Richard Lindzen

Richard Siegmund Lindzen (born February 8, 1940) is an American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He is the author of more than 200 scientific papers. From 1972 to 1982, he served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard University. In 1983, he was appointed as the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he would remain until his retirement in 2013. Lindzen has disputed the scientific consensus on climate change and criticizes what he has called "climate alarmism".

Lindzen was born on February 8, 1940, in Webster, Massachusetts. His father, a shoemaker, had fled Nazi Germany with his mother. Lindzen moved to The Bronx soon after his birth and grew up in a Jewish household in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood.

Lindzen attended the Bronx High School of Science, where he won Regents' and National Merit Scholarships, then Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before matriculating at Harvard University. In 1960, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in physics, magna cum laude, followed by a Master of Science degree in applied mathematics in 1961 and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1964. His doctoral thesis, Radiative and photochemical processes in strato- and mesospheric dynamics, was about the interactions of ozone photochemistry, radiative transfer, and dynamics in the middle atmosphere.

Lindzen has published papers on Hadley circulation, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, hydrodynamic instability, mid-latitude weather, global heat transport, the water cycle, ice ages and seasonal atmospheric effects. His main contribution to the academic literature on anthropogenic climate change is his proposal of the iris hypothesis in 2001, with co-authors Ming-Dah Chou and Arthur Y. Hou.

Lindzen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Science, Health, and Economic Advisory Council at the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy. He joined MIT in 1983, prior to which he held positions at the University of Washington (1964–65), the Institute for Theoretical Meteorology at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Oslo (1965–67), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) (1966–67), and the University of Chicago (1968–72). From 1972 to 1982, he served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard University. Lindzen also briefly held a position of visiting lecturer at UCLA in 1967.

As of January 2010, his publications list included 230 papers and articles published between 1965 and 2008, with five in process for 2009. He is the author of a standard textbook on atmospheric dynamics, and co-authored the monograph Atmospheric Tides with Sydney Chapman.

He was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT from 1983, until his retirement which was reported in the Spring 2013 newsletter of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). On December 27, 2013, the Cato Institute announced his appointment as a Distinguished Senior Fellow in its Center for the Study of Science.

Lindzen's early work was concerned with ozone photochemistry, the aerodynamics of the middle atmosphere, the theory of atmospheric tides, and planetary waves. His work in these areas led him to a number of fundamental scientific discoveries, including the discovery of negative equivalent depths in classical tidal theory, explanations for both the quasi-biennial oscillation of the Earth's stratosphere and the four-day period of the superrotation of the Venus atmosphere above the cloud top.