Arguments
Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
Posted on 5 November 2025 by dana1981
Joe Rogan has one of the most popular podcasts on the Spotify and Apple Podcasts platforms, and a combined 50 million followers on YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram. And like nearly all of the most popular online shows, Rogan’s frequently tends to spread climate misinformation.
On his October 21st episode, Rogan interviewed two octogenarian fringe climate contrarians, Richard Lindzen and William Happer, who together have been spreading climate misinformation in the media that we at SkS have been debunking since at least 2012. For over two hours the trio discussed climate myths and conspiracy theories, many of them identical to the misinformation Lindzen and Happer were peddling well over a decade ago.
In this post we’ll do a brief debunking of 19 of the climate myths that were raised in the podcast episode. See this article for a look at the underlying psychology and science denial techniques. Each of the 19 myths is included in a sub-section below, with the quote provided in a blue box, including a link to the timestamp in the podcast, followed by a brief debunking.
A degree of global warming is a lot
Lindzen @ 6:02: “global mean temperature doesn't change much, but you know you focus on one degree, a half degree, so it looks like something”
Lindzen @ 22:06: “Gutierrez at the UN says the next half degree and we're done for. I mean, doesn't anyone ask, a half degree? I mean, I deal with that between, you know, 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m [laughs]. Rogan: "it does seem crazy. It's just that kind of fear of minute change that they try to put into people.”
Seemingly small changes in Earth’s average global temperature represent a tremendous amount of heat energy and can cause large changes in the climate, such as extreme weather events. The last ice age was ‘only’ about 5°C colder than the recent relatively warm period, for example.
Global warming and predictions in the 1970s
Lindzen @ 6:15: “[global mean temperature] was cooling from the 1930s. 1930s were very warm and it was getting cooler until the 70s and that's why they were saying well you know this is going to lead to an ice age and they focused on that for a while.”
The Earth’s average temperature increased slightly from 1930 to 1970, by about 0.05°C, although this was less clear in the temperature data at the time. Scientists were studying competing effects resulting from the burning of fossil fuels – cooling caused by sulfate aerosols that block sunlight and are caused by sulfur dioxide pollution, and warming from carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Some studies concluded that if sulfur dioxide emissions were to continue rising rapidly for many more decades, the resulting cooling effect could trigger an ice age. Instead, pollution regulations soon caused those emissions to decline.
A 2008 paper that looked at the relevant research in the 1970s found that a majority of studies were predicting global warming at the time.
Manabe's accurate early climate models
Lindzen @ 7:06: "Suki Manabe showed that even though CO2 doesn't do much in the way of warming – doubling it will only give you a half degree or so – but if you assumed that relative humidity stayed constant so that every time you warmed a little you added water vapor which is a much more important greenhouse gas, you had doubled the impact of CO2 which now gives you a degree which still isn't a heck of a lot … that began the demonization of CO2."
Manabe helped develop the first computer climate model, which projected that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would result in about 2°C global warming. Manabe’s modeling work was later included in the famous 1979 ‘Charney Report,’ which noted that two models developed by his team projected a 3°C northern hemisphere warming in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and a third projected global warming of around 2°C. The Charney Report also included modeling work by James Hansen and concluded that Earth’s average temperature will warm about 3°C ± 1.5°C in response to doubled atmospheric CO2, which is quite close to the IPCC’s latest ‘very likely’ range of 2–5°C.
Follow the money
Lindzen @ 8:10: “the energy sector is trillions of dollars. anything you can do to overturn it, change it, replace fossil fuels, it's big bucks, right?"
Rogan @ 22:35: “How much money is involved in getting people to buy into this narrative so you can pass some bill that's called 'save the world climate,' something crazy like that"
Numerous fossil fuel companies are among the most profitable in the world, and the industry spent $219 million in the last U.S. election. That’s about 100 times more than clean energy political action committees spent on campaign contributions over the past two years.
Water vapor and clouds amplify warming
Lindzen @ 9:54: "if you read the IPCC reports, they're pointing out, for instance, that water vapor and clouds are much bigger than CO2, and we don't understand them at all."
