindzen's contrarian attitude about global warming first stirred in 1988. In the heat of an atypically hot summer in the United States, Sen. Al Gore held hearings in which prominent scientists raised fears of rapid warming. The IPCC was formed to assess the need for action. "I wrote a piece for the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society saying that perhaps we should go easy on this because the case wasn't strong," Lindzen recalls. "I got people telling me that perhaps, as a Democrat, I shouldn't say that." In 1989 he spoke to an Earth Day gathering at Tufts University. "I was put down immediately," he says. "Scientists can have doubts, but environmentalists can't."

In the early 1990s Lindzen was asked to contribute to the IPCC's 1995 report. At the time, he held (and still does) that untangling human influences from the natural variation of the global climate is next to impossible. When the report's summary came out, he was dismayed to read its conclusion: "The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." "That struck me as bizarre," he says. "Because without saying how much the effect was, the statement had no meaning. If it was discernible and very small, for instance, it would be no problem." Environmentalist Bill McKibbon referred to this phrase in an article in The Atlantic in May 1998: "The panel's 2,000 scientists, from every corner of the globe, summed up their findings in this dry but historic bit of understatement." In an angry letter, Lindzen wrote that the full report "takes great pains to point out that the statement has no implications for the magnitude of the effect, is dependent on the [dubious] assumption that natural variability obtained from [computer] models is the same as that in nature, and, even with these caveats, is largely a subjective matter."

This statement contains the crux of Lindzen's beef with the global-warming establishment. What is the relationship between nature, on the one hand, and the gigantic computer models that churn out climate predictions for 100 years hence? "In the scientific methodology," he says, "simulation is the weakest link. To say you've simulated something is to say very little." To appreciate why requires a brief foray into the world of climate science.

When it comes to meteorology, data can be very iffy. The United Nations specifies that thermometer readings in harsh polar climates, for instance, should be taken in a shelter that is freshly painted, of a specified height, ventilated in a certain way and so forth. When the Soviet Union fell and Siberian data collectors stopped being paid, did they continue to maintain the shelters? In the oceans, sometimes data collectors take the temperature of water drawn in a bucket over the side of a ship. Other times they put their thermometers in the water that enters the ship's engine intakes. Such inconsistent practices may have something to do with why observations show a warming at the North Pole but not at the South, while some areas even seem to be cooling. The overall warming trend of 0.6 degrees centigrade in the past 100 years is just discernible above these messy readings. "The observations are not great, but there's a consistency in the trend," Lindzen says.

Back in the 1980s, climate models were very crude simulations of the greenhouse effect. The main test of a climate model is to start sometime in the past and "predict" the present, with all the temperature swings and ice ages and so forth in between. When scientists tried this out on their early models, they got silly results, such as severe ice ages occurring in the 20th century. To avoid this kind of "drift," scientists applied a sort of fudge factor to ensure a sensible outcome. This doesn't do much good when it comes to predicting the future, which may be why 1988 predictions of rapid warming by 2000 never panned out. The average temperature hasn't climbed at all.

In recent years climate scientists have added a great deal of complexity to their models in the hope of capturing the essential behavior of the earth's climate. They have tried to account for clouds, water vapor, ocean currents, dust particles in the air (aerosols), sea ice and variations in ground cover. They have coupled the oceans to the atmosphere so that changes in one affect the other, and vice versa. Only recently have the better models, such as that of the Hadley Centre in Britain, abandoned the practice of fudging.

The change adds to the models' credibility, but does it mean they are reliable in predicting the future? It doesn't, Lindzen argues. For one thing, added complexity does not ensure that the models reflect what nature is doing. Take the case of aerosols--dust and other particles in the atmosphere. Scientists realized only a few years ago that aerosols reflect light and may exert a cooling influence; their effects are poorly understood. Putting them in climate models is essentially the same thing as adding a fudge factor. "There are no records of aerosol production before the 1960s," Lindzen says. "So you have complete freedom to adjust the amount of aerosols to make the models replicate the temperature record."

