Climate "Science" | Dr. Richard Lindzen | EP 320

So the Hebrews created history as we know it. Don't get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It's going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny.

I want villains to get punished, but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That's such a Christian question. While 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is real (which is different than saying that global warming is real, by the way), 97 percent of scientists agree. And now we're hearing from Dr. Richard Lindzen, and he doesn't agree, but 97 percent of scientists do. So why the hell should we listen to Dr. Lindzen? There are some issues where I think you could say there was a hundred percent agreement. For instance, if you were to say CO2 is a greenhouse gas and adding it will probably create some warming, I don't think too many people would disagree. I think the only thing would be how much, and many people would think it would be negligible, but no one would disagree with that.

Given this telephone game, where you can say something perfectly innocent and the politicians can interpret it as saying, "Oh, so you agree that we'll have warming," and that warming, however small, you know they'll assume is the end of the world. Well, yeah, there's this agreement, but it's not agreement with what they're ultimately claiming—that it's an existential threat.

Hello everyone, I'm going to continue today my inquiry into the fraught realm, let's say, of climate science, the so-called settled climate science. I'm talking today to Dr. Richard Lindzen. He's an accomplished professor, atmospheric physicist, and meteorologist, having authored over 200 scientific papers and contributed to landmark theories in the realm of ozone photochemistry, atmospheric tides, and most recently, climate stability.

Holding a rare view in opposition to mainstream science—or perhaps not so rare—Lindzen disagrees on the role of water vapor in current climate change models and argues that alarmism is widespread, aided by political consensus, not unlike the once popular research on eugenics. Dr. Richard Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist. He has contributed to the development of theories for the Hadley circulation, hydrodynamic instability theory, internal gravity waves, atmospheric tides, and the quasi-biennial oscillation of the stratosphere. His current research is focused on climate sensitivity, the role of cirrus clouds in climate, and the determination of the tropics to pole temperature difference.

His academic degrees are all from Harvard University. He is the recipient of various awards and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Between '83 and 2013, he was the Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT. He assumed emeritus status as of July of 2013. Prior to '83, he held professorships at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. He's also been a distinguished visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, the École Normale Supérieure, the University of Paris, and Kyushu University.

The first thing we're going to determine before we dive into the topic at hand is why it might be reasonable and important to listen to Dr. Lindzen. So we're going to go through his academic background and then we'll proceed to the main issue. So where did you do your undergraduate degree? At Harvard?

Yeah, if I—if that's right—in physics from 1960.

Let's start from there.

Okay. Yeah, I graduated from Harvard in physics in the 1960s, so it was a long time ago. I realized at that point that I really enjoyed classical physics, and actually modern physics seemed, in some ways, intimidating. So I continued in graduate work in applied mathematics. Now, Harvard was different from other places in applied math. Places like NYU were very heavy into the theoretical aspects of applied math. Harvard applied math was solving problems with applied math, and they were heavily into problems in meteorology and other things.

So I ended up doing a thesis that was really atmospheric physics. It was the interaction of fluid motions and chemistry and radiative transfer, mostly in the stratosphere, and there were a lot of good problems. I enjoyed it. The one problem with it was there was very little experience with data. So I went for a postdoctoral study period at the University of Washington, and there was a superb data analyst, Dick Reed, who was on the faculty there. He's now deceased. After that, I went to Norway for a year, and there was a very able and famous dynamic meteorologist, there—Arn Eliason—and that was also a pleasure.

During that time, I began working on some other problems, ranging from tides in the atmosphere to some problem called the quasi-biennial oscillation. You may not realize it, but the wind over the equator at about 15 kilometers (roughly plus or minus 10) goes from east to west for one year, turns around, and goes the other way for another year. The average period is actually about 26 months, and that had been a puzzle. We managed to find a solution to that puzzle as to how that worked. Probably be too complicated to explain; it involves random waves generated by the cumulus clouds in the tropics interacting with the flow and forming something that essentially would be called a relaxation oscillator, and that's actually held up pretty well for almost 50 years or 60 years. So as theories go, that did well.

There was also a problem with tides. I mean, people familiar with tides in the ocean know that they're primarily 12-hour lunar tides, and they're lunar tides because the moon, although much less massive than the sun, is so close that its perturbation to the gravitational potential is greater than that of the sun. But then it was observed that in the pressure at the surface in the Earth, the tides were also primarily semi-diurnal—that is, say, 12 hours, but solar. So that was a bit of a puzzle because that had to be thermal, and Lord Kelvin in the 19th century was asking, you know, given that the 24-hour component was much stronger, why was it 12 hours?

And he suggested the atmosphere was resonant at 12 hours and that actually dominated the literature until the late 50s. President meaning what? Meaning, you know, let's say you have a violin or something—if you're stroking it, you get a certain note. That's because it's resonant at that note; it vibrates. And so people had figured out how it might be resonant and so on. But after World War II, when one had rockets, one realized the atmosphere was not the way it had to be to be resonant, and we figured out why the 24-hour got trapped.

That was kind of fun; those were problems like that that made, in some ways, atmospheric science, meteorology, geology, and geophysics kind of fun. They're great fields.

So you liked physics a little bit more on the concrete side, a little bit more data-driven, a little bit more down to earth than the theoretical realm. And then, so you said you were at U Washington to do a postdoc and then you went to Norway. What happened after that?

And then I went to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and I was a staff scientist there. And there was a sort of reason for it; it was slightly cynical. Some of my classmates had gone into academia, and I was watching what a horror show being an assistant professor was— you had insecurity, you had a heavy teaching load, you didn't have time to do the research. So I decided that I would stay at a research center until I was off for tenure. I was after a couple of years offered a tenured post at the University of Chicago.