The fact that a warmer atmosphere will hold more water vapor (a result of the Clausius–Clapeyron relation) and thus amplify warming caused by other greenhouse gases is well-known. As the latest IPCC report put it, “Greater atmospheric water vapour content, particularly in the upper troposphere, results in enhanced absorption of [longwave] and [shortwave] radiation and reduced outgoing radiation. This is a positive feedback.”
The IPCC report also concluded that clouds will very likely amplify global warming:
"The net effect of changes in clouds in response to global warming is to amplify human-induced warming, that is, the net cloud feedback is positive (high confidence) … An assessment of the low-altitude cloud feedback over the subtropical oceans, which was previously the major source of uncertainty in the net cloud feedback, is improved owing to a combined use of climate model simulations, satellite observations, and explicit simulations of clouds, altogether leading to strong evidence that this type of cloud amplifies global warming. The net cloud feedback, obtained by summing the cloud feedbacks assessed for individual regimes, is 0.42 [–0.10 to +0.94] W m–2°C–1. A net negative cloud feedback is very unlikely (high confidence)."
Nobody is killing cattle for the climate
Rogan @ 11:17: "in the UK they were getting rid of cows. They were forcing people to kill cows"
Lindzen @ 1:37:35: "there were consequences in Ireland. They had to kill half their cattle."
There are about 7 million cattle in Ireland. The Irish Department of Agriculture proposed to cull 200,000 over three years to help meet the country’s climate targets. This would represent about 3% of the nation’s cattle, not 50%, and it never happened, though cattle herds populations in the country were reduced by 276,000 over the past year for economic reasons.
Fossil fuels are expensive
Rogan @ 12:02: "How are these net zero policies stopping people from getting electricity?" Lindzen: "Okay. Well, by making it expensive, by eliminating fossil fuels, fossil fuels are cheaper. Uh, at least the experience in the UK is when you switch to “renewables,” it tripled the price of electricity."
Although it’s complicated to compare the costs of different types of power generation that have different profiles, solar and wind are generally considered the cheapest sources of new electricity today. For example, Bloomberg New Energy Finance concluded in 2021 that “Two-thirds of the global population lives where renewables are the cheapest new power generation option,” and solar power costs in particular have declined significantly since then.
Recent spikes in UK energy prices are due to disruptive factors related to its residual reliance on natural gas, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
CO2 both leads and lags temperature changes
Lindzen @ 17:14: "[Al Gore] was showing this cycle of ice ages and CO2 and temperature going together. And uh it never bothered him that the temperature changed first and then the CO2."
A 2012 study found that the picture is much more nuanced than Lindzen claims in this myth. The authors found that at the end of the last ice age, Earth’s orbital cycles triggered a melting of large quantities of ice in the Arctic, causing fresh water to flood into the oceans. This influx of fresh water then disrupted ocean current circulation, in turn causing a seesawing of heat between the hemispheres. The Southern Hemisphere and its oceans warmed first, starting about 18,000 years ago. As the Southern Ocean warms, the solubility of CO2 in water falls. This causes the oceans to give up more CO2, releasing it into the atmosphere. This increase in CO2 then caused the Earth as a whole to warm.
In short, Earth’s orbital cycles caused some regional warming, which was then amplified into global warming by rising CO2.
CO2 was high in the past, and Earth was hot
Rogan @ 17:33: "there have been times where the CO2 was much higher in the atmosphere but the temperature was colder."
In general, past global temperatures and CO2 levels are well correlated.
Declining crop yields are more important than global greening
Rogan @ 17:47: "the other really inconvenient thing with CO2 is that the Earth is actually greener than it has been in a long time."
Although increased CO2 levels have led to ‘global greening,’ the CO2 fertilization effect diminishes over time. Moreover, worsening extreme weather like heatwaves, droughts, and floods are already suppressing crop yields and will increasingly do so in the future.
The expert climate consensus
Rogan @ 19:32: "To me it's very strange to see an almost unanimous acceptance that we have settled this, that the science has settled from so many people and both the left and in academia and even on the right there's a lot of people on the right that believe that."
Scientists follow the evidence, and there is an overwhelming expert consensus on human-caused climate change because there is an overwhelming body of supporting evidence. It’s what we call a knowledge-based consensus.
