Dr. Richard Lindzen and Dr. Jordan Peterson: Climate "Science"

The video is about Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Richard Lindzen, and the debate surrounding climate change and the role of scientists in understanding and addressing it. The speaker, Dr. Richard Lindzen, disagrees with the majority of scientists who believe that climate change is real and caused by human activity. He argues that the alarmism surrounding climate change is aided by political consensus and that the role of water vapor in current climate change models is not fully understood. The speaker is a distinguished atmospheric physicist and meteorologist with a focus on climate sensitivity and the determination of the tropics to pull temperature difference.

This video by Jordan B Peterson was published on Jan 5, 2023.
Video length: 01:49:52.

The video is about the topic of climate change and the role of science in understanding and addressing it.

The host, Dr. Richard Lindzen, is an accomplished atmospheric physicist and meteorologist who disagrees with the mainstream view that climate change is an existential threat. He argues that the alarmism surrounding climate change is aided by political consensus and that water vapor plays a more significant role in climate change than is currently understood. Dr. Lindzen's research is focused on climate sensitivity, the role of cirrus clouds in climate, and the determination of the tropics to pull temperature differences.

He is a member of several prestigious scientific organizations and has received numerous awards for his contributions to the field.

• Dr. Richard Lindzen is a distinguished atmospheric physicist and meteorologist.
• He has authored over 200 scientific papers and contributed to landmark theories in the realm of climate science.
• He disagrees with the majority of scientists who believe that climate change is real and caused by human activity.
• He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• He has held professorships at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and MIT, among others.
• Dr. Lindzen believes that the role of water vapor in current climate change models is not fully understood.
• He argues that the alarmism surrounding climate change is aided by political consensus.
• He believes that the focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is misguided and will not solve the problem.
• He believes that the debate surrounding climate change is politically motivated and not based on sound scientific evidence.

Climate "Science" | Dr. Richard Lindzen | EP 320 - YouTube

Introduction

• The speaker is Dr. Richard Lindzen, a distinguished atmospheric physicist and meteorologist.
• He has authored over 200 scientific papers and contributed to landmark theories in the realm of climate science.
• He disagrees with the majority of scientists who believe that climate change is real and caused by human activity.
• The speaker is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• He has held professorships at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and MIT, among others.

Disagreement with Mainstream Science

• Dr. Lindzen disagrees with the role of water vapor in current climate change models.
• He argues that alarmism is widespread and aided by political consensus.
• He believes that the alarmism surrounding climate change is not based on sound scientific evidence.
• He believes that the focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is misguided and will not solve the problem.
• He believes that the debate surrounding climate change is politically motivated and not based on sound scientific evidence.

Role of Water Vapor in Climate Change

• Dr. Lindzen believes that the role of water vapor in current climate change models is not fully understood.
• He argues that water vapor is a natural part of the Earth's climate system and does not contribute to global warming.
• He believes that the focus on reducing water vapor emissions is misguided and will not solve the problem.
• He believes that the role of water vapor in climate change is overestimated by mainstream scientists.
• He believes that the focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is misguided and will not solve the problem.

Climate "Science" | Dr. Richard Lindzen | EP 320 - YouTube

Conclusion

• Dr. Lindzen's views on climate change are controversial and not supported by the majority of scientists.
• He believes that the focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is misguided and will not solve the problem.
• He believes that the role of water vapor in climate change is overestimated by mainstream scientists.
• He believes that the debate surrounding climate change is politically motivated and not based on sound scientific evidence.
• His views on climate change are not supported by the majority of scientists and are considered controversial.

Dr. Richard Lindzen's Academic Background

• Graduated from Harvard University in physics in the 1960s.
• Enjoyed classical physics and found modern physics intimidating.
• Continued in graduate work in Applied Mathematics at Harvard.
• Worked on problems in meteorology and other fields.
• Completed a thesis on the interaction of fluid motions, chemistry, and radiative transfer in the stratosphere.

Postdoctoral Study and Research

• Completed a postdoctoral study at the University of Washington with a superb data analyst named Dick Reed.
• Worked on problems ranging from tides in the atmosphere to the quasi-biennial oscillation.
• Found a solution to the puzzle of the wind over the equator, which involves random waves generated by cumulus clouds and the tropics interacting with the flow.
• Theories that did well include the interaction of fluid motions and chemistry in the stratosphere and the relaxation oscillator.
• Observed that in the pressure at the surface in the Earth, the tides were also primarily semi-diurnal, which was a bit of a puzzle because that had to be thermal.

Dr. Richard Lindzen's Views on Climate Change

• Disagrees with the majority of scientists who believe that climate change is real and caused by human activity.
• Argues that the alarmism surrounding climate change is aided by political consensus.
• Believes that the role of water vapor in current climate change models is not fully understood.
• Focuses on climate sensitivity and the determination of the tropics to pull temperature difference.
• Considers himself a distinguished atmospheric physicist and meteorologist.

Dr. Richard Lindzen's Background

• Dr. Richard Lindzen was a distinguished atmospheric physicist and meteorologist.
• He was born in 1948 and received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1974.
• He worked at the University of Washington as a postdoctoral fellow and then went to Norway.
• After that, he worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) as a staff scientist.
• He later moved to the University of Chicago as an assistant professor and then to Harvard University as a professor.