Aerosols are small potatoes when you consider the effects of clouds and water vapor. Water vapor is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide--a change of a few percentage points in the atmosphere's humidity could wipe out, or amplify, the effects of a rise in carbon dioxide. Even a doubling of carbon dioxide from preindustrial levels (which is expected to happen in 100 years if no effort is made to reduce carbon emissions) would probably, by itself, increase temperature only about 1 degree centigrade by the end of the century--warmer, to be sure, but probably short of doomsday. True catastrophe would require a helping hand from water vapor. That's exactly what most models depict.

But here's the rub: water vapor is not well understood. Models, for instance, assume that a warmer atmosphere would hold more water vapor, but it wouldn't necessarily, says Lindzen. Another wild card is the role of clouds in regulating humidity. Cumulus clouds draw moist air from the surface and carry it skyward. Some of the moisture falls back to the ground as rain, and what's left over is taken high up in the atmosphere, where it freezes into cirrus clouds. These clouds drift hundreds of miles raining ice particles into the lower atmosphere; these evaporate and raise humidity. But how much? Lindzen asserts that as the atmosphere warms, cumulus clouds will produce rain more efficiently, thereby leaving less for humidity-causing cirrus clouds. The result would be drier air. Rather than amplifying the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, this would counteract it.

Even if scientists understood climate perfectly, the models would still contain another type of error inherent in the way computers do the calculations. In an ideal world, models would account for everything, down to each molecule of water. In practice, compromises are made. The Hadley Centre's model, for instance, dices the atmosphere into 250-kilometer squares, and then crunches equations that describe scientists' best approximation of the atmosphere's aggregate behavior. Making the squares smaller would reduce error, but it's expensive: shrink the squares to 125km, and the calculation balloons 16-fold. Even so, much of what goes on at the scale of clouds is lost.

Modelers concede both types of uncertainty but insist that their predictions are still valid. "There are many things we're uncertain about in climate modeling," says David Griggs, director of climate research at Hadley. "But there are a lot of things we can say with confidence. Our estimates take all of these uncertainties into account." The IPCC report agrees: "Confidence in the ability of models to project future climate has increased." Nonsense, says Lindzen. "The argument that the models are continu-ally improving is a kind of motherhood statement that international reports al-ways make. But there's no evidence of that."

Another way of estimating how much the climate will warm is a matter of dispute. By looking at events that disrupt climate and measuring the amount of time it takes for temperatures to change in response, scientists can calculate how sensitive the global climate might be to a change in carbon dioxide. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, for instance, it spewed ash into the atmosphere, which reflected sunlight and caused a discernible cooling across the globe. Lindzen studied volcanic eruptions and found that cooling tends to kick in pretty quickly, which suggests that the climate is relatively insensitive to disruptions. From this he concludes that a doubling of carbon-dioxide levels would lead to a warming of less than 1 degree centigrade.

Case closed? Hardly. James Hansen, a climate scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, has studied the end of the most recent ice age, when temperatures rose to the level they've more or less maintained for the last 10,000 years. (The data come from ice-core samples taken in Antarctica and Greenland, an approximate record of past climate change.) He found a sensitivity consistent with a warming of 3 or 4 degrees centigrade, which jibes with current models. "Dick's idea that climate sensitivity is low is simply wrong," says Hansen. "The history of the earth proves him wrong."

In the face of such disagreement, it is difficult--for scientists and nonscientists alike--to decide who is right. Should Lindzen be discounted as some lunatic on the fringe? Or is it foolish to wish too hard for a consensus? Perhaps what's needed is a dispassionate look at the research. This is a big part of what Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber does. As director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Studies in Germany, where he oversees the work of oceanographers, meteorologists, mathematicians and biologists, he is a practiced synthesizer of disparate scientific specialties.

Schellnhuber acknowledges the difficulty of interpreting the IPCC's temperature-increase predictions for the end of the century, which range from 1.4 degrees centigrade to 5.8 degrees. "There is a certain arbitrariness," he says. "Two Japanese models, one showing a 9-degree warming and the other showing zero warming, were thrown out because they were felt to be too far outside the range. So you take all these models and average them out, and you get a 3- or 4-degree warming. What does it mean?" He shrugs. "If one model is operating on wrong principles, all of them are off."

In light of the uncertainty, Schellnhuber takes a very European view of climate policy. He favors cutting emissions, a la Kyoto, just in case the pessimistic majority is correct. He believes in consensus. "Science really comes down in the end to the scientists," he says. "You have to make your best judgment." What does he make of Lindzen? "People like him are very useful in finding the weak links in our thinking," says Schellnhuber. It may take many years to sort out just where those weak links are. But it's worth being reminded that the answers will come in their own time, no matter how badly the world wants them now.

ART Photo: HOT ZONE: (from left) Potsdam Institute's Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, deforestation in Bangladesh, glacier ice in Chile, dry earth in Thailand, winter woods in the United States Graphic: (Diagram) How the Greenhouse Effect Might End With A Whimper (Graphic omitted)

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JQ, I added a citetag on Fred Guterls quote because NewsWeek required a subscription and I thought that a 'freely available' one would be simpler, (btw, thank you for posting interview). I thought there'd be some mention of his [RL] views on smoking in that article, but as far as I can see there isn't, unless I've missed it of course. For a quote like that, particulary in light of the opening sentence of the paragraph, I think all quotes about RL should include a source. --Dean1970 12:48, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Googled using 'fred guterl' 'richard lindzen' and 'cigarette' as keywords. First hit is the wikientry. Thereafter, mainly blog forums. --Dean1970 20:33, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I've been googling 'Fred Guterl' to see if he has a personal blog (being a journalist,) so as its primary author the quote can be referenced from there. Could not find one. I'm only curious as to where the quote originated, i.e., from an article or paper, etc. I'm adding back the tag for now. --Dean1970 20:52, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

This is wrong. If you applied this rule, you wouldn't be able to cite books. There is no requirement that sources be freely available on the Internet. If you want to check the quote, and don't want to pay, you can visit a library, just as you would for a book.JQ 20:42, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Ok, hmm, if Guterl 'reported' it after the interview, to whom? Plus, does that edition of NewsWeek (if available in a library) mention the quote? Where exactly does it appear? If quoting from a book, simple, give the name of the book! --Dean1970 21:02, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I thought I didn't need "to pay" now that you copy-pasted the relevant article above? I've read it, 'cigarette' isn't even mentioned! --Dean1970 21:07, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

An online copy can be found here. Just search the text "The forecasts of doom are mostly guesswork" - its the complete text. And the quote is quite accurate. (Note: i'm not going to argue about the text, nor if its relevant or not on this page - all i'm doing is asserting that the quote is accurate). --Kim D. Petersen 21:34, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Apologies, I accidentally copied from the International edition which omitted this para. I've now pasted in the full text.JQ 22:42, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, Kim. I had hoped that this section would be backed up with more Reliable Sources. Bio of a living person and all.--Dean1970 23:42, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

In what sense is Newsweek not a Reliable Source? Anyone with access to a library (preferably in the US, I guess) can check it. If you are concerned about accuracy, I suggest you do so. If you're not willing to take the effort, you'll just have to trust the Factiva version I posted.JQ 03:36, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

I didn't claim NewsWeek was unreliable. I read the sentence..., "Guterl 'reported' after an interview blah blah", so I checked the source...it turned out to be a source that required subscription and 3 bucks. Then I made an error (which I apologised to you for) for adding a cntag and not asking on the talk page if there was a 'free' RS (I'm not getting into the 'it doesn't have to be free' requirements,) just asking if there was an alternative source. So, you kindly pasted the interview (above). I read that, no mention of ciggies, and that is when I re-added a tag, your rational switched to the veracity of quoting from books but I decided (to coin a phrase) to give you a run for your money on the Interview you pasted,(because after checking wikipolicy on RS, the burden of proof lies with the editor, not me,) because I thought 'what would a library reveal that the article pasted in its entirety on the talk page doesn't', that is when Kim took the effort to search online (or maybe he already knew of its existence, no matter either way) and supplied a link that was free.

I'm sorry for getting wires crossed in all this. I made the error of not asking on the talk page, if I did perhaps Kim would have produced the link earlier and avoided any unpleasantry you feel you've read on my part by questioning edits you're involved in.

Also, the text that wraps up the section along the lines of...."However, Lindzen is not being directly quoted in the article, and the pro-tobacco views in that case are those of the article's authors, not necessarily Lindzen" reads kinda like a disclaimer. --Dean1970 09:06, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

The only direct quote of Lindzen throughout this discussion is to the effect that he thinks that there has been some bad science done in order to promote the claims regarding the harm caused by passive smoking. I think the vast majority of statisticians would agree with him - even those who think that passive smoking does cause significant harm. The reason I looked at this page was to see if the people who control the passive smoking page have an interest in nailing "climate change deniers". Boy, did I hit the jackpot. Otis66 (talk) 16:53, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Heartland article.

The text:

Lindzen asserts that it is misleading for alarmists to claim a scientific consensus exists regarding global warming, adding "to pretend that this is settled is bizarre."

Is not correct according to the transcript[8] - and i've cut it for reasons in WP:BLP and WP:ATT. Heartland is apparently projecting their own view onto Lindzen's (which he may share (and probably does) - but its not verifyable). --Kim D. Petersen 00:14, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Thats speculation, how do you know for a fact that Lindzen didn't say what he said to someone who works for the Heartland Inst, remember, I'm just quoting what a website (not transcript) claims he said and Lindzen hasn't disputed it. --Dean1970 00:38, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

I have no idea - but the Heartland article isn't describing an interview with Lindzen - they are describing the debate - and i've pointed you to the transcript. Which doesn't support Heartlands claims. Personally i don't think that the text is far from Lindzen's personal opinion - but that doesn't matter here. Its not Verifiable. (in fact it can be verified to be wrong). --Kim D. Petersen 00:44, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Page 55 of 79 in your linked transcript: "RICHARD S. LINDZEN: And, you know, to pretend this is settled, is bizarre." What are you disputing? This should be added back. Oren0 07:04, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Oren0 - context please. Note the context in which Lindzen states this. (hint: he is stating this about water-vapor and our knowledge about this - not about consensus). --Kim D. Petersen 10:44, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Senate(?) hearing

Didn't Lindzen once lie to the Senate as regards him receiving funding (as a consultant) that jeopardized his neutrality on climate change issues? See http://dieoff.org/page82.htm. Dysmorodrepanis 14:26, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WP:BLP and the bet

"Material from self-published books, zines, websites, and blogs should never be used as a source about a living person, including as an external link, unless written or published by the subject of the article"

Therefore, I'm removing all material not in the Reason article. --Theblog 16:39, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't think it poses any problems to go ahead and put that material in whatshisnames article though. --Theblog 16:41, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Stop cutting stuff that embarasses you. Lindzen wimped out of the bet, people deserve to know that William M. Connolley 17:15, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Indeed. A scientist should stand by his claims. Dysmorodrepanis 23:13, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Please present arguments as to why the rules don't apply in this case. --Theblog 00:52, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

It's commentary by one of the principals in the exchange, properly attributed as such. Raymond Arritt 03:55, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Can you please show me exactly where in WP:BLP blogs are allowable if involves one of the principles who is not the subject of the article? --Theblog 03:59, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

I see you've already brought up the issue at the BLP noticeboard. Let's wait for comments. Raymond Arritt 04:02, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism of Richard and funding

A recent edit stated that Richard denied those claims, but the closest I've come to finding is that he states that he does not currently receive money from big oil.[9] Not the same thing as denying he ever received money from them. Ben Hocking ^{(talk|contribs)} 20:08, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

It's in a Newsweek article that isn't avilable online.99.244.181.114 (talk) 03:18, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Sources don't need to be online, but they do need to be cited. What would be best here would be a cite to the given edition of Newsweek and a quote with a direct denial (as noted above, the exact words are much better than a paraphrase).JQ (talk) 03:55, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Scientific criticism

Lindzen has made a number of statements that are (to the best of my knowledge) strongly contradicted by a weight of scientific evidence. I'm surprised to see that mention isn't made of his claims about water vapour, for example, and his repeated and deliberate mischaracterisation of findings. One might get the impression from reading this that he is merely a contrarian with alternative theories - not one who rejects established and independently verified findings. Mostlyharmless (talk) 01:45, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

People tend to remove his more wacky statements as "unencyclopaedic". I've just restored one I hadn't realised had gone William M. Connolley (talk) 09:47, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] A new article blog says this article is being censored

This article says that this article is beng censored. Grundle2600 (talk) 19:13, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

It's a blog, not an article. --Art Smart (talk) 21:53, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

And its cr*p William M. Connolley (talk) 21:59, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Funding

Lindzen made only $10,000 total from fossil fuel interests, and has had NO communication with auto companies. Strangely I seem to be the first to ATTEMPT to post this fact only now in May 08! and have gone through hell trying to get that small but important fact to remain in Wiki, against the determined effort of KIMDABELSTEINPETERSEN. What is constantly left out in Lindzen criticisms is his reply in 2006 to journalist Alex Beam of Boston Globe in "MIT's inconvenient scientist" article, which should be a fixture in the criticisms section(although people are trying hard to blank out important info there). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bill0756 (talk • contribs)

First: Please sign your posts.

Second: Nothing is left out - since this is in fact in the article.

Third: It is irrelevant whether Beam is a journalist. He is writing as a columnist in this instance - and that is what we care about - since that determines what the editorial oversight demands are for the writing. To write journalist/columnist is WP:PEACOCK, and misleading. If people are interested in Mr. Beam they go to his wikilinked article. There is a difference between the fact-checking that is done in the editorial process of a column and a regular news item.

Beam is relating his own version of what Lindzen said. You have to be very careful about such instances. Lets assume for a moment that what Beam relates is wrong - and someone turns up that Lindzen received money from other interests, and point to wikipedia to show that Lindzen is a lier? Relate precisely what is said. Do not make it look like Beam interviewed Lindzen (as you've done earlier) - because that is not what the column relates ... --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 12:00, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

First: You are the famous Kimdabelsteinpetersen person/group that has been ever active in Richard Lindzen's and other global warming posts? Your rep speaks for itself. Google "Solomon kimdabelsteinpetersen" to find out what other names this group/person goes under, and their tactics. Solomon has a good article on you and what may be other monikers you go under, one can read in the National Post of Canada titled "Wikipedia's Zealots" http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/04/12/wikipedia-s-zealots-solomon.aspx .

Second: It was only left in the article after you blanked it out and I was forced to keep putting the info back into the article...you deleted my entire first entry then you attempted to lie about deleting it, posing yourself as editing that initial post to say it was Beam's impression of what Lindzen said.

Third: Before given time to edit and with discussion taking place after the fact, you've instantly blanked dates, links, other relevant information and now you insist time and again on blanking the relevant notion that Alex Beam is a "journalist". It's relevant because Beam WOULD USE his JOURNALIST abilities to keep to journalistic standards, even when writing a column. Alex Beam, who for decades has been a journalist(PBS's title for him) with an unblemished resume spanning Newsweek, Business Week, and now his award winning column at the Boston Globe. For whatever reason you are determined through several blankings, to eliminate the idea that his article "MIT's Inconvenient Scientist" is not journalism but simply a commentary...that article contains both journalism(new verifiable information, including quotes), and commentary(although commentary is also journalism), therefore the reader needs to know if Beam has the journalistic credentials to offer journalism. You say to us here maybe, but in the article are determined to imply NO,...PBS, the Boston Globe, ME, Newsweek, Business Week, and others say YES. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bill0756 (talk • contribs) 22:32, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

This is the third time i'm going to ask you to read WP:CIVIL and WP:NPA (the first two times where on your talk page - which you've blanked). These are not guidelines - they are policies, and if you continue in this vein - you will end up being banned.

Yes, i reverted the very first attempt on this paragraph [10], because it was editorializing, POV and didn't describe the source faithfully (one columnist doesn't make "supporters or even a supporter). Then i edited the paragraph to something very close to the current version - to reduce POV. [11].

Your description of Beam is pure original research, and has no place here. He is probably a very good journalist. But what Wikipedia is interested in, is what amount of editorial oversight a specific source has, not what our personal opinions about specific journalists or sources is. There is a difference between columns and regular journalistic pieces, and the difference lies in the amount of freedom the writer has to express his personal views, and the amount of editorial oversight that the articles receive. And that is what we adhere to.

There is apparently only one reason to mention Beam as a journalist here, and that seems to be to inflate the importance of his piece. And that is not allowed per. WP:NPOV. --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 00:46, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't have time to flush down your assertion that calling a journalist a "journalist" equates to an attempt at inflating the importance of a piece of information. The pipes are already clogged with other "Kimdabelsteinpetersens", such as the definition of 'journalism' ripped out of the pages of Webster's. Wikipedia's zealots evaporate facts like magic. I just got Kimdabelsteinpetersened! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bill0756 (talk • contribs) 10:46, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] BLP problematic section

I've cut this entire section, as it is unreferenced. The reference for the suit does not mention Lindzen - and relying entirely on a debunk from Beam seems to be rather strange. Please find references for the section, and the claim that Lindzen was indentified in that particular suit, before reinserting

In 2006, Lindzen was identified^{[citation needed]} in a lawsuit brought forth by major auto companies[Central Valley Chrysler-Jeep Inc. v. Catherine Witherspoon, No. 04-6663]^[1] in which the state of California, Environmental Defense, and the Natural Resources Defense Council demanded, in a pre-trial discovery motion, the entire correspondence between several scientists (including Lindzen) and the auto companies. Environmental Defense attorney Jim Marston said of Lindzen and the 15 other scientists, ``We know that General Motors has been paying for this fake science exactly as the tobacco companies did,". Lindzen replied to columnist Alex Beam about the attempt to link his science to the auto companies``This is the criminalization of opposition to global warming," and added he[Lindzen] has never communicated with the auto companies involved in the lawsuit. ^[2]

--Kim D. Petersen (talk) 13:32, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Well it seems it has been reinserted without any comments here. Please address the WP:BLP issues with this section. The entire section seems to be hearsay, unless a reference is provided. --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 14:20, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

I've RE-ADDED the very relevant info regarding the Environmental Defense accusations and Lindzen's response, AS REPORTED IN THE BOSTON GLOBE BY AWARD WINNING JOURNALIST ALEX BEAM. Please don't erase the info. Please discuss why first here, if you intend on editing it. You could've been helpful and edited it, but instead you simply erased the info which would've been helpful to those attempting to research Lindzen. Again, for the sake of those attempting to research the truth, please don't give the idea that a quoted accusation by Environmental Defense was never documented by a professional journalist, or that Lindzen did not offer a quote and perspective to that award winning journalist in return. Please stop slashing facts from Wiki. I haven't erased anyone's information, I simply want a couple key helpful facts and links to remain so people can make an informed decision.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Bill0756 (talk • contribs) 09:20, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Try addressing the problems that has been pointed out, before reinsertion. You are putting undue weight on something that we have no information about. What case is it? Has it been covered by other reliable sources? Why was Lindzen involved? What were the claims about Lindzen? What were the results of the case? Was there any claim at all, that Lindzen had talked to General Motors? --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 09:59, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Tobacco

What on earth is this nonsense in which the pro-tobacco views of people other than Lindzen are presented? What has it to do with anything? Are we to include stuff about his views (or anyone else's) on shoe-manufacture or model railways? I'm going to remove the section unless someone can present a good argument otherwise. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Masmit (talk • contribs) 15:16, 26 May 2008 (UTC)