The entire quote is:
"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."

Lindzen's research funding is exclusively from the government, and Lindzen has received no RESEARCH funding from energy companies. Lindzen has received CONSULTING funding from the energy companies.

The biographical note is like the editorial itself. It appears to be correct, but its wrong and worded deceptively.  

His first backer was Phillip Morris.
http://www.greyfalcon.net/lindzen.png

-David Ahlport

This is the kind of logic used by Lindzen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOyk-UwHiH4

"Scientists who study manmade global warming are only in it because they are greedy for getting grants."

-David Ahlport

1. Lindzen goes on a bender about how climate scientists use untrustworthy models, "similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now". Now, I thought weather and climate were different things. Am I right in thinking this is a ridiculous statement on the face of it? (Again, I am not a climate scientist.)

2. How much of Lindzen's peer-reviewed research actually attacks the notion of rising temperatures? I've looked through some of the databases and he's certainly published a fair bit, but I can't understand the jargon in even the abstracts. How serious is his science? (Again, IANACS.)

3. My lay impression of the article is that Lindzen has jumped the shark. Anyone better placed to comment on that?

One of his best examples is that the METS model (one of the 4 most influential models) has predicted that summer rainfall in Ireland and the Central Sahara is the same.

What is known is that plants evolved and genetically fixed the C3 photosynthesis metabolic pathway in an atmosphere of about ten times present atmospheric C02.

The reason that 90% of atmospheric CO2 in the earlier atmosphere is not still in the atmosphere we breath is that plants fixed the CO2 in forms such as limestone.

In the Everglades, where I live, there is approximately 14,000 feet of lime rock - ALL of which was metabolically fixed.  Yea, photosysthesis!

As we free more CO2 by burning carbon fuels, we cause faster and more efficient photosynthesis.  Look up Dr. Idso's work on mass of plants (sour orange trees) grown in CO2 enhanced atmospheres.

Not only does increased CO2 cause faster plant growth, it results in lower water requirement for plant growth.

PS   Buy lawn mower stock - - Grass WILL grow faster in the future!

It's typical of a person with a background in political science, English, history--whatever you studied--to argue that "models are just made up."

Actually, if you understood science, you would know that their have been cases where the models let us know that data was wrong, and forced us to reanalyze. This has occured numerous times, in areas that are not only climaze science.

A case in point can be found in this article.

http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2006/aug/ ...

Benny Big Eye

Lindzen does concede (with other doubters) that temperatures are rising, but claims that it may be due to some other mechanism than global warming.

I think Lindsen jumped the shark when he claimed a couple of months ago on TV that people alarmed by global warming were like "little children." But that's not as spectacular as his fellow doubter William Gray of Colorado State University, who last June compared Al Gore to Adolf Hitler.

So Al Gore makes money. Good for him. If we have to believe the so called skeptics anybody who states that global warming is a problem is not allowed to make any money and has to live in a cave without any electricity. You have to be a saint apparently. It is both ridiculous and a complete fabrication as to what Gore is saying needs to be done.

The point Gore is making is that we can do this. He believes in the capability of the human race to tackle such a major issue. The deniers do not have that faith in our capabilities. Please leave things the way they are because we won't be able to cope. It will be the end of our society! Let's face it, the skeptics are a bunch of alarmist, apocalyptic scare mongerers.

If we have to believe the so called skeptics anybody who states that global warming is a problem is not allowed to make any money and has to live in a cave without any electricity.

But that's exactly what they should be doing!   How can these people be among the most energy hogging people on the planet and yet tell me not to use my convection oven from Target so much?

That is why The Guillotine has been founded:

http://you-read-it-here-first.com/viewtopic.php?t=511

The Guillotine states:

1. The majority of societies problems are caused by the top 3% of society.

Lindzen clearly relishes the role of naysayer. He'll even expound on how weakly lung cancer is linked to cigarette smoking.

I think that clearly puts Lindzen's statements about climate change in context: he would rather be a naysayer than be right.

Do not dwell on the naysayers or Lindzen's failed strategies.  Yes, models are just a simulation that can be biased by its constructs but the exact same same be say for observational atmospheric physics, lead by Dr. Gray of University of Colorado - sometimes they completely fail, too.

Why spend valuable time dissing some creeps who want to promite personal strategies and vendettas when we have so much work to get done?  

Oh, and thank you, Dr. Andrew Dressler.  I want to hear more from you in the future.  You are an asset to the Grist when you comment.

Clifford H. Wells ("sammie")
Masters of Applied Geography
Wells Environmental Consulting, LLC
South Padre Island, TX

Onward through the fog

I think the problem I have as a non-scientist is that society puts such faith on scientists. When a few contrarians are held up by the media as balancing the AGW consensus, we stop and think, "Hang on a bit, what if they're right?" I think you know how it goes from there.

