No. Just because Lindzen is a reputable scientist, doesn't mean he's studied the climate history of the periods. He may have and he may have spoken or written on the subject. I don't know and I don't need to know what he has said specifically about it as it is well known from other sources.
But here is something interesting by Lindzen (doesn't deal with the LIA or MWP though) - its long and I'll only post a bit of it:
UNDERSTANDING COMMON CLIMATE CLAIMS
(THIS IS A DRAFT COPY OF A PAPER THAT WILL APPEAR IN THE
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2005 ERICE MEETING OF THE WORLD
FEDERATION OF SCIENTISTS ON GLOBAL EMERGENCIES)
RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
……………..
By now the reader should understand that the public discourse concerning global warming has little in common with the standards of normal scientific discourse. Rather, it
should be considered as part of political discourse where comments are made to secure thepolitical base and frighten the opposition rather than to illuminate the issues. In political
discourse, any information is to be spun and used to reinforce pre-existing beliefs, anddiscourage opposition. The chief example of the latter is the perpetual claim of universal
scientific agreement. This claim was part of the media treatment of global cooling (in the1970’s) and has been part of the treatment of global warming since 1988 (well before most climate change institutes were created). The ‘consensus,’ in brief, preceded the research.
However, in this section, I would like to focus on the former.
For example, in 2001, the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) issued a report:
Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions. This report was prepared at the specific request of the White House. The brief though carefully drafted report of 15 pages
was preceded by a totally unnecessary 10 page executive summary. The opening lines were appended at the last moment without committee approval. Nevertheless, all these lines did
was to repeat the basic agreement.
Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.
Temperatures are, in fact, rising.
The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability.
To be sure, this statement is leaning over backwards to encourage the alarmists (a point I will return to later). Nevertheless, the two sentences in the first claim serve to
distinguish observed temperature change from human causality. The presence of the word ‘likely’ in the second statement is grossly exaggerated, but still indicates the lack of certainty, while the fact that we have not emerged from the level of natural variability is, in fact, mentioned albeit obliquely. What, as usual, goes unmentioned is that the observed changes are much smaller than expected. As most readers are aware, this report is commonly cited as endorsing global warming alarmism. The response from many commentators was typical and restricted to the opening lines. CNN's Michelle Mitchell characteristically declared that the report represented “a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room.” Mitchell’s response has, in fact, become the standard take on the NRC report. Such claims, though widely made, have no basis: they are nonsensical.
That media discourse should be political rather than scientific should, in fact, come as no surprise. However, as has already been noted, even scientific literature and institutions have become politicized. There are, at least, three aspects to this politicization. The first is typified by the above opening remarks to the NRC report. Some scientists issue meaningless remarks in what I believe to be the full expectation that the media and the environmental movement will provide the ‘spin.’ Given the fact that the societal response to alarm has, so far, been to increase scientific funding, there has been little reason for scientists to complain.
………
A second aspect of politicization of discourse specifically involves the scientific literature. Over the years, articles have been published which challenge the claim of alarming response to anthropogenic greenhouse gases. A number have already been mentioned (Lindzen, Chou and Hou, 2000, Douglass and Knox, 2005). There are several others including McIntyre and McKittrick25 (2005) and von Storch26 (2004). Not surprisingly, there quickly appear challenges to these papers. However, there are several aspects of these challenges that are anomalous. They appear unusually quickly, and they are usually published as independent papers rather than as correspondence concerning the original papers. Thus, any defense that the original author(s) may make does not appear until a frequently long delay (1.5 years in at least one instance). In my experience, the criticisms are usually hasty and without understanding of the original work. However, the original papers are immediately referred to as ‘discredited.’ When the responses of the original authors finally appear, they are accompanied by the response of the critics who generally ignore the responses of the original authors, and repeat their criticism. This is clearly not a process conducive to scientific progress, but it is not clear that progress is what is desired.
………………
A final aspect of politicization is the explicit intimidation of scientists. It is essential to discuss this unsavory subject – albeit briefly and incompletely. Intimidation has mostly, but not exclusively, been used against those questioning alarmism. Victims of such intimidation generally remain silent for reasons that will become evident. Thus, prior to 1992, then Senator Gore ran at least two hearings in order to pressure scientists who questioned his views27. Scientists whose views he objected to were called before his subcommittee. Usually almost no other senators participated. However, other witnesses consisting in mostly government scientists and representatives of funding agencies were called, clearly with the intent of these additional witnesses criticizing the initial scientist.