Climate changed naturally in the past, and anthropogenically now
Rogan @21:15: "The weirdest thing is when you look at the charts of the overall temperature of Earth that have been, you know, from core samples over a long period of time. It's this crazy wave and like no one was controlling it back then and we're supposed to believe that we can control it now?"
There is overwhelming evidence that human greenhouse gas emissions are driving the incredibly rapid and dangerous climate change that is currently occurring. There are also natural factors that cause much more slow and gradual climate changes, generally driven by changes in atmospheric CO2.
The Climategate nothingburger
Lindzen @27:00: "somebody anonymous released the emails from a place in England, the University of East Anglia, which has a lot of people pushing climate alarm. And they were communicating with other people like Michael Mann and so on. And they were talking about blocking publication and getting rid of editors and doing this and doing that and so on."
Nine independent enquiries have investigated the conduct of the scientists involved in the emails. None found evidence of fraud or conspiracies, and all cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing, but the contents of the emails were taken out of context and grossly misrepresented.
Climate models have been accurate
Rogan @ 40:45: "[almost nobody has] any idea what the actual predictions are, how wrong they've been, what Al Gore predicted in this stupid movie, which is so far off. He thought we were all going to be dead today, right? There's very little change between 2006 and today, right?"
Mainstream climate predictions have been remarkably accurate, unlike those by climate contrarians, including Richard Lidzen, who said in 1989, "I personally feel that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small." That, like most of Lindzen’s claims, turned out to be remarkably wrong.
See this post for a description of this chart
Sea level rise is accelerating
Happer @ 1:09:38: "[sea level rise] hasn't accelerated; there's no evidence that CO2 has made any difference. It started rising roughly 1800 at the end of the Little Ice Age and it's not changing very much."
Sea level rise is accelerating. In the 1990s it was rising at 2.1 millimeters per year and today it’s rising at 4.5 millimeters per year – more than twice as fast.
Climate change could cripple the economy
Lindzen @ 1:18:02: "As best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe. Koonin made the point I think correctly that even with the UN's models you're talking about a 3% reduction in national product or gross domestic product by 2100."
Recent climate-economics research has estimated that climate damages could reduce global GDP anywhere from 5% to 30% by 2100.
Climate change is making extreme weather more intense, including hurricanes
Rogan @ 1:31:43: "It's extreme weather events. That's what I keep hearing. The hurricanes are getting stronger. They're getting more frequent. And they repeat that. And I don't think that's necessarily true. Lindzen: No. No … the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the UN, was honestly saying they could find no evidence that these were related."
Climate change is making hurricanes more destructive, and the latest IPCC report said:
“New evidence strengthens the conclusion from the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5) that even relatively small incremental increases in global warming (+0.5°C) cause statistically significant changes in extremes on the global scale and for large regions (high confidence). In particular, this is the case for temperature extremes (very likely), the intensification of heavy precipitation (high confidence) including that associated with tropical cyclones (medium confidence), and the worsening of droughts in some regions (high confidence).”
Methane is causing a lot of global warming
Lindzen @ 1:39:23: "there's so little methane in the atmosphere that if you got rid of all of it, it would have almost no effect compared to CO2."
Methane is the second-largest contributor to the rising greenhouse effect, responsible for about 30% of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. The European Union Climate and Clean Air Coalition Scientific Advisory Panel estimated that reducing human methane emissions by 50% over the next 30 years would mitigate global temperature change by about 0.2°C.
It's a lot hotter today than it was in the 1930s
Rogan @ 2:10:14: "What are the warmest years on historical record in terms of like recent years? Happer: ‘34, ‘35, 1930."
According to temperature data from NASA Goddard, both global and U.S. temperatures in the 1930s were about 1.3°C colder than they are today.
It was easy for me to comprehend that if you really wanted to understand the truth about anything, why not listen to a variety of sources. Use critical thinking to look for biases, including your own and choose experts/scientists to get the information.
Believe your opinion can be changed if new facts/information thoughtfully assessed becomes available. I used to think this miracle of the internet/social media would finally enlighten and connect us all- man, I'm not such a naive fellow now.
Education can set you free, I guess the opposite is true too. With the quality of the elected rulers in many cosplay democracies hitting rock bottom, this might help explain why such corrupted mainly right wing influences are believed and increasingly so. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBRVvkKre1E
Same old nonsense from the same few denialists. I wonder, at this point, whether the reward for such denial is financial (I don't think either has published much recently), ideological (against government control/pro libertarian), or just consistency with past assertions?
