Professor Richard Lindzen is an Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, working in the department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Lindzen believes that the climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change do not properly account for the physcis of cloud formation, and that as a result they exaggerate the warming effect of CO2.

Do you disagree with the assertion that increases in CO2 causes GW?
It is a complicated issue how the earth’s climate changes, it’s changed dramatically in the past – we’ve had cycles of Ice Ages every hundred thousand years for the last 700 000 years, we’ve had warm periods when there were alligators in Pittsburgh, we’ve had changes, change has been the norm in climate. And we’ve had models in recent years that can’t explain any of these major changes, we’ve had models that they can’t explain even shorter term changes. In a sense there’s no science. We know these models don’t have the physics of water vapour and clouds which are the major factors in these models determining their sensitivity to climate. They do not get regional forecasts rights, they do not get polar temps right, and I mean by big errors.

I think to be fair to the scientific community over the years they have at least explored their assumptions and we now know that in the distant past and even in the recent past climate change and CO2 are not intimately connected, at least not in the sense that CO2 causes climate.

But we’re willing to accept that the model predictions are possible until disproved.

Could you explain your recent research which suggests that the effect of clouds shown in current models is wrong?
We have published a paper recently on this so-called ‘iris effect’, where we looked at clouds in very high resolution, geostationary data, provided by Japanese, and we saw a very good relation between the area of cloud coverage and surface temp. It operated in a way so that the clouds and the associated moisture would oppose changes in surface temp – when the surface got warm, they opened up more clear air to let heat out, when the surface got cold, they closed it down to keep heat. A potentially very important thermostat, it might be sufficient to reduce the response to a doubling of CO2 to another half degree.

There will undoubtedly be controversy about it, and we’re not even absolutely sure - the data we got was data of opportunity, there is other data we would like, it may take a few years to get that data. But one thing one could do immediately was take many existing large climate models and ask what they produce for these cloud diagnostics that we observed with the geostationary data. And it’s clear that the models do not reproduce what you observe, confirming that this important aspect of the model response is not behaving the way does in nature.

What do you think of the IPCC report and the decisions taken at Kyoto about actions against CO2 emissions?
We have introduced this precautionary principle that seems to suggest if something is possible we better let people do something about it, even though we have no idea what to do. I don’t think this is healthy.

Picking holes in the IPCC is crucial. The notion that if you’re ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don’t have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing, it’s like quackery in medicine – if somebody says you should take jelly beans for cancer and you say that’s stupid, and he says, well can you suggest something else and you say, no, does that mean you have to go with jelly beans?

The Kyoto treaty in many ways represents a triumph of politics over science. Despite all the controversy in the science over what you think may or may not happen to the climate, there has been very little controversy over what one expects the Kyoto emissions caps to do to climate, and that is nothing. If you have a model that predicts 4 degrees warming by 2100, Kyoto might knock it back to 3.8. Sometimes argued it does so little because it only involved the developed world, rather than China and India, but the truth is if China and India also agreed to cap their emissions at 1990, if you predicted 4 you might get 3. The point is, if you expect a lot of warming, Kyoto will leave you with a lot of warming. And the question is why go through what could be a wrenching economic reorientation of society, to do nothing about climate? I don’t know the answer to that, but it can’t be about climate.

So I think in the interests of public accountability to have policy that you claim is dealing with climate that you have another reason for, without telling the public what your reason is goes against democracy. But environmentalists say the reason is we’ll have lots of Kyotos. Nobody knows how to meet one Kyoto. It’s possible in 50 years we’ll all be using nuclear fuel shells and it won’t even be an issue, but the way we’re oriented now we don’t know how to do Kyoto.

Why do you think there is such a focus on CO2 as a cause for GW?
Whenever you have a problem which involves the interaction of science with politics and where there are advocates, like the Environmental movement and so on, there’s a kind of battle for the public mind, you are inevitably going to try and simplify the science as much as possible. CO2 for different people has different attractions. After all, what is it? - it’s not a pollutant, it’s a product of every living creature’s breathing, it’s the product of all plant respiration, it is essential for plant life and photosynthesis, it’s a product of all industrial burning, it’s a product of driving – I mean, if you ever wanted a leverage point to control everything from exhalation to driving, this would be a dream. So it has a kind of fundamental attractiveness to bureaucratic mentality.

It also has an attractiveness to a number of components of the scientific community. They also are attracted by an easy answer as to how climate works, so as a community they were attracted to the notion that there was one thing that determined climate and they didn’t have to learn the rest.

The difficulty is with a complicated subject we cannot simplify it without misrepresenting it. And so yes it would be nice if we could say the greenhouse effect is utterly basic and CO2 is a greenhouse gas and so changing it is responsible for climate. Well, there are many greenhouse substances, there are quite a few that are far more important that CO2, but climate changes irregularly, there are historical times when you don’t have this relationship, the greenhouse effect is not simple. And so the simplification gives people a comforting feeling they understand something, but that feeling is designed for propaganda purposes.

The public is being confused by not being permitted to distinguish between changing temp, which always occurs, and about which there is agreement, and man’s role in it, which is extremely uncertain and which there is very little agreement on, and the predictions of catastrophes, which there is almost no agreement on –they’re all lumped together in a kind of amorphous statement which they’re told all scientists agree on. And rather than having to disentangle each of these, they’re being provoked into a hysterical response which they’re told science demands, and science is doing nothing of the sort.

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