That was a very nice experience; I loved Chicago. But my wife was a little bit insecure about the crime situation on the south side of Chicago, and when Harvard made an offer of a chair, we accepted it. I left Chicago, and we came to Harvard, and I spent about 10 years there as a—I think eventually I was surprised—the Gordon McKay Professor, then it was some other chair.

But I had a close colleague at MIT, Jewel Charney, who was a preeminent dynamic meteorologist but also a very interesting guy, good friend. He died, and that has offered his chair at MIT, and I took it.

When was that?

That had to be the early '80s.

Okay, so I should just point out for everyone who's watching and listening that this is a pretty—what would you call it?—stellar academic track. So first of all, an undergraduate at Harvard, and then applied PhD work at the post-doc level in a variety of different places, including research institutions. But the fact that Dr. Lindzen was offered tenure at UChicago—a tenured position to begin with—that's not the normal mode of making an entryway into academia. Usually, you start as an assistant professor, and so that's untenured, and it's very rare to be offered a first-time job as a tenured professor.

Was that associate level or full professional?

That was associate. I wasn't promoted until a few years later.

Right. And then, okay, so from the University of Chicago, then you were offered a Harvard chair.

And I want to point out to everyone who's watching and listening again that that's very rare. So at Harvard, the hiring streams are really broken into two segments. You have faculty members who are hired as assistant professors—so that's the most junior level of professor, and those positions are not tenured at the Ivy Leagues, generally speaking.

And so what the Ivy Leagues do is bring in promising young people at the assistant level but turn them over, and that gives lots of people a chance to work at the Ivy Leagues, and it gives the students a chance to be in contact with dynamic young researchers, let's say.

But the second hiring stream and the more important one is the senior professors, and that's usually at associate or full professor level. And what Harvard did when I was there—that was in the 90s—was, and I am sure the practice still continues and is characteristic of Ivies in general—is they look all over the world for the people who are doing the top research in their areas at a relatively senior level, and then make them an offer. See if they can entice them to come to Harvard.

And so that doesn't happen to very many people; it's a very rare occurrence. It's not that huge a university, Harvard, and there aren't that many professorships. So to be offered a chair there is a mark of, I would say, universal esteem devoted and directed towards a given professor within the confines of their research; and they have to have made quite a splash on the research front for that to happen.

And then to move from Harvard to MIT—well, the same thing is the case there, because, well, Harvard and MIT battle it out for priority, let's say, for the most prestigious and highest quality university in the U.S., and possibly in the world. We could have an argument about that. But to move from Harvard to MIT is, well, that's another indication of a stellar academic career.

So you went to MIT in the 1980s, yeah?

And you then—you were there until you retired?

Yeah, until I retired formally in 2013. But, you know, they've been good to me. I have an office and, you know, some assistance occasionally. And of course, one of the things is you no longer have students.

Well, that's a bit of a drawback occasionally. However, I had colleagues, and even, you know, at the end of it—for reasons that are obvious, I had almost no funding. But there were some postdocs who were paid—who paid their way from South Korea, so that was helpful.

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So did you have a preference for Harvard or MIT in terms of the students you encountered?

Not really. I mean, the students I encountered changed over time more than they changed with place. When I came to Harvard, the students in my area were, I would say, in some ways coming from math and physics mostly. They were the overflow, and there were lots of kids studying math and physics, so they were good—and, you know, very good, in fact. And that was sort of true when I came to MIT. But by the '90s, things changed a little bit.

First of all, good students were not entering physics and math at the level that they had once had. Did the best students often were going into finance, things like that?

Right, right. And so there was no overflow. And I think there was a slight change in the nature of students—they were not as theoretical, they were more model-oriented, and so on. There was also a change at MIT, which was not something we wanted, which is it was getting harder and harder to find people working with data. So the students were getting less experience with actual data.

But those were changes— I mean, compared to current changes, they probably were minor. I mean, at the moment, I just find it strange. There's so much emphasis on racism in the neurosciences and so on. I'm sort of glad I'm not teaching at this point.

Yeah, it's that one-trick pony—that ideological insistence that something approximating critical race theory should dominate every single discipline—and it gives people who really have no background whatsoever in these fields the opportunity to dominate, and it's really quite an appalling thing to see.

Yeah, we'll see one other thing too, which is the vast increase in both numbers, power, and importance of administrators.

Yes, yes, definitely.

Well, you know, I think in some ways we live inside a giant whale carcass that's walking on the beach.

Oh, really?

Yeah, well, really it's a good biological metaphor. There's plenty of food for everyone for a very short period of time, and the administrative overload in the university is something remarkable to behold, especially because it's been built on the backs of students and their student loan.

Oh, yeah, but it's like indentured servitude, I would say. It's more than that. You now have administrators certainly outnumbering faculty—in many places, outnumbering faculty and students—and they need money, but they do not do the functions that the university gets paid for—teaching, research, and so on.

And so we have overhead on the grants, and that has become critically important. The more overhead, the better the administration likes you. So, you know, if you have a big laboratory, you'll have more overhead than someone who does theory.

And if you're interested, well when I was there, we were paying about 50 percent in overhead costs—if I remember correctly—for a given grant. So scientists spent about a third of their time in the United States.

It's one of the reasons I was actually happy to come back to Canada, as the scientists I knew in the U.S. were spending one-third of their time writing proposals, taking a shot at about a five percent chance of getting a large grant, and 50 percent of that went to overhead.

Yeah, it was quite the waste of time for the scientific community because that meant, you know, the brightest people in our community were spending 30 percent of their time at least writing grants that had a pretty low probability of success.