Andrew, you're doing a great job. Please don't stop exposing sceptics when they hog the spotlight. It's a valuable service to people like me, who aren't familiar with the science.

All I see is a bunch of pipsqueaks hiding behind the IPCC and Al Gore.

Why aren't their throngs of tenured scientists at Yale, MIT, Brigham Young, and so on, who are speaking out on a daily basis about Anthropogenic Global Warming?

Is it because they still aren't sure?  And they don't really want to risk their jobs and pensions by casting their luck in with the Crypto-Malthusian hoaxers?

All I see is a bunch of pipsqueaks hiding behind the IPCC and Al Gore.

How about this then?

National Academy of Sciences, United States of America
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Royal Society, United Kingdom
Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
Academia Brasiliera de Ciências, Brazil
Royal Society of Canada, Canada
Academié des Sciences, France
Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher, Germany
Indian National Science Academy, India
Accademia dei Lincei, Italy
Science Council of Japan, Japan

i.e. The biggest national science organizations in the world.

_

All you have on the NGW side is a handful of individual scientists who speak more of conspiratorial rhetoric than scientific evidence.

-David Ahlport

Note: Nye and that Heidi girl are kinda scary with their thin faces ;D
They remind me of Colmes from Fox News.

Note: The Gulf Stream issue is argueable.
Carl Wunsch for instance argues against Gore on this, but still believes man made warming is real.

But this largely irrelivant to whether or not Manmade global warming is real.

That said:

Larry King: "Richard Lindzen I read your pieces in the Wall Street Journal.  They were very authoritative and very well written."

(Skip to 8:00)
Bill Nye: "So it will be very dangerous if the world gets 2°F warmer, in say the next 50 years.  I'd be dangerous for almost everybody. Do you disagree with that?"
Richard Lindzen: "Yes of course I do, there is no study that suggests that 2°F will make the world appreciably more dangerous"

Note: The difference between temperatures now, and the "little iceage" was less than 2° difference.
http://www.greyfalcon.net/moberg2005.png

Richard Lindzen: "At the heart of it, we're talkiing about a few 10ths of a degree change in temperature, none of it in the last eight years by the way."

Thats just patently false.
Likely he's cherrypicking 1998 in that statement, even though that was an El Nino Year.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/2001/2 ...
http://www.greyfalcon.net/globaltemps.png

Richard Lindzen: "If we had warming it should be accompanied by less storminess, but because the temperature itself is so unspectacular, we've developed all sorts of fear prospect scenarios: Of flooding, of plague, of increased storminess, when the physics says we should see less."

Lindzen makes baseless claims, that are essentially outright lies

_

Julian Morris, he's just your common oil lobbyist.
His organization has been funded atleast $295,000 from Exxon Mobil.
With the standard tagline that most skeptics are picking up nowadays:
"OMG we need to help the thirdworld countries first.  OMG You bleeding heartLESS liberals!"
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=108
http://youtube.com/watch?v=at0T7Fi5l_I

-David Ahlport

1. "It's not happening"
   
2. "We're not causing it"
   
3. "You can't prove that it will be a bad thing if it does happen. Infact I believe it will be a very good thing."

_

Basically saying Prevention is more costly than Adaptation plus Desperate Measures.

It's a lot harder to get the cat back into the bag, especially when it has claws.

-David Ahlport

We glared at him in disbelief.  We tried to explain that for the most part, all academic scientists were under immense pressure to get published and some [loud-mouth scientists] adopted "maverick" opposing opinions so as to sell books and get on TV, and that the mainstream had been recording remarkably continuously higher climactic averages when viewed annually over 30 years.  Simply stated, there was no proof for global cooling in the US or worldwide, and we knew about it for many decades.

Some of us who have been around since 1970 cringe at the idea of even using global average temeratures to indicate Global Warming, since in fact some areas might be indeed cooling.  We had hoped that by using geographic information systems we could show the "hot spots" were hot and the imbalances there could cause cooling of certain other areas at certain times, and damn the global averages because they didn't mean shit to a tree.

For example, we know that if Arctic ice melts it will flood certain currents such as the Laborador and the meltwater could end up plunging northern Europe into a mini-Ice Age, while other areas of the world would bake and fry in extreme heat; inland areas would be baked dry and coastal areas could be deluged by a combination of sea level rise and tropical cyclones.  We had hoped the science could go these more discrete directions, and be able to guage the mass balance of thermal heat input much better than using one global average temperature, which is as stupid is as stupid gets.

But 25 years later we're still trying to convince Americans whether or not Global Warming effects from man-made carbon dioxide even exist.  Dang, that really sucks.  In hindsight the topic wasn't managed to darn good.  Maybe a new crop of kids can do better than us old farts.  I certainly hope so.  /sammie

Onward through the fog