Generally, at least some of the attending scientists were appalled at the use to which they were being put, but Gore usually managed to extract enough from these hearings to place
something in the Congressional Record to the effect that the target had ‘recanted’ or had been ‘discredited.’ In the early 90’s after Gore had become Vice President, Ted Koppel on his evening television program, Nightline, announced that Vice President Gore had asked him to find connections to unsavory interests for scientists questioning global warming alarm. Koppel, after editorializing on the inappropriateness of Gore’s request, proceeded to present a balanced exposure of both sides of the debate28. Of course, it was most unlikely that the Vice President had restricted his request to Koppel, and shortly thereafter an article by a relatively unknown journalist, Ross Gelbspan, appeared in Harper’s Magazine proclaiming (libelously) that scientists who differed with Gore were stooges of the fossil fuel industry. Gelbspan, who
had taken unusually early retirement from the Boston Globe, seems to have made this into a second career. He followed his article with extensive lecture tours and two books rehashing his position29. The second book has an effusive preface by Gore. Both the preface and Gelbspan, himself, refer to Gelbspan as a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist though the Pulitzer Foundation seems to have no record of this. All of this would be bad enough, but the real source of intimidation was the fact that neither the American Meteorological Society nor the American Geophysical Society saw fit to object to any of this. I should add that this brief treatment hardly exhausts the known cases. Perhaps, the best documented case (because it resulted in legal proceedings) involved the attempt to have the name of Roger Revelle removed from a published article in which Revelle expressed the view that the purported danger of global warming was not sufficiently established to take costly action (N.B. Gore frequently referred to Revelle as the person who introduced him to Global Warming.).
Professor Fred Singer was accused of misrepresenting Revelle’s participation in the paper. The resulting legal proceedings revealed a tangle of involvements including Vice President
Gore, several environmental groups, and a young scientist claiming to be the intellectual heir of Revelle. The reader is urged to read Singer’s detailed account of this incident.30
All of the above contrasted with other cases of political interference with climate science. For example, when William Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton University,
was dismissed in 1993 from his position as Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy after he expressed questions about global warming, the physics community was
generally supportive and sympathetic31. More relevant is the recent case of Michael Mann (currently on the faculty of Penn State) who, with colleagues, created a reconstruction of
mean temperature going back 1000 years which purported to show that the half degree (Centigrade) rise of the past century was unprecedented32. Not surprisingly, this result was controversial (despite the previously mentioned fact that the observed rise was much less than models predict should have resulted from the anthropogenic increases in greenhouse forcing).
Several papers have appeared challenging Mann’s results by both climate scientists (Esper et al33, Broecker34, Soon et al35, and von Storch for example) and other experts (Muller36,
McIntyre and McKittrick). There have also been papers claiming similar results (Jones and Mann37, and Crowley and Lowery38 for example). The difficulty in this controversy is that
Mann has not released the details of his analysis so as to permit detailed checking. Because of the extensive use of Mann’s result in the politics of global warming, Representative Barton of the US House of Representatives has demanded that Mann make public the details of his analysis since it was supported by US funds. Mann has refused (however, he appears to have subsequently posted his Fortran code on his website), and, interestingly, both the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union have formally protested Barton’s request. One need not go into the relative merits of this controversy to see that this difference in the response of the relevant professional organizations sends a rather chilling message to those who question what has become climate orthodoxy; only the defenders of the orthodoxy will be defended against intimidation – regardless of the merits of the case or the lack thereof.
Not surprisingly, a large portion of the scientists challenging alarmism have been older and more senior scientists with the benefit of tenure (or even retirement). These included Professor William Nierenberg, former Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institution, and Professor Jerome Namias also of Scripps and former head of the Weather
Bureau’s Long Range Weather Forecasting Division. Both are now deceased. For beginning scientists, I have little doubt that publicly questioning global warming alarm would be extremely detrimental to their careers. A potential exception to this is Willie Soon whose scientific position is in solar physics rather than climate. There has been a general tolerance
for solar physicists who suggest solar influence as being important to climate. My personal impression is that this tolerance stems from the utility of the essentially unknown solar forcing in ‘adjusting’ models to better simulate observations (viz Section 4).
The situation in Europe has been similar. Before 1991, some of Europe’s most prominent climate experts were voicing significant doubts about climate alarm. Note that the issue has always concerned the basis for alarm rather than the question of whether there was warming (however small) or not. Only the most cynical propagandist could have anticipated
that sentient human beings could be driven into panic by the mere existence of some warming. In any event, among these questioners were such distinguished individuals as Sir
John Mason, former head of the UK Meteorological Office, and Secretary of the Royal Society, Prof. Hubert Lamb, Europe’s foremost climatologist and founder of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, Dr. Henk Tennekes, Director of Research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute, and Professor Aksel Wiin-Nielsen of the University of
Copenhagen and former Director of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, and Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization. All of these figures except Tennekes have disappeared from the public discourse. Lamb is now dead. Tennekes was dismissed from his position, and Wiin-Nielsen was tarred by Bert Bolin (the first head of the IPCC) as a tool of the coal industry. The Italian situation was more benign.
Some of Italy’s leading younger atmospheric scientists like Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza publicly questioned alarm and organized a meeting in early autumn of 1991 in
Chianciano under the auspices of the Demetra Foundation. Shortly thereafter they too disappeared from the debate. Apparently their funding for climate research was cut off, but
funding for other projects was provided, and they, quite reasonably, moved to other areas of research. In Russia, a number of internationally recognized pioneers of climate science like K. Kondratyev and Y. Izrael, continue to vocally oppose climate alarm, but Russian scientists eager for connections with the rest of Europe are much more reluctant to express such views.