Yeah, instead of—and then, you know, of course, that the problem with writing grants is that they—you tend to have to study trendy topics, and you also can't be very daring; you have to take the next obvious step in some real sense and only in the improved direction.

And so that whole granting system to me looked like something approximating the death of exploratory science.

Well, that actually also evolved over time. When I entered academia, the National Science Foundation actually had very few staff, and they were eager to give out money; there wasn't that much demand for it.

Right.

But as the administration grew, there was also—I mean, the administration plays a large role in the behavior of departments. Young faculty today, I mean, are sunk if they don't get grants.

Oh, yeah.

And when we get to climate, you don't get grants if you question the current narrative.

So, okay, so let's delve into that a bit. When you were at MIT and at Harvard, how many papers have you published approximately between your colleagues?

250 or so.

Okay, so for those of you who are watching and listening—and correct me if you think I'm making an error in proposition here—so when I was working as a faculty member, we kind of had a rule of thumb in the psychology department, which was that if a student prepared three publishable papers that were sequentially linked, added an introduction to that in the conclusion, we would basically accept that as a thesis.

And so the rough equivalence was three published papers equals a PhD thesis, and you've published 250 papers. So, in some real sense, that's equivalent to 80 PhDs.

Now, what do you think of that for a light in logic?

Not much, but to be honest.

Okay, so—well, I'm trying to give everyone—well, I'm trying to give everyone watching and listening

Yeah, since if you don't really know what it means to have a publication record like that, well, I mean, because that's what I'm trying to elucidate.

Yeah, I think it's also a matter that has changed with time. I mean, people like Jill Charney, who I mentioned, who was the leading figure in dynamic meteorology, probably published 60 papers. Aaron Eliason, who was also a terrific influence, something like that order. The pressures to publish have increased, and so people's behavior is different. Also, publication has become a very different issue.

You probably know that before World War II, peer review was very rare, and if I had students read papers from the 19th century or the early 20th century, they're quite surprised to read them. Why? Because they're informal, their communications, they're not assertions of truth; they are looking for truth.

And, you know, after the war, for a variety of reasons, peer review entered largely because there was too much demand for publication. There may have even been a shortage of paper.

But for instance, the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society in the UK had a wonderful statement of what the reviewer was supposed to do, and it said you can only reject a paper for two reasons. One is an overt mathematical error or lack of originality. The paper then would be discussed at the monthly meeting, and the discussion would be included with the paper.

There is no essential thought that peer review—I mean, peer review—the public has been made to think that this is the certification of the paper, that it is somehow proven right now, it's fact.

Right, right.

Yeah, and it's nothing of the sort. It is to see if the stuff is interesting and it's not overtly wrong mathematically and not plagiarized. On the other hand, it's become something more. I mentioned, you know, I had two papers that appeared in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that dealt with climate and my objections to the current narrative in various ways, and they got published; they got reviewed.

But in both cases, the editor was fired immediately.

Oh, yeah, oh, that's cute.

That was when—well, when did that happen?

One was in 2000, one was 1991 or '92, and the other one was in 2001.

Okay, and what—when you started to object to the narrative, what narrative were you objecting to on what grounds?

This is something that took me a while to understand. You know, Gerbils famously said, "If you tell a big enough lie and repeat it often enough, it'll become the truth." There's been a lot of that in this, but there are aspects of establishing the narrative, i.e., what makes something the truth that I hadn't appreciated.

So the narrative was that climate is determined by a greenhouse effect and adding CO2 to it increases—that causes warming. And moreover, the natural greenhouse substances besides CO2 (water vapor, clouds, upper-level clouds) will amplify whatever man does.

Now, that immediately goes against Le Chatelier's principle, which says if you perturb a system and it is capable internally of counteracting it, it will. And our system is, and you think that applies?

Okay, so that's a very germane issue because, well, but let me—please go ahead.

Let me finish because, okay, so that was a little bit odd. You began wondering where did these feedbacks come from? And immediately people—including myself—started looking into the feedbacks and seeing whether there were any negative ones or how did it work. But underlying it, and this is what I learned, if you want to get a narrative established, the crucial thing is to pepper it with errors, questionable things, so that the critics will seize on that and not question the basic narrative.

The basic narrative in this sense was that climate is controlled by the greenhouse effect. In point of fact, the Earth's climate system, which has many regions, but two distinct different regions are the tropics—roughly the minus 30 to 30 degrees latitude—and the extra tropics outside of 30 degrees, plus or minus. They have very different dynamics.

In the tropics, the crucial thing for the Earth, by the way—and this is a technicality and much harder to convey than saying that greenhouse gases are a blanket or that 97 percent of scientists agree—this is actually a technical issue. The Earth rotates. Now, people are aware of that. We have day and night. But there’s something called the Coriolis effect.

When you're on a rotating system, it gives rise to the appearance of forces that change the winds relative to the rotation, and the only component of the rotation is the component that is perpendicular to the surface. So at the poles, the rotation vector is perpendicular to the surface; at the equator, it's parallel to the surface—it's zero.

And this gives you phenomenally different dynamics. So where you don't have a vertical component to the rotation vector, motions do what they do in the laboratory in small scales. If you have a temperature difference, it acts to wipe it out.

And so if you look at the tropics, the temperatures at any surface are relatively flat; they don't vary much with latitude. On the other hand, you go to the mid-latitudes, extra tropics—there, the temperature varies a lot between the tropics and the pole. We know that. I mean, temperatures are cold at high latitudes, and if you look at changes in climate nearest history, what they consist in is a tropics that stays relatively constant, and what changes is the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole.

