Articles Tagged "Richard Lindzen"

Atmospheric physicist, MIT Professor of Meteorology and former IPCC lead author Richard S. Lindzen joins us to discuss the state of the climate change debate, the lack of evidence for catastrophic warming and what the science really tells us.

Interesting comment on 'tipping points in natural systems'-

"if climate has not 'tipped' in over 4 billion years it's not going to tip now due to mankind. The planet has a natural thermostat"! H/T NM.

See also MUST SEE: House Science & Technology Subcommittee Hearing on Climate Change Science

CLICK to see:- The House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment heard from a dozen witnesses about how the public and private sectors are approaching climate change.

See also - A Rational Discussion of Climate Change: the Science, the Evidence, the Response H/T The Week That Was(TWTW) Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

A Rational Discussion of Climate Change: the Science, the Evidence, the Response

CLICK to download the Witness Testimony

Professors Andrew Dessler from Texas A&M and Richard Lindzen from MIT debate the scientific evidence of anthropogenic global warming, while University of Virginia Law School professors Jonathan Cannon and Jason Johnston discuss the policy implications

This is a 1:54 recording, Richard takes the chair at 31 minuets, who came out best?

Richard is very good here, polite, good-natured, relaxed and completely wipes the floor with the interviewer who tries to corner him at every turn and fails.

Hear him laugh at the mention of Nicholas Stern !

Interview in 2 parts - Start 5:40 in and the 2nd bit is about 5 mins from the end. (Nick Mabbs)

CLICK to use the BBC iPlayer

Aerosols help cool the atmosphere by encouraging cloud droplets to form icy particles which reflect sunlight, but new research suggests they could also have the opposite effect and warm the atmosphere too.

Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT , and his former postdoctoral researcher Youn-Sang Choi analysed cloud formation and dust aerosol data collected by CALIPSO – NASA’s Cloud Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation satellite – from June 2006 to May 2007.

They discovered that there were 20% fewer super-cooled cloud particles – a mixture of water and ice that reflect more sunlight that ice alone – in regions that had dust aerosols, which the researcher suggest could warm the atmosphere in those areas.

“Current climate models generally over-predict current warming and assume that the excessive warming is cancelled by aerosols,” Lindzen and Choi said, “Our research offers a potentially important example of where the secondary effect is to warm, thus reducing the ability of aerosols to compensate for excessive warming in current models.”

A Penn State University panel of scientists on Thursday exonerated one of the school's researchers of accusations that his work on climate change violated the university's research misconduct policy.

After a four-month investigation, five university professors unanimously cleared professor Michael Mann, a climate scientist and one of several hundred researchers sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their work with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Penn State investigators concluded in a report released yesterday that "Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities."

"I am pleased that the last phase of Penn State's investigation has now been concluded, and that it has cleared me of any wrongdoing," Mann wrote in an e-mail. "These latest findings should finally put to rest the baseless allegations against me and my research."

Mann's work was chronicled in the 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," about former Vice President Al Gore's public campaign on global warming.

WEST ANTARCTICA—At a camp here on Earth's remotest continent, American researchers have constructed a towering drill that, like a biopsy needle, periodically plunges thousands of feet into the ice to extract an exotic marrow of frozen gases and isotopes.

Their work could settle a central question in the dispute over climate change, by documenting how greenhouse gases influenced temperatures in the past. Only then can researchers accurately analyze climate changes that may be under way today.

Until now, that information was hidden in Antarctica's ancient ice.

Scientists agree that global temperatures are rising, and so are levels of carbon dioxide. But the immediate impact of human activity on natural climate cycles—from ice-sheet dynamics to wind and ocean currents—remains unclear. The Antarctica research could, for the first time, teach scientists how global warming developed when humankind had no hand in it.

"One of the questions that everybody is interested in with greenhouse gases is, did the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations occur before or after the increase in temperatures in the past climate changes?" says glaciologist Kendrick Taylor, chief scientist of the $30 million U.S. National Science Foundation project. "Ice cores are the only way we can answer that question".

As many know, I recently returned from ICCC4. It has taken me a couple of days to get back on track and I want to share over the next couple of days, some of the things I saw there.

One thing I witnessed was a story of courage and of professionalism in the face of adversity. As many know, Heartland formally invited many scientists and scholars who are AGW proponents from the other side of the aisle.

This has been done for every conference since the first one in 2008.

James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at the sponsoring Heartland Institute and the person who recruited all of the 70-plus presenters Including yours truly) at the May 16-18 conference, said this about the invitations:

“I personally and cordially invited literally dozens of high-profile scientists who disagree with our speakers, including Gavin Schmidt, James Hansen, Michael Mann, Phil Jones, William Schlesinger, and many others,” Taylor said. “I planned to give each side equal time at the conference.

Regrettably – and predictably – only two ‘warmists’ accepted my invitation to participate: Scott Denning of Colorado State University and Tam Hunt, a consultant on renewable energy and a lecturer at UC Santa Barbara’s School of Environmental Science & Management.”

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