9. SCIENCE AND POLICY
The mixture of science and policy often leads to absurdity, and global warming is no exception. The policy community appears to have no understanding of the science while the
science community is in thrall to the policy community. This hardly helps communication.
On top of everything is the fact that global warming and energy policy are intertwined, and many in the energy policy community are eager to take advantage of the connection — again
with little regard for the science of climate. Consider, for example, one simple fact: as concerns climate change, what matters is not the emissions of CO2 or even the concentration
of CO2 in the atmosphere, but rather the radiative forcing due to the anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Thus, policy and energy specialists talk endlessly (in seemingly unboundedly numerous meetings) about small reductions in emissions without reference to CO2 levels, and (for the more sophisticated discussants) about CO2 levels without reference to radiative forcing. Of course, even the simple relation of radiative forcing to climate is a chimera, given the importance of geographical distribution. For example, the likely forcing
of ice age cycles by the earth’s orbital variations (the Milankovich hypothesis) involves very little net radiative forcing but very large changes in the geographical distribution of this forcing. None of this should be surprising, given the facts that the atmosphere and oceans are
fluids, that their motions are major transporters of heat, and that the motions depend on gradients of temperature rather than specific values.
We hear about ‘insurance policies,’ critical levels of CO2, etc., etc. My impression is that when we speak of models calculating the climate response to doubled CO2, the policy
makers assume that we are far from this point. However, as I noted earlier, in terms of radiative forcing, we are, in fact, three quarters of the way to this point. The encouraging fact
is that despite this forcing, we have not seen anything near what models predict. Indeed, it still is essentially impossible, in my estimation, to distinguish what has been seen from natural unforced variability. Moreover, what changes we have seen (regardless of cause) have not prevented profound advances in GDP, food production, life expectancy, etc. On the
other hand, if one still chooses to take the model outputs seriously, we have long passed any point of ‘no return’ with respect to radiative forcing, and future additions of CO2 will only add modestly to current forcing. Thus, policies such as the Kyoto Protocol, which don’t seriously limit emissions and don’t measurably impact concentrations, genuinely deserve the designation of ‘no gain and all pain.’ Indeed, there would appear to be little we can do at this stage other than to prepare to adapt. However, the policies that address adaptation are often diametrically opposed to those involved in so-called mitigation, because at the heart of adaptive capacity is wealth. To people of good will, this should be welcome news. We are, in effect, saying that policies promoting the improvement of general welfare throughout the
world are also, automatically, the appropriate policies with respect to climate change. It would appear, however, that most of the advocates in this issue are more concerned with their special interests (whether they be alternate energy sources, bureaucratic control, political preference, corporate image, etc.) than with general welfare.
10. CONCLUSION AND SUMMARY
So where does all this leave us? First, I would emphasize that the basic agreement frequently described as representing scientific unanimity concerning global warming is entirely consistent with there being virtually no problem at all. Indeed, the observations most simply suggest that the sensitivity of the real climate is much less than found in models whose sensitivity depends on processes which are clearly misrepresented (through both ignorance and computational limitations). Attempts to assess climate sensitivity by direct observation of cloud processes, and other means, which avoid dependence on models, support the conclusion that the sensitivity is low. More precisely, what is known points to the conclusion that a doubling of CO2 would lead to about 0.5C warming or less, and a quadrupling (should it ever occur) to no more than about 1C. Neither would constitute a particular societal challenge. Nor would such (or even greater) warming likely be associated with discernibly more storminess, a greater range of extremes, etc.
Second, a significant part of the scientific community appears committed to the maintenance of the notion that alarm may be warranted. Alarm is felt to be essential to the maintenance of funding. The argument is no longer over whether the models are correct (they are not), but rather whether their results are at all possible. Alas, it is impossible to prove something is impossible. As you can see, the global warming issue parts company with normative science at a pretty early stage. A very good indicator of this disconnect is the fact that there is widespread and even rigorous scientific agreement that complete adherence to the Kyoto Agreement would have no discernible impact on climate. This clearly is of no importance to the thousands of negotiators, diplomats, regulators, general purpose bureaucrats and advocates
attached to this issue.
At the heart of this issue there is one last matter: namely, the misuse of language. George Orwell wrote that language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are
foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
There can be little doubt that the language used to convey alarm has been sloppy at best. Unfortunately, much of the sloppiness seems to be intentional. A question rarely asked, but nonetheless important, is whether the promotion of
alarmism is really good for science? The situation may not be so remote from the impact of Lysenkoism on Soviet genetics. However, personally, I think the future will view the
response of contemporary society to ‘global warming’ as simply another example of the appropriateness of the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes. For the sake of the science, I hope that future arrives soon.
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