During the Ice Age, it was about 40 degrees centigrade; today, it's about 60. Today it's about 40. During 50 million years ago, something called the Eocene was about 20. And so that's all a function of what's going on outside the tropics. Within the tropics, the greenhouse effect is significant, but what determines the temperature change between the tropics and the pole has very little to do with the greenhouse effect. It is a dynamic phenomenon based on the fact that if you have a temperature difference with latitude, it generates instabilities.

These instabilities take the form of the cyclonic and anti-cyclonic patterns that you see on the weather map. Now, the tropics are very different. I mean, you know, even a casual look at a weather map, the systems that bring us weather travel from west to east at latitudes outside the tropics; within the tropics, they travel from east to west. The prevailing winds are opposite in the two sections, and what I'm saying is that what changes due to the greenhouse effect, however you look at it, is amplified at the poles—that is not true.

There's no physical basis for that statement. All they do is determine the starting point for where the temperature changes in mid-latitudes, and that's determined mainly by hydrodynamics.

Okay, that's complicated to explain to someone, and yet—and yet it's the basis for claiming that these seemingly large small numbers, you know, they're saying if global mean temperature goes up one and a half degrees, it's the end. That's based on it getting much bigger at high latitudes and determining that. But all one and a half degrees at the equator would do or in the greenhouse part of the Earth is change the temperature everywhere by one and a half degrees, which for most of us is less than the temperature change between breakfast and lunch.

And the thought that this is the end of the world—it's a little bit outrageous.

So let's play devil's advocate here first. So let me lay out the narrative, and correct me if I've got it wrong. So first of all, the world at the moment is making a big deal out of climate and associating climate change with the greenhouse effect—the trapping of heat—and they're associating—we're all associating the greenhouse effect with an increase in carbon dioxide.

And at least initially, we were associating that increase in climate—that increase in carbon dioxide with global warming. Then we've added the proposition that, well, not only will there be warming, say, of up to a degree and a half or two degrees by the end of the century—and maybe there's some variation in those predictions—but we're also looking at a system that’s characterized by a variety of positive feedback loops.

And the danger here is that a one and a half degree increase might not be catastrophic, but that that might trigger a sequence of cataclysmic events we hear sometimes about—the melting of the Greenland ice cap, for example, the rapid rise in sea level that would occur as a consequence, the increase of temperatures at the poles, the release of methane as a consequence, let's say, of the permafrost thawing, and then a runaway greenhouse effect because of that.

And you've evinced some skepticism about the whole narrative, but also, more particularly—and perhaps more importantly—you don't sound like you're a big fan of the idea of runaway positive feedback loops.

Oh, well, there are a lot of things enmeshed in what you've said. Even the one and a half degree depends on the positive feedbacks; otherwise, CO2 would be even less significant—much less significant.

So you assume that water vapor increases and amplifies it, but the whole picture is one-dimensional. So, you know, you’d have to know the area where water vapor is important, and it goes through a mess of things. And we know now that that probably isn’t occurring; even people who support the narrative, so you keep—the water vapor isn’t amplifying carbon dioxide effects?

If it is, it has to be considered as part of an infrared feedback, and nobody has detected that that is actually positive.

Okay, okay. Well, I heard that the punitive contribution of carbon dioxide to global warming is less than the margin of error for measurement of the effect of water vapor.

Yeah, do you know if that's—that's really sad if that's—that's—that's really sad if that's true.

It is true.

If you want to mention—if you want to measure it rather than hypothesize it, then what you're saying is true. It's been hypothesized, in other words.

So we're planning on spending two trillion dollars to remediate a problem whose magnitude is so small that it could easily be hidden within another measurement error on the water vapor front?

I think so. But I mean that's really quite something. No, I mean it's caught the fancy of the political world.

I mean I'll give you an example of it: you know we’re falling into the trap. I mentioned earlier going along with the narrative, because it has so many weaknesses, ignores the fact that the whole picture of the greenhouse is misconceived.

Okay, well, let's not go too far down that rabbit hole because I'd like to stay focused on the critique of the major narrative.

Yeah, no, I mean I'm quite willing to talk about the other problems, but the fact that you don't have this polar amplification, you know, that it's going to be bigger at high latitudes—it may be, but it's not due to the greenhouse; it's due to processes in the extra tropics, where the greenhouse is secondary by a long shot.

There's one example of what you're saying, and it helps, I think, understand why this issue gets so distorted. In one of the International Panel on Climate Change, you know this UN body reports, I think the third report, somewhere in the early 2000s, where I was the lead author, but that we can get to that later. In any case, they have this thousand pages that deals with the science, has no index, is totally unreadable.

And then they have a summary for policymakers, which isn't really due to the scientists, and they can manipulate the text because that comes out six months before the text, of which it's a summary. But you know they know people aren't even going to read that.

So you have the thousand pages they're not going to read; then you have 20 pages they're not going to read. So you have the press release, and the press release is the iconic statement, and that's what gets the headlines.

So the iconic statement was they now are—I forget how that's how certain that most of the warming since 1960 is due to man.

Okay. In truth, that doesn’t mean much. It was about a half degree; it was most consistent with the climate being relatively insensitive. It was basically a statement—there's not much of a problem here.

But they didn’t say that! They just said most of the warming since 1960 is due to man. All of a sudden, what does most mean? Does most mean 95 or 51 percent?

Could mean 51 percent, yeah!

Okay, even if it meant a hundred percent, it wouldn’t matter; it was small.

Yeah, got it.

But how did Senators McCain and Lieberman respond to that? They come out immediately with a statement, “This is the smoking gun; we must do something.”

So as long as the scientists can make innocent remarks and be assured that politicians will convert them into alarm and increase funding, why are they going to complain?

And so you have this insidious interaction where scientists—and you know, there’s another guy, Bill Steve Koonin, who’s written this book, and I know Steve well. The point is he could use the documents that are cited on behalf of alarm to say, “Look, nobody here is saying it’s the problem that the environmentalists and the politicians are saying.”

Where did this come from? And the answer is it came—well, Bjorn Lomborg has done the same thing. I mean, he accepts the IPCC predictions, essentially, with some criticism, but says, “Look, if they're right, this is straight from the horse’s mouth, let's say."

With regard to the UN, even if they're correct, that'll mean two things. The first is we’ll be slightly less rich than we would have been a hundred years from now because economic growth is so high, and we won’t even notice that in some real sense—but even if it's slightly bigger than we predict, we're so good at adapting.

And you can see, like the curves, for example, in terms of the number of people who are dying from natural disasters each year, which has declined precipitously over 100 years. We’re so good at adapting that the probability that we can just adapt to this is a hundred percent.

Now that, of course, assumes that there are none of these runaway positive feedback loop effects, but my problem with that on the scientific front was, well, how the hell do you predict a runaway positive feedback loop?

You can’t predict that. As far as I can tell, by the way, the feedbacks are not runaways that they’re using; they just amplify. You’d have to get a much higher level of feedback to be a runaway system.

The tipping point is a different argument, and I find that kind of nutty because tipping points in the climate system are virtually unheard of, and there’s a good reason for it. They’re usually characteristic of systems that have what I would call few degrees of freedom.

Oh, I see what you mean; so a system that flips would flip because it could be frozen or liquid.

Yeah, in the case of water, but a system that’s complex and highly entropic, because of that, has many, many ways of dispensing.

Looks like a formal argument—that I haven’t seen explicitly expressed, but I’m pretty sure there's something in the literature about that.

Well, it makes a lot of sense to me that, you know, a system that flips would flip because it could be frozen or liquid, yeah. But a system that’s complex and—

And highly entropic, because of that, has many, many ways of dispensing, looks like a formal argument.

Yeah, I haven't seen it explicitly expressed, but I'm pretty sure there's something in the literature about that.

Well, it makes a lot of sense to me that you know a system that flips would flip because it could be frozen or liquid, yeah.

But a system that's complex and highly entropic, because of that, has many, many ways of dispensing.

Yeah, then it's not going to do anything dramatic.

Has that been—has that proposition been quantified? Like, do people—I've never heard that before, right? That's very good.

Yeah, it's—it makes a lot of sense to me that, you know, a system that flips would flip because it could be frozen or liquid.

Yeah, in the case of water, but a system that’s complex and highly entropic, because of that, has many, many ways of dispensing.

Looks like a formal argument—I haven’t seen it explicitly expressed, but I’m pretty sure there’s something in the literature about that.

Well, it makes a lot of sense to me that, you know, a system that flips would flip because it could be frozen or liquid—

Yeah, in the case of water, but but a system that’s complex and highly entropic, because of that, has many degrees of freedom—including—

When quantum fluctuations happen, there are lots of different possibilities to explore, let's say.

And then we've got this manifold of interrelationships, which further complicates the situation.

Okay, so part of the issue here is that we’re dealing with temperature changes that are of relatively small magnitude compared to the potential range of temperature change. And what that means is that for that degree of accuracy in prediction, let’s say you need an accuracy of one to three degrees over a hundred years, you have to have an unbelievably finely tuned model at an extremely high level of resolution.

And then, with the difficulties in modeling fluid dynamics, it isn’t even obvious that you could do it in principle.

I think that's probably true. You know, you can restrict, as I say, you damp the models, you keep them from blowing up, you do all sorts of things. And you know, for instance, with the greenhouse picture, I’ve been critical of it because I think it only really is useful in the tropics, but it is useful.

If I’m comparing Venus and Mars and Mercury for them, you know, the gross idea of the greenhouse does tell you why they’re different, but you know the changes in the Earth’s climate involve minuscule temperature changes compared to the temperature differences between the planets.

Right, right, right.

Well then we have the additional problem on the political front that, so imagine you have an unstable climate model or an inaccurate climate model at the scale of resolution we’re discussing, and then you put on top of that an economic model.

And the economic model uses the climate model as an axiom and then tries to predict out a hundred years, which I just don’t see that as going anywhere at all because you can’t predict economic development with any degree of accuracy over a hundred-year period.

If you could do that, you’d have all the money in the world almost immediately! If you could generate a model that accurate, you simply can’t do it.

So if you stack a bad economic model on a flawed climate model, you really do have a tower of—well, and they don’t even do that.

I mean, the economic models that people like Nordhaus and so on use just take that metric for climate and assign it.

But they assume it’s accurate, and they assume that you can put a monetary value on it.

And then, you know, tune the—I mean, you know, model there are various kinds of models that do these things, but I don’t know what to say.

I mean, I don’t think any longer that it’s the models that are driving the perception; I think it is the pure repetition.

All you know—and this was understood from the beginning in 1988 when Jim Hansen gave testimony to the Senate about finding that there was global warming, and Newsweek had a cover.

And the cover showed the Earth on fire and had the label, “All scientists agree.”

Now, you know you had all sorts of funny problems at that time, like most weathermen disagreed, and the American Meteorological Society decided they needed re-education.

I mean, the march through the institutions was pretty effective, and we could talk about that.

I mean, that's been well—well, I’d like to—well, let’s talk about this because I was going to push back at you again, playing devil’s advocate.

So we hear all the time this idea that while 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is real—which is different than saying that global warming is real, by the way—but 97 percent of scientists agree, and so we’re now hearing from Dr. Richard Lindzen and he doesn’t agree. But 97 percent of scientists do, so why the hell should we listen to Dr. Lindzen?

