Newsweek Hides Global Warming Denier's Financial Ties to Big Oil

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted April 12, 2007.

So Newsweek is running an opinion piece about global warming titled: "Why So Gloomy?" The piece is authored by Richard Lindzen, a well-known meteorologist, and his thesis about the potential melt-down of our climate can be boiled down to this: Don't worry, be happy!

At the bottom of the article, is this brief biographical sketch of the author:

Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.

Sounds like he's on the up-and-up, no? After all, the guy's not one of those scientists who denies global warming and then cashes nice checks from a bunch of big energy firms, right? Maybe those wing-nuts are right when they deny that there's a scientific consensus about human activities contributing to global warming. Hmmm.

Oh, but wait. That name … Lindzen … sure does sound familiar.

Yes! From that excellent investigative piece in Harper's on the funding behind the climate skepticism "industry" …

In the last year and a half, one of the leading oil industry public relations outlets, the Global Climate Coalition, has spent more than a million dollars to downplay the threat of climate change…

For the most part the industry has relied on a small band of skeptics--Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Dr. Pat Michaels, Dr. Robert Balling, Dr. Sherwood Idso, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, among others--who have proven extraordinarily adept at draining the issue of all sense of crisis.

Lindzen, for his part, charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled "Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus," was underwritten by OPEC.

His research may be funded entirely by the government, but Lindzen himself -- his kids' college tuition, his mortgage payments -- have at least in part been funded by Big Oil and Big Coal, including OPEC for crying out loud!

But wait, it gets worse. The positions advocated by Richard Lindzen, the paid-by-OPEC opinion writer commenting in Newsweek -- he's also written op-eds for a number of other publications including the Wall Street Journal -- appear to be the diametric opposite of those held by Richard Lindzen, the serious meteorologist, when he's writing peer-reviewed scientific texts.

Specifically, Lindzen co-authored the 2001 National Academy of Science's report on climate change. It concluded that despite some scientific "uncertainties," there is "agreement that the observed warming is real and particularly strong within the past 20 years."

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.

The report predicts: "increases in rainfall rates and increased susceptibility of semi-arid regions to drought."

Global warming could well have serious adverse societal and ecological impacts by the end of this century, especially if globally-averaged temperature increases approach the upper end of the IPCC projections. Even in the more conservative scenarios, the models project temperatures and sea levels that continue to increase well beyond the end of this century, suggesting that assessments that examine only the next 100 years may well underestimate the magnitude of the eventual impacts.

See more stories tagged with: global warming, climate change, newsweek

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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