Dr. Lindzen's Career

• Dr. Lindzen was offered a tenured position at the University of Chicago, which is not the normal mode of making an entry into academia.
• He was later offered a chair at Harvard University, which is also rare.
• At Harvard, Dr. Lindzen was part of a broken hiring system where faculty members are hired as assistant professors, which are not tenured at the Ivy Leagues generally speaking.
• The second hiring stream and the more important one is the senior professors, usually at associate or full Professor level.
• Dr. Lindzen was hired at Harvard in the 90s and was considered a mark of universal esteem within the confines of his research.

Dr. Lindzen's Views on Climate Change

• Dr. Lindzen disagrees with the majority of scientists who believe that climate change is real and caused by human activity.
• He argues that the alarmism surrounding climate change is aided by political consensus.
• He believes that the role of water vapor in current climate change models is not fully understood.
• He is a distinguished atmospheric physicist and meteorologist with a focus on climate sensitivity and the determination of the tropics to pull temperature difference.

Dr. Richard Lindzen's Academic Career

• Dr. Richard Lindzen studied at Harvard University and later moved to MIT.
• He had an office at MIT and some assistance, but no funding.
• He had postdocs who were paid, which helped him financially.
• He retired from MIT in 2013.
• He had colleagues at MIT, but no students.

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Dr. Richard Lindzen's Preference for Harvard or MIT

• Dr. Richard Lindzen did not have a preference for Harvard or MIT in terms of the students he encountered.
• The students he encountered changed over time, more than they changed with place.
• When he came to Harvard, the students in his area were mostly math and physics students.
• By the 90s, things changed a little bit and good students were not entering physics and math at the level they had once had.
• There was a change at MIT which was not something they wanted, which is it was getting harder and harder to find people working with data.

Dr. Richard Lindzen's Thoughts on Current Changes in Education

• Dr. Richard Lindzen finds it strange that there is so much emphasis on racism in the neurosciences and other disciplines.
• He is glad he is not teaching at this point because of the ideological insistence that something approximating critical race theory should dominate every single discipline.
• He believes that people who have no background in these fields are dominating them.
• He is also concerned about the vast increase in both numbers, power, and importance of social media.
• He believes that social media has a negative impact on people's mental health and well-being.

Administrative Overload in Universities

• The speaker discusses the issue of administrative overload in universities.
• Administrators outnumber faculty and students in many places.
• They need money but do not perform the functions that universities are paid for.
• Overhead on grants has become critically important.
• Scientists spend a third of their time writing grants with a low probability of success.

Death of Exploratory Science

• The granting system looks like the death of exploratory science.
• Young faculty today are sunk if they don't get grants.
• The administration plays a large role in the behavior of departments.
• The National Science Foundation had very few staff when the speaker entered academia.
• As the administration grew, there was also a role for the administration in the behavior of departments.

Climate Change and Grants

• You don't get grants if you question the current narrative on climate change.
• The rough equivalence of three published papers equals a PhD thesis.
• The speaker has published 250 papers.
• People's behavior has changed with time due to increased pressures to publish.
• Publication has become a very important factor in people's behavior.

The Role of Peer Review in Science

• Before World War II, peer review was rare and informal.
• After the war, peer review became more formal and widespread.
• Peer review is not meant to certify the paper as proven right, but to see if the stuff is interesting and not overtly wrong mathematically and not plagiarized.
• Two reasons for rejecting a paper: an overt mathematical error or lack of originality.
• The public has been made to think that peer review is the certification of the paper that it is somehow proven right.

The Early History of Climate Science

• The issue of climate science began in the 1960s.
• There was a lot of hunting around for some environmental issue that would give people power over the energy sector.
• Earth Day was one of the early environmental movements.
• Global cooling was another environmental issue that was popular in the 1960s and 1970s.
• The notion was to get rid of coal-fired plants because they were polluting and creating sulfates that were reflecting light and causing global cooling.

The Global Mean Temperature Metric

• The global mean temperature metric started increasing in the 1970s.
• CO2 came into the issue as one of the reasons for the increase in global mean temperature.
• The international geophysical year began a measurement program for CO2 at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
• Charles Keeling and Roger Ravel were involved in the measurement program for CO2.
• Evidence shows that CO2 has been increasing since the industrial era began, and serious levels of CO2 were reached in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Role of Water Vapor in Climate Change

• Water vapor plays a role in the greenhouse effect.
• It is an important chemical that is vital for photosynthesis.
• Water vapor is present in our breath at around 40,000 parts per million.
• It has infrared absorption, which contributes to the greenhouse effect.
• The question was what are the implications of water vapor in terms of climate change.

The Debate Surrounding Climate Change

• The debate surrounding climate change is significant in terms of heating.
• The question was what are the implications of controlling the energy sector.
• Carbon dioxide is a pollutant that cannot be completely removed from the burning of fossil fuels.
• The attempts to control the energy sector were motivated by the heart of industrial development and prosperity.
• There is an antipathy towards the working middle class and their aspirations to live decently.