And so let’s start with the 97 percent of scientists agree claim.

Well, yeah, I mean there are a couple of aspects to it. There are some studies, like one by a man called Cook, that were just bogus. They, you know, ended up looking at 50 papers specially selected and found, you know, this percentage, and this was taken apart in the Wall Street Journal by Spencer and Best.

And it was nonsense, but there are some issues where I think you could say there was a hundred percent agreement.

So for instance, if you were to say CO2 is a greenhouse gas and adding it will probably create some warming, I don’t think too many people would disagree.

I think the only thing would be how much, and many people would think it would be negligible, but no one would disagree with that.

And so given this telephone game where you can say something perfectly innocent and the politicians can interpret it as saying, “Oh, so you agree that we’ll have warming,” and that warming, however small, you know they’ll assume is the end of the world, well, yeah, there’s this agreement.

But it’s not agreement with what they’re ultimately claiming—that it’s an existential threat.

I think if you posed it that way, you know, you would, for instance, notice that the UN’s IPCC—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—never in its Working Group One, which is the only part dealing with science, talks about an existential threat.

Just right, right, while Lomborg has been telling people that constantly.

Yeah, you know, he’s, with his attempts to shed some light, some intelligent light on this issue, he keeps saying, “Well, look, I’m willing to accept the IPCC forecast, even though he has some problems with the forecast.”

He said, “Look, I’ll give you that. But the negative consequences that are often assumed are simply not realistic.”

Now, even there, I mean, you know in the part I participated in, we said that, you know the models cannot handle water vapor and clouds, and thus there is no basis for our assertions about the feedbacks.

That was in there, and it was interesting because, I mean the whole procedure is a little bit nutty.

I was responsible with two other people for three pages for this. We traveled around the world twice or three times, I mean the meetings, and you had quote thousands of the world's leading climate scientists— which is a field that probably had a few dozen at the—early in my career, and suddenly, when you piled in the money, you know, in the U.S., I think the increase with Clinton and Gore was maybe a factor of 15.

You suddenly had thousands of quote climate scientists.

Now, no one in my department claimed they were a climate scientist in 1990 because nobody met. You know, I didn’t know everything about paleo-climate; I didn’t know how you assessed ice cores; I knew dynamics; I knew radiation; other people knew other things.

Right, right.

But it’s not a field of specialization—climate science, right? I mean, it is the definitive interdisciplinary thing, and nobody has mastered all the disciplines.

The trouble is when you increase the funding 15 times, and the condition for funding was supporting the narrative, that you then could get lots of people all of them calling themselves climate scientists, and most of whom have not familiarized themselves with the physics and the chemistry and so on.

So you have this idiocy of impacts, so you know, you know, you’ve seen it; you know global warming and obesity, global warming and diabetes.

I mean, anyone can get a piece of the action.

We’ll be back in one moment! First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new documentary, Logos and Literacy.

I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world.

The pastor's home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing.

The Christian faith is a singing religion, probably 80 percent of script memorization today exists only because of what is sung.

Amazing; here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg.

Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically, that has not been the case.

Now the book is available to everyone, from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself; it is the most influential book in all history, and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that.

Well, what happened to you on the funding front when you started to, well, let's say swim against the tide to some degree?

Although really, what you were doing was just pursuing your research.

For a while, I would say in the '90s, I continued to get money from this National Science Foundation, but never for climate.

I was working on hydrodynamic instability, other things that were pure meteorological. And by the late 90s, I was known well enough for my skepticism of climate that people were rejecting, saying, you know, he'll use some of this money for that.

NASA also was pretty open in the '90s, and so, for instance, my work on feedbacks, my colleagues were from NASA, and it was okay.

But by the end, there was a NASA administrator who was skeptical of climate, and they got rid of him, and they got sticked up.

The Department of Energy was actually trying to keep balanced funding, and then the government just clamped down on them.

And so that also means that, so that’s very interesting too, because it means that not only does the narrative spin itself up to chase the funding, but any elements that would run contrary vanish.

Oh yeah, I mean at MIT—for instance, we had a celebration of the work of two distinguished faculty members who had died some years ago, this Jewel Charney and Ed Lawrence, chaos theory and so on.

And you know, because of my closeness to Jewel, they asked me to speak on that, and the administration from MIT decided, no, given his position on climate and that we have a climate initiative, we can't do that.

The department was quite okay; they found someone else to do that talk and I gave another talk.

And so be it, but the administration was upset with that.

You know, again, I mean now what’s really important, it’s really appalling to hear of that sort of thing happening at MIT.

I mean, I’m always hoping that the engineers and the STEM types will have enough, what would you say, clout and political conviction to push back against this hyper-administrative invasion of the technical schools and the universities.

At MIT, you have to think things are very, very sad.

That’s very, very sad—the state of affairs; hope springs eternal, but you know we just went through the issue of Dorian Abbott—I don’t know if you heard about it.

Yeah, oh yes, yes.

He was going to give a talk on exoplanets; pretty, I mean, you know, he’s keeping away from this issue in a way. Exoplanets is easy, but on the other hand, he had written a piece with someone from Stanford for Newsweek in which he said, you know, they really didn’t think diversity, equity, and inclusion was that great; they preferred maintaining meritocracy while having school choice for children, including poor children, black children so that they could be qualified for equity instead of it being a good kind of trap.

And so MIT’s administration decided that this was not consistent with MIT’s values.

Yeah, yeah, and you know that statement—and you know then it got to the point, who speaks for our values?

Well, that is the question, all right?

And you know this is very much the case with almost every university, every professional society; and you probably know this.

You know, the people in these—the faculty, the people in professional societies are busy. They like their work; they're doing things they like, and so you often choose one person to be executive director or so on, and they’re happy not to have to do it or to be president of the university or a dean.

Not everyone wants to do it; they’d rather do their science.

Yeah, well, that's a big problem because it leaves the administrative avenue opening, and they can speak for you and speak of our values without ever polling you.

That’s true in the professional societies, it’s true of the National Academy in the U.S.—there are a handful of people who can speak for the organization, and the organization is full of people who would rather do their work and are happy to leave them that power.

Yeah, yeah.

So have you—what’s been your experience with cancellation? You said it got harder and harder for you to get grants, so that—

That run a lab at MIT, it also makes it almost impossible to publish.

As I say, editors get fired if you get published; the more common thing is among the peer reviewers, they insist that they be gatekeepers.

So you’ll send in a paper, and a lot of people have had exactly this experience.

At first, it was pretty crude. So one of the papers I published in the early '90s I had submitted to Science, pointing out questions about climate, and they sent it back without review, saying there’s no interest in this.

Oh, yeah.

Right, oh yes. But then, no interest, right? And then they got a little bit more—I don’t know if I’d call it sophisticated— you would send it to a journal, and they would reject it immediately of some good, and it came; that wasn’t very effective because you send it to another journal.

So what happened is you typically—and again this is a common experience—you send it to a journal, they take about six, seven months to review, and they send back a review that says accept it with major revision.

And so you spend six months making major revisions, if you pay attention to them, send it back; they take another six, seven months and reject it.

That got them first time yet— a year or, you know, so that you’re not sending it to other journals.

Well, it’s also a very good way of wasting the time—

Oh, yeah, who might be actually trying to conduct research!

Right!

Yeah, so you know, all these things happen, and even with my students, you know, I couldn't tell them; you know to oppose global warming, it would ruin their careers. They couldn’t even get a perfect or—

Well, well, being associated with you eventually was that enough to make it difficult for your students to get a job?

No, I don’t think so.

Oh, well, that’s good.

That’s good, you know, I would have expected that to have happened.

No, I hadn’t seen it happen, but you know, I think most of my students, I think all of them pretty much have steered clear of climate.

There are other things you can work on. Just like with Dorian, I mean, you know, he doesn’t want to get in trouble with climate—pick an area which isn’t climate.

The only difficulty with it is that funding and balance can give preference to climate.

On the other hand, they’ve induced so many people to support climate alarm that they probably don’t have enough money to support all of the people who want to go feed at the trough.

Well, the other problem, of course, is that the very people who are hell-bent on pursuing their actual research—that’s where all the real scientists are.

And so now if we’re in a situation where the real scientists—and those would be the ones who want to do their research—are refusing to have anything to do with so-called climate science, then what happens is that we’re deprived of the very expert voices that we would need to bring some sense and stability to the overarching narrative upon which so many of our economic decisions are made now.

So that just doesn’t seem like a very good state of affairs.

It’s not a good state of affairs, but it's desired by the people who want this state of affairs.

Right, right.

Well, so let me recapitulate because we’re running out of time on this section. So we talked about—we talked about your career and where you worked, MIT and Harvard, primarily on the academic front.

We talked about the fundamental climate narrative, which is that climate's a major concern; it’s changing primarily because of the greenhouse effect. That’s a consequence of carbon dioxide. Most of that’s warming involves a variety of potential runaway positive feedback loops.

And you’re not convinced of any of those propositions—that climate should be our major concern; that the greenhouse effect as popularly conceptualized is an existential catastrophe; that carbon dioxide is a contributor, again, of existential proportions; or that the positive feedback loops that are often put before us are likely to manifest themselves.

In fact, you think that the climate system has enough degrees of freedom to be relatively immune to large-scale perturbations.

Yes, is that a decent summary?

Yeah, I mean, I’d modify it a little bit. You know, I think feedbacks and tipping points are slightly different and you’re conflating them; I don’t think this system has tipping points—it has feedback.

Okay, okay, I’ll make sure that I use that terminology from here on in.

And then we talked about the, well, we tried to investigate some of the reasons why this more apocalyptic narrative has gained a foothold.

We talked about the Malthusians; we talked about the political tilt of the funding regime; we talked a little bit more implicitly about the fact that more apocalyptic and doom-saying prognostications tend to attract a lot more attention, and so that’s a big problem—constant repetition.

And the fact that children—I mean, you know, Al Gore—no, it was John Kerry who made this statement.

I mean it was just astounding. I think it was in a talk in Indonesia he said something to the effect that we all know how difficult physics and chemistry can be, but climate is easy enough for any child to understand.

Right, right.

Which showed you the level of his understanding.

Well, yeah, but also the impact is we’re starting to teach kindergarten children climate.

Yeah, but you don’t teach them terrifying them.

Yeah, right. Your world is coming to an end in 10 years unless your parents stop eating meat or, you know, God knows what, right?

Or driving their vehicle, or hitting their house or grandma warm, or recharging their electric car.

Well, so let me offer a set of propositions to the listeners and stop me or clarify what I’m saying if I get it wrong. So there are lots of drivers of climate variation; the big drivers have to do with oscillations in planetary orbit or other comparative effects.

There are so many factors that would impact it. There are ocean currents; you know, for instance, again, it's a technical term, but the surface of the Earth is not isolated; you know, it's not in equilibrium with space.

It has the oceans underneath it. Ocean circulations have time scales up to a thousand years, and they're constantly bringing fluid up and taking fluid away from the surface, and that fluid is carrying heat.

