Leading Climate Scientist Disputes Global Warming Theories

Washington, D.C., March 1, 2001 – In a briefing before congressional staff, members of the press and scientists, Professor Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology assailed the politically driven work of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), specifically its pattern of misrepresenting the work of its contributing scientists to fit a preconceived agenda.

“The whole notion of a scientific consensus has been contrived to disguise the genuine disagreement among scientists on a number of different issues. Major media outlets announced, incorrectly, as early as 1988 that the issue of global warming was scientifically settled, and the IPCC has been spending over a decade trying desperately to make their reports conform to this belief,” said Lindzen. “To think that hundreds of scientists could be in full agreement in dozens of separate disciplines is ridiculous. The aura of certainty with which the IPCC’s conclusions are being reported is clearly more a matter of politics than science.”

Advocates of the theory of catastrophic global warming have managed to manipulate results of climate science for years now, using a variety of strategies to mislead the public and the media. Strategies that the IPCC has used include issuing a summary that misrepresents the contents of the full report, using language that means different things to scientists and laymen, and exploiting public ignorance – and the embarrassment about this ignorance – over scientific matters.

The briefing, titled “The Search for Scientific Consensus or The IPCC and the One-Handed Scientists,” was hosted by the Cooler Heads Coalition, a subgroup of the National Consumers Coalition that focuses on global warming issues. Members of the Cooler Heads Coalition include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Consumer Alert, the 60 Plus Association, and Frontiers of Freedom. For more information, find the Cooler Heads Coalition online at http://www.globalwarming.org/.

Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a lead co-author of Chapter 7 of the IPCC’s forthcoming Third Assessment Report. He is also 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. One of the world’s foremost atmospheric scientists, Dr. Lindzen received his AB, SM, and PhD degrees from Harvard University.

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