The Antipathy Towards the Working Middle Class

• There is an antipathy towards the working middle class.
• People resent the fact that ordinary people aspire to live decently.
• There is a fear of the working middle class and their aspirations.
• The antipathy towards the working middle class is warm.
• The working middle class is seen as a threat to the prosperity of the West.

The Role of Water Vapor in Climate Change

• Water vapor plays a role in the greenhouse effect.
• It is an important chemical that is vital for photosynthesis.
• Water vapor is present in our breath at around 40,000 parts per million.
• It has infrared absorption, which contributes to the greenhouse effect.
• The question was what are the implications of water vapor in terms of climate change.

The Problem with the Climate Model

• The climate model is not obvious that single-celled organisms are a good metaphor for human beings.
• Human populations are capable of extremely radical adaptation and transformation.
• The notion that human populations are destined to a malthusian end is not a canonical biological fact.
• The problem with the climate model is that it is not clear what the upper bound is for population capacity.
• Agriculture has become far more efficient, leading to an emphasis on food that has not used fertilizer and other chemicals.

The Limits of Population Capacity

• India's population has increased significantly since independence, despite having a population under 200 million before independence.
• Farmland has been taken out of production and reverted to the wild, yet the amount of food produced is still increasing at a rapid rate.
• The upper bound for population capacity is not obvious.
• Agriculture has become more efficient, leading to an emphasis on food that has not used fertilizer and other chemicals.
• If we were to bury Europe, the US, Canada, and get rid of all their emissions, it would make very little difference to the growth of CO2.

The Ethics of Impoverishing People

• If we believe the carbon dioxide climate catastrophe narrative, we could make a case that it is ethically required to impoverish people.
• Germany's energy production is much less efficient and more expensive than it was 10 years ago, and it pollutes far more.
• If we provided people with cheap, clean energy on a world basis and eradicated absolute poverty or at least ameliorated it to the degree that was possible, people would start caring about the long term and start working for environmental preservation.
• Impoverishing people and making the planet worse is not an effective way to take care of the planet.
• If we want to take care of the planet, we need to focus on local environmental preservation.

The Narrative

• The narrative surrounding climate change is that it is determined by a greenhouse effect and adding CO2 to it increases it, causing warming and more.
• The natural greenhouse substances besides CO2, water vapor clouds, and upper-level clouds will amplify whatever man does.
• This narrative goes against Le Chatelier's principle, which states that if a system is capable of counteracting a perturbation, it will do so.
• The Earth's climate system has many regions, but two distinct different regions are the tropics and the extra-tropics.
• The Coriolis effect, a technicality, gives rise to the appearance of forces that change the winds relative to the rotation on a rotating system.

The Feedbacks

• The speaker began wondering where the feedbacks came from.
• People, including the speaker, started looking into the feedbacks and seeing whether there were any negative ones or how they worked.
• The crucial thing for the Earth is that it rotates, and the only component of the rotation is the one that is perpendicular to the surface.
• Where there is no vertical component to the rotation vector, motions do what they do in small scales if there is a temperature difference.
• The temperatures at any surface are relatively flat in the tropics, and they don't vary much with latitude.

The Role of Water Vapor

• The speaker argues that the role of water vapor in current climate change models is not fully understood.
• Water vapor clouds and upper-level clouds will amplify whatever man does.
• The speaker touches on something that took him a while to understand.
• Gerbils famously said that if you tell a big enough lie and repeat it often enough, it will become the truth.
• There are aspects of establishing the narrative that I.E., what makes something the truth that the speaker hadn't appreciated.

The Editors

• Two editors got fired for publishing the speaker's work.
• The second editor who got fired was for published after that.
• The speaker wrote 2001, immediately after the second editor got fired.
• The speaker started to object to the narrative when he began wondering where the feedbacks came from.
• The speaker immediately started looking into the feedbacks and seeing whether there were any negative ones or how they worked.

The Role of Water Vapor in Climate Change

• Water vapor is significant in the tropics but has little to do with temperature change between the tropics and the pole.
• Instabilities in temperature differences with latitude generate cyclonic and anti-cyclonic patterns that travel from east to west in mid-latitudes.
• The prevailing winds are opposite in the tropics and the poles.
• The greenhouse effect is amplified at the poles, but there is no physical basis for the statement that it determines temperature change between the tropics and the pole.
• The starting point for temperature change in mid-latitudes is determined mainly by hydrodynamics.

The Narrative of Climate Change

• The world is making a big deal out of climate and associating it with the greenhouse effect.
• The increase in carbon dioxide is initially associated with global warming.
• A one and a half degree increase in temperature might not be catastrophic but could trigger a sequence of cataclysmic events.
• The melting of the Greenland ice ice cap, rapid rise in sea level, and release of methane as a consequence of permafrost thawing are examples of cataclysmic events.
• The narrative assumes that water vapor increases and amplifies temperature change, but the whole picture is one-dimensional and knowledge of the area where water vapor is important is necessary.

Watch the video on YouTube:
Climate "Science" | Dr. Richard Lindzen | EP 320 - YouTube