It's certainly not based on facts. At all.
KR#2
"ideological (against government control/pro libertarian), or just consistency with past assertions"
I don't think such pathological scepticism is motivated by money, at least, not directly. I find most nowadays is strongly ideologically based and caused by what Katharine Hayhoe calls being "solutions averse". This is that they don't like the solutions offered up, such as distributed wind and solar and 'Big Goverment'/Internationalist type restrictions, so intensely that they choose denialism as a strategy to head off restrictions on 'freedom' etc.
I've had some success arguing with the most extreme by pointing out how virtually unanimous the science is about the effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and then asking them why, instead of embracing denialist propaganda as a political strategy, they didn't come up with alternative 'free market' type solutions. Most actually shut up...
I was not aware of these interviews where Happer and Lindzen are straight up lying to the public. They are lying about the most elementary facts that any climate scientist should have under control. This is extremely frustrating. To my knowledge Mr. Lindzen is supposed to be a climate scientist, but I am not sure about Happer. I have to wonder if they are being paid for their dishonesty.
Plincoln @4 :
Lindzen may be the exception, indeed. IIRC, roughly 19 years ago [aged 65?] he gave an interview where seemingly his fundamental denialism was on the religious basis that Yahweh would prevent the Earth's climate deviating from the Eden-like state. Doubtless Lindzen's viewpoint would also be reinforced by the usual political and/or motivated reasonings of the true Denialist.
Yes, Lindzen had received some small payments/stipends from the usual industry suspects. Interestingly, the psychologists say that small payments of cash or other benefits, can have a remarkably strong effect on the mindset of recipients.
Happer and the other elderly Denialists ~ in which I include the youthful [mid-70's] Koonin ~ seem to have the more typical mishmash of ego/Emeritus-Syndrome/wingnut/etcetera distortions of logic as well as a deficiency in Charity.
But I guess we should update the traditional virtue of Charity, to be re-named as Empathy.
[BL] A note to all participating in this thread: please try to avoid inflammatory accusations such as deceit, etc.
Lindzen was a well-respected meteorologist and did some good work early in his career. Happer was a well-respected physicist. Both have wandered away from good science in their positions on climate change, but they do not deserve having us ignore the SkS Comments Policy statements against accusations of deception, etc.
KR said: " I wonder, at this point, whether the reward for such denial is financial (I don't think either has published much recently), ideological (against government control/pro libertarian), or just consistency with past assertions?"
The denialism may be a mixture of all three motinations. Humans often have multiple motivations for a particular action or view. This is a basic finding of psychology.
We humans are reductionist we prefer a simple singular explanation. Occams Razor being the formalisation of this broadly saying that the simplest explanation for an event that can explain all the facts is usually correct. But with human behaviour the simplest explanation that works is sometimes a not so simple.
And I think you can add more motivations for climate science denialism. Religious beliefs and extreme attention seeking. And unusual stubborness. Some people have a big narcissistic ego so it becomes difficult and downright painful to admit they are wrong or made a mistake so people hold onto absurd beliefs their whole lives. Of course we are all egotistical but most of us are capable of admitting we made a mistake. People at the extreme end of the ego spectrum have a huge problem walking back from their views. They are unusually stubborn.
And some people are super smart and over confident so they believe they just cannot be wrong. But everyone is fallible
Of course its hard to know precisely what motivates Lindzen but the evidence suggests it may be some sort of combination of money and religion and I reckon over confidence and attention seeking.
When reading denialists comments and getting in discussions with them a large number do seem to have very strong libertarian leaning anti government regulation ideologies, so denying the science is an obvious strategy to prevent governments control. Nick Palmer is right.
I dont like accusing people of lying. Its hard to know if they are lying because lying means deliberately spreading falsehoods that they know are falsehoods. Sometimes they are just mistaken. Genuine lying does happen of course and can sometimes be proven, but in scientific issues its tricky to prove because scientifc findings have error bars and theories are not the same as facts. So someone like Lindzen may really believe his numbers are the truth. I think hes more in the delusional category. Hes certainly spreading "miss"information.
