Critique of Lindzen & Happer 2025 PHYSICS DEMONSTRATES THAT INCREASING GREENHOUSE GASES CANNOT CAUSE DANGEROUS WARMING, EXTREME WEATHER OR ANY HARM.
Richard Lindzen and William Happer are well-know climate contrarians, the former a retired climate scientist and the latter a retired physicist. In June 2025, they produced and posted on the fossil fuel funded Carbon Dioxide Coalition website a criticism of current climate science consensus. under the above-identified title.
The following and linked document comprise my review of that diatribe.
It was no surprise to me that this item was authored by Richard Lindzen and William Happer, two climate science skeptics whose names and opinions are very familiar to the sane climate community. As I have encountered many scientists over my career, I have come to realize that not all scientists are fully committed to the principles of science as it seeks to understand how the world works, at least the physical dimensions of that world. An exploration of Lindzen’s career reveals someone who seems to be an inveterate contrarian, not just within his area of expertise, but also outside it. For example, without any medