Richard Lindzen on the NAS Global Warming Report

By Brian Carnell

Wednesday, June 27, 2001

When the National Academy of Sciences recently released a report on global climate change it was widely hailed in the media as being incontrovertible proof that there is no serious scientific disagreement about global warming. As CNN's Michelle Mitchell put it, "[the report is] a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Richard Lindzen, one of the 11 scientists who prepared the report recently wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal saying that such claims were pure nonsense.

Lindzen wrote,

Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled. We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds).

But--and I cannot stress this enough--we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions.

Lindzen goes on to say that there is still far too little known to make the jump from the observed climate changes over the past 20 years to the broader claim that human activity will lead to the sort of dire forecasts predicted by many environmentalists.

Source:

Global warming: The press got it wrong. Richard S. Lindzen, Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2001.