Mit Prof Sounds A Dissonant Note In Global-Warming Debate

As climate experts firm up their view that human activity is seriously altering the atmosphere, one voice stands out in clarion dissent.

Dr. Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a shoemaker’s son from the Bronx, has risen through the academic hierarchy as a leading expert on the physical processes of the atmosphere.

Is there truly cause to worry that emissions of waste industrial gases that trap heat like carbon dioxide could disrupt the world’s climate?

Lindzen does not equivocate. “We don’t have any evidence that this is a serious problem,” he says flatly, with precise diction, in a friendly voice that resonates strongly in his 17th-floor office overlooking Boston across the Charles River.

His opinions attacking the formal consensus about climate change have made the 56-year-old Lindzen a feared opponent of environmentalists who trumpet the dangers of global warming and a champion to political conservatives and industrial interests who minimize the threat.

Admirers see him as a force for intellectual honesty in a highly politicized debate. Critics fault him for professing unwarranted sureness in a field of research rife with uncertainty. Many say he is simply wrong.

But everyone takes him with the utmost seriousness because of a reputation for brilliance that got him elected to the National Academy of Sciences at age 37.

Regents’ and National Merit scholarships at the Bronx High School of Science (class of 1956) propelled him as a student first to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and then to Harvard University, where he was attracted by classical physics, and then atmospheric physics.

After various academic posts, he joined the MIT faculty in 1983, where he is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology.

In recent years, while pursuing his main interest of atmospheric dynamics in trying to help “figure out how climate works,” he has leveled a variety of criticisms at the idea of serious climatic change, some with telling effect.

For instance, he points out, the computer models do not reflect the climate’s natural variability very well - a key shortcoming in trying to gauge the human effect on climate, one that is readily conceded by the modelers.

The idea that has attracted most attention is based on a fundamental point of physics: that carbon dioxide and the other waste gases generate only a small amount of warming. Something has to amplify that warming for the larger amount of warming predicted by the United Nations panel to materialize.

The main candidate, whose presumed amplifying effect is built into the computer models, is water vapor - also a heat-trapping gas, and the most powerful one since there is so much of it and it is so pervasive. The theory is that a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, thereby increasing the warming even more.

Without this amplification, Lindzen argues, the average global temperature will rise by only about a degree Fahrenheit if atmospheric carbon dioxide is doubled.

While it is well known that warmer air generally holds more vapor, he says, “we don’t know what determines upper level water vapor,” a factor he says is crucial, and central to the predictions of future climate change.

To some critics, Lindzen’s confidence about the climate’s low sensitivity to carbon dioxide emissions embodies more certitude than the facts allow. “I don’t know what line from God he has,” says Dr. Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who cites what he sees as the overprecise estimate Lindzen gives.

Lindzen replies that he at least gives some reasons for his estimate rather than simply following a “herd instinct” that he says is very common in science.