And so the system is never quite in equilibrium; it varies on its own. Until we understand these systems perfectly well, we don’t necessarily have a good theory for the fact that, you know, there was a medieval warm period; there was evidence of a warm period, you know, 2,000 years ago—all sorts of things.

There were things, oddly enough, I mean you know, at the beginning of the 19th century in New England, every town had a learned society, and they had their proceedings.

And you would look at these old documents of ordinary people, well ordinary educated people at that time, discussing whether Rome when they had vineyards and so on was warmer than it is at their time, they were still in little ice age, and they were wondering if it was just reportage or there was something really different—had climate changed?

They were doing sophisticated thinking about it, which has virtually disappeared from our world.

We also talked about the 97 percent of scientists fallacy, and you pointed out that 97 percent of scientists likely agree that carbon dioxide plays a role in the greenhouse warming phenomenon.

Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that 97 percent of scientists believe that there are tipping points built into the climate and that we’re going to slide off the edge of an abyss within the next hundred years.

Oh no, those are very different claims.

No, and it’s, you know, as I say, I mean, I was speaking at a group, I think, Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, and they’d give me some recognition, and I decided that I would point out who opposed this narrative during the early '90s or the '90s, and it was leading figures in the field, and Bill Nye the Science Guy on TV or something was saying that, you know, these are just old people who’ll die soon and we won’t have these objections.

And there was some truth to that! I mean, you had directors of major labs, directors of the MOX Plank, people who are heading the European medium-range weather forecasting, which is a premier group—all of them objecting to it, presidents of the National Academy and so on.

But starting in the '90s with the takeover of major funding institutions and so on, you weren’t going to get many younger people.

Right, right.

Okay, so if we close this off, and maybe we could do this if you—maybe you could take 30 seconds or get a lot of relatively young people watching this YouTube channel, and you know they’re worried because they’ve been fed a non-ending diet of apocalyptic catastrophe and oppressive patriarchy since they were like three.

And so if you wanted to address them directly and say what you wanted to say about what we can expect over the next 50 years, let’s say— because that’s kind of not a bad lifespan.

Uh, viewpoint or 75 years—what do you think? What should we be contemplating on the climate front?

Much the same as we’ve seen. You’ll see variations; they’ve always occurred. There will be places like the Gulf Coast of the U.S.—which had been a citrus country in the 40s and now it’s too cold for citrus.

Other things will change, things always change a bit. There may be, you know, several inches of sea level rise, but not a lot more. There’s no evidence it will be much more.

You’ll still have a situation where if you live in New England, Mark Twain's remark, you know, wait a minute, and the weather will change will still be true.

And you know, that's life; that’s why you have overcoats and gloves and swimsuits, and there will be nothing special—it’s not cataclysmic.

You’re not going to be inundated with hungry polar bears fleeing the Arctic; you’re not going to have cities underwater, um, and you know get on with your life.

But the question is if your teacher insists on your saying the world is coming to an end or you won’t get promoted, I’m not sure what I should tell them.

Well, I’ve told my students my whole life—don’t falsify your words. Because the thing is, you know, I’ll tell you an experiment, a psychological experiment that’s quite interesting—it might even be valid.

So imagine you bring people in to the lab—young people—and you give them a political attitudes questionnaire regarding their views on a particular topic, maybe abortion, maybe climate—whatever, some topic that’s, you know, relatively contentious.

Then you have them sit down and write a 500-word essay arguing against their position.

Now, they know they’re doing this in a lab—then you bring them in a week later, and you give them the same political attitudes questionnaire.

You find that their attitudes have shifted substantially and significantly towards the direction of their writing.

And so the problem is, you can’t falsify your words without falsifying your thinking—because your words construct your perceptions, and so if you kowtow to the teacher’s ideology—we found this too when we were looking at what predicted politically correct beliefs.

So the trait agreeableness did; being female did; having a lower verbal IQ did. But another major predictor was whether or not you’d taken any courses at all that were explicitly politically correct or theoretically oriented.

So you have to be very careful about kowtowing to the ideology because you can’t get away with it. You’ll falsify your own psyche if you falsify your words.

You know, I think I agree with what you’re saying, but 1984 was a fairly good example of how society can break that down.

And so you've maintained your ground, you've maintained your ground, how come age?

In other words, you know, it's the business that for scientists of an older generation, up to mine, pretty much—maybe a little further—we could develop our reputations, our work product over a freer time.

The other thing is theoreticians don’t need as much money as experimenters, and so I needed money just to support students.

I didn’t need equipment; I didn’t need very much of anything else.

Right, right.

But it was mainly that people were advanced in their careers. If you were a director of a lab and so on, if you were near retirement, you could speak freely.

The more sad were the weathermen—the people, the media forecasters and so on, who had a love of meteorology—in many cases, were very knowledgeable and objected to this by and large.

I would go on a train ride or something, and meteorologists from the media would see me in there and say, “Thank you for that,” but the media have been firing people who don’t attribute every weather event to climate.

Right!

And the meteorologists know this is nonsense, but they just, you know, are being pressured immensely.

And we were lucky; our jobs were not at issue; we had tenure and so on.

But younger people don’t have that luxury.

Yeah, while being canceled is no fun. I mean, I’ve known like 200 people who’ve been canceled, and it’s about equivalent to a major illness; it’s no joke.

So all right, sir. Well, look—for everybody who’s been watching and listening on YouTube, thank you very much for your time and attention.

And Dr. Lindzen, thank you very much for your calm and dispassionate—and kind, I would say—analysis of the current situation, and for agreeing to speak to me today and for providing all the people who are watching and listening with the fruits of your decades of labor.

And for—I'm going to talk to Dr. Lindzen for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform, by the way, probably on a more biographical front.

I’m interested in how his career developed.

Hello everyone, I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.