Does anyone have a reference for the claim that Lindzen has used the 'God wouldn't let us wreck our climate' argument. I knew both John Christie and Roy Spencer have very strong religious beliefs which makes them kind of believe that God wouldn't let us do it, which colours their views, but I've never heard anything similar about Lindzen.
In any event, I think it's unfair to characterise Lindzen as a denialist because his basic position is that he "accepts the elementary tenets of climate science. He agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, calling people who dispute that point 'nutty.' He agrees that the level of it is rising because of human activity and that this should warm the climate. He also believes that decreasing tropical cirrus clouds in a warmer world will allow more longwave radiation to escape the atmosphere, counteracting the warming."
This is his hypothesised 'Iris effect'. This is why he believes that climate sensitivity is about 1/3 that of the figures 'IPPC science' works with. If he's right, then global warming genuinely will not be a problem. He often phrases his rhetoric to assert that 'science shows' that the sensitivity is a lot less than the IPCC's, but he's usually referring to his own papers and sort of implies that science generally supports him - but it's just his own views about clouds in the tropics.
[BL] According to Wikipedia, Richard Lindzen has signed onto the Cornwall Alliance's evangelical statements. Web searches provide a variety of hits indicating a strong connection with the Cornwall Alliance.
Because of Lindzen's past history of contributions to climate science, I find it very difficult to grant him any benefit-of-doubt regarding his statement in the first point raised (repeated below):
Lindzen @ 6:02: “global mean temperature doesn't change much, but you know you focus on one degree, a half degree, so it looks like something”
Lindzen @ 22:06: “Gutierrez (sic) at the UN says the next half degree and we're done for. I mean, doesn't anyone ask, a half degree? I mean, I deal with that between, you know, 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m [laughs]. Rogan: "it does seem crazy. It's just that kind of fear of minute change that they try to put into people.”
To start, Lindzen seriously misrepresents what Gutierres has said. A quick internet search finds the following UN News item: There is an exit off ‘the highway to climate hell’, Guterres insists. It includes the following selected quotes:
“It’s climate crunch time” when it comes to tackling rising carbon emissions, the UN Secretary-General said on Wednesday, stressing that while the need for global action is unprecedented, so too are the opportunities for prosperity and sustainable development.
...
Question of degrees
He said a half degree difference in global warming could mean some island States or coastal communities disappearing forever.
Scientists point out that the Greenland ice sheet and West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse and cause catastrophic sea level rise. Whole coral reef systems could disappear along with 300 million livelihoods if the 1.5℃ goal is not met.
Extreme weather from East Asia to the western seaboard of the US has been turbocharged by climate chaos, “destroying lives, pummelling economies and hammering health”, said the Secretary-General.
It is very challenging to excuse someone like Lindzen saying those types of things (and all the other cases of misleading manipulative messaging by him and Happer that have been pointed out).
Rogan can be excused for being a gullible desperate pursuer of popularity who is easily impressed and therefore potentially is unwittingly massively harmfully misleading. No such excuse comes to mind for Lindzen (or Happer).
I look forward to the follow-up mentioned by Dana that will "...look at the underlying psychology in a separate article in the near future."
Nick Palmer @7,
Regarding Lindzen's 'alternative understanding of the impact of cloud changes as warming occurs due to increased CO2 levels'.
I may be mistaken. But nearly 1.5 C warming has happened with CO2 increasing from 280 ppm to 420 ppm (only a 50% increase of CO2). I appreciate that correlation does not prove causation. But that information would appear to fairly solidly establish that Lindzen's past belief, that he appears to powerfully resist changing his mind about in spite of updated information, has 'very little merit'.
Three matters :-
(a) One Planet and Nigelj ~ you make many excellent points.
(b) Thank you Moderator [Bob]. I hope that a careful reading of my words @5 does show that I am not accusing these elderly scientists of deceit ~ but simply that they are persistently wrong and should know better. I am sure that they have high intelligence (well above mine) and that a few (e.g. Lindzen) have a high level of climate science knowledge . . . even though their own comments all too often suggest otherwise.
At a functional level, the human brain is rather like a stack of pancakes. The top pancake, exposed to the world (and generally being the "self-aware" pancake) can be strongly influenced and/or controlled by some of the deeper pancakes. [Freud used an over-simplistic concept of superego/ ego/ id. ]
However, just as a highly-skilled driver can sometimes crash his car, or as a poker-player can sometimes botch the good hand he has been dealt . . . . so too can eminent scientists sometimes present garbage to the world. And keep presenting it for decades ~ and the longer they do it, the less likely they are to admit they are wrong. Human nature. They are not intending deceit, at least not at their surface pancake level. (Versus those paid propagandists at Heartland Institute, etc. )
(c) Nick Palmer @7 :
Regarding Lindzen's expressed belief that God/Jehovah/Yahweh would of course design an Earth which narrowly controlled its climate for the benefit of the human race ~ it might take me a while to find the exact reference. A quick search shows me a youtuber interviewing a relaxed Richard Lindzen sitting on a chair in his garden (which rings a bell in my memory) but the date was stated as 2014 (or 2015) . . . but I am not clear whether that's the release date or the interview date.
My initial impression is that the video is 48 minutes of Judith-Curry-like vagueness & minimisation. But I will make a separate post once I have digested it.
[BL] The moderator's comment on #5 was intended for all. Your comment was simply the last in the chain at the time. Some people were getting closer to the line than others - and maybe were crossing over it. I simply wanted to send up a warning flag to all participants to be careful. Basically, a moderator's equivalent to a parent saying "don't make me come down there!".
Ok, I grant that Lindzen signed the documents, but that's a far cry from meaning he supports every word in them. The actual 'God loves us and wouldn't let us' bit is the CA's 'reasoning' for why they believe mainstream climate science is wrong.ost of it is about how environmental stewardship should be for the benefit of human flourishing etc. The only direct quotes AI could find relating to Lindzen and Yahweh was from me questioning it and Eclectic themselves saying it here several months back "Eclectic at 07:43 AM on 8 January, 2025".
Most AI points out that Lindzen does not use religious arguments to make his case about low climate sensitivity
"climate science is wrong.ost of it is about how environmental" should have been 'climate science is wrong, most of it is about how environmental... '
Nick Palmer @11 :
Aha ~ I am disappointed that the AI [Artificial Intelligence] detected my comment of 8 January 2025. Here I was, thinking that I was flying under the radar, by my [unspecified cloaking] of my public comments.
More seriously, you could perhaps try Lindzen+God / Lindzen+Jehovah / Lindzen+Elohim / etcetera. Bur why waste yhour time on such a project? AI's are improving by the month : but while they are great on specific words, they are not yet ( I gather) much chop at inference, induction, and the "reading-between-the-lines" of meaning & context.
Just as I find it tiresome to read the vague fuzziness & "plausible deniability" style of Judith Curry's climate commentary/opinions ~ so too I avoid following Richard Lindzen closely during his lengthy almost-but-not-quite denial of the mainstream science over the years. Lindzen does not wear his heart on his sleeve . . . so we must look for his implicit position.
Nor had I looked into the "Cornwall Alliance" and its "evangelical statements" [~ thanks BL]. Since Lindzen is non-Christian (of evangelical or any other type) then I am a tad surprised that he would sign onto anything from the Cornwall Alliance. However, Wikipedia says the Cornwall Declaration goes: "We believe Earth and its ecosystems ~ created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence ~ are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory."
Well, you get the picture. And thinking back on the youtube interview (that I touched on earlier) I can see that he was using many of the words/phrases expressed by the Cornwallites.
So if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a real denialist ~ with an added teaspoon of That Old Time Religion.
Nick, already my post is too long : so I shall coffee up and get back to your inquiry, soon.
Nick Palmer :
A lengthy PART TWO of the religious component of Lindzen's climate science denialism.
While we see where the typical Denialist (e.g. to be found in the street or @WUWT website) harbors anger / selfishness / deficiency in empathy . . . . there is IMO an additional fundamentalist religious component in the Motivated Reasonings of some prominent Denialists. You yourself could name a few of those luminaries, I am sure.
IIRC, there was an interview with a very relaxed, laid-back Lindzen sitting in a chair in his garden, while being interviewed by a "sympathetic" interviewer. My perhaps-faulty memory was that the occasion was 2006 ~ but perhaps that date is wrong. My googling this week turned up youtube: "Interview with Professor Richard Lindzen" on the "Rathnakumar S" channel. I am unclear on its date ~ maybe 2014 or 2015. Hard to be sure, since youtubers tend to recycle and re-post stuff from years earlier from other sources. But the exact date is a trivial matter. And please do not bother to view the video, unless you are in a masochistic mood.
# The "Rathnakumar S" channel is new to me, and I have not viewed any of the rest of the playlist. But the playlist does include interviews (originals or re-posts?) of people such as :- W.Soon; W.Happer; H.Svensmark; M.Salby; P.Michaels; S.Baliunas; Bob Carter; et alia. And including that paragon of ethical public education, Marc Morano. Plus there appears to be a flirtation with anti-vax. Of course.
Video with approximate time-stamps :
Lindzen seems to favor a degree of Intelligent Design ~ the World is well-designed. 3:05 "Oh I think the case is pretty strong that it is in fact better designed, and there are strong negative feedbacks that will instead of amplifying, diminish the effect of man's emissions."
Lindzen keeps minimizing the Global Warming: "Only half a degree in a century ... [and] the temperature is always flopping around."
Lindzen opines that CO2 can have a warming effect, but most of it is not due to humans . . . though yes, water vapor and clouds "worsen what we do with CO2." [Note that Lindzen's "Iris Hypothesis" has been a dud.]
22:20 "We still don't know why we had these ice age cycles. We don't know why 50 million years ago we could have alligators in Spitzbergen."
27:00 "Ever since we invented the umbrella, we've known how to deal with climate, up to a point."
37:20 "Nothing in this [climate] field is terribly compelling. The data is weak. ..."CO2 will contribute some warming : not much. ..."It is then claimed that recent changes are due to man : I don't think that's true."
46:13 He returns to Intelligent Design : "A well-engineered device tries to compensate for anything that perturbs it."
So ~ not much particularly explicit denialisty statements . . . but a great deal of implicit statements. Including, throughout the video, a great deal of "Cornwall" wording.
Becoming clear that Richar Lindzen is vastly overrated as a scientist. Even his earliest research from back in the 1960's needs to be revisited. Some foundational mechanisms were dismissed or overlooked by Lindzen, and for the longest time his arguments were never revisited. I started reviewing his early models on the QBO several years ago and found surprising connections that he missed. Alas, Lindzen is no longer in the picture as he is no longer active as a researcher, but his disciples can take the helm if they wish to defend him They seem mum about the new findings as PubPeer reappraisals are being ignored
https://pubpeer.com/publications/E27F0929E64D90C32E9358889CC80F
PubPeer is the place for futther discussion, not the comment section here, IMO. This won't make a dent when it comes to arguing for a change
I asked some of the usual AI tools what are Richard Lindzens political beliefs. The responses were lengthy and listed references but here are some key quotes fyi:
Google Gemini: Richard Lindzen was a lifelong Democrat who switched to the Republican Party due to his views on climate change and government policy responses. He describes his political beliefs as generally conservative or libertarian, especially regarding what he sees as government overreach in the name of climate action.
Microsoft Copilot: While Lindzen doesn’t publicly identify with a specific political party, his affiliations and rhetoric suggest a strong ideological alignment with libertarian and conservative critiques of environmental regulation.
So he may be minimising the climate problem as a way to avoid government involvement in solutions. He may not even realise hes doing this.
Quite correct, Nigelj @16. I suspect that the AI tools are only capable of going looking for evidence of partisan political affiliation, rather than for the "subconscious" evidence that a person is guided by the deeper (and often unworthy) motives that rule so much of the non-partisan aspect of politics. Power / money / psychological resentments.
Sad that Lindzen & the handful of eminent "denialist" scientists have abandoned logical scientific thought. To quote my favorite politician : "Sad. Sad like has never seen before."
[Except that we have seen it before.]
Bother. Another typo @17. Should read: "Sad like has never been seen before." ~ He deeply resents being misquoted . . . and now I shall have to worry about the next tumbril/indictment.
Eclectic @ 17, said: "I suspect that the AI tools are only capable of going looking for evidence of partisan political affiliation, rather than for the "subconscious" evidence that a person is guided by the deeper (and often unworthy) motives that rule so much of the non-partisan aspect of politics. Power / money / psychological resentments."
I'm not so sure. If you asked an AI tool to investigate all possible motives for denialism including psychological motives, and listed them the AI would probably trawl the internet looking for commentary that mentions such things, or evidence that might suggest such things, and have a go at making sense of it.
What I've found is the performance of AI depends on asking very clear and precise questions and providing some explanatory background and even listing your own suspicions. And defining your terms carefully. This leads to more useful answers than just putting in a 5 word search, "Lindzen, motives for climate denialism." You have to help the AI.
The problem is the AI then tends to tell you what it thinks you want to hear. Accuracy can suffer. But at the very least you get a good list of relevant articles with links.
The AI has limits of course. I've found accuracy is variable but its good enough to be useful for simple issues, and the AI is so fast and that makes it useful. But I digress and I may have misinterpreted what you are getting at.
Clarification: If you asked an AI tool to investigate all possible motives for Richard Lindzens denialism including psychological motives, and listed them the AI would probably trawl the internet looking for commentary that mentions such things, or evidence that might suggest such things, and have a go at making sense of it.
Nigelj @19 :
Hallucinations aside, the AI tools are certainly impressive in their speed & wide-ranging searches.
AFAIK, they have not yet gained much ability to infer. And when we are needing to scout the public utterances & texts (especially of particularly public figures e.g. politicians and propagandists) then we run up against the problem of "dog-whistling" and nuanced/coded language and subtle cloaking of meaning & intent. And outright camouflage.
Rogan, Lindzen and Happer are easy to see through, at least at the level of their public actions.
At this stage, I still think we must make use of the experience and wisdom of the well-informed human mind. A dash of cynicism also helps [recent comments of Philippe Chantreau come to mind! ].
Well, I subjected myself to the video Eclectic refers to - a 48 minute conversation with Lindzen. IMHO, at no point does Lindzen imply that he believes that God/Yahweh is looking after us. Lindzen does refer to "design" a couple of times, largely, I think to manipulate the audience of this YouTube channel. I think he is using the same idea as sceptic engineers do, who are convinced that feedbacks must be in Earth's systems to maintain stability. This is similar to the 'Uniformitarianism' principle that sceptic geologists invoke.
Near the end Lindzen actually pours scorn on the other wing of 'Evangelicals', who think our activities are an assault on God's creation.
It's clear to me that spreading stories that Lindzen is motivated by a deep religious conviction are as wrong as the denialist assertion that climate scientists are all making it up to keep the jobs and grants gravy train rolling along.
Nick Palmer @22 :
Congratulations on surviving that 48-minute video, with all its waffle & minimization of the Global Warming trend. It was presented on a Denialist youtube channel . . . so it's possible that the video was edited down in places. And I hope you will agree that Lindzen is clearly batting for Team Denialist. (Whether his semi-subconscious motives had a partly religious component, or not.)
You may recall that (decades ago) Lindzen's model projection was for global temperatures to plateau early in this century. His prediction was an embarrassing failure, compared with the actual rising temperatures (as projected by Hansen and the mainstream climate scientists of the time). And judging from the Lindzen video we have watched, he has fought a rear-guard battle to minimize his total failure. He has simply doubled-down, to a very large extent.
Lindzen, more than once, gives a nod to a narrowly-controlled climate-resilient design of Earth ~ when, as an academic, he really should know the the ancient paleo climate variations of our planet. #Looking at the overall context, he is IMO engaging in Doublethink about Global Warming. Motivated Reasoning is very evident.
"Cornwall" or not, it is (to me) rather surprising that Lindzen would take such a 'religious-adjacent' view, for he is not a Christian Fundamentalist nor Christian at all. Sadly, I know little of the pre-Christian Old-Testament tenets of the Creation (dated 6029 years ago, per Bishop Ussher).
Whether Lindzen's [half-baked?] climate denialism has underlying motives which are 50% religion-based or only 10% religion-based . . .is something which Lindzen perhaps does not know (or acknowledge?) ~ nor does it matter much in the greater sheme of things. We need not get exercised about it. It is enough to see that explicitly and implicitly, he is showing he has abandoned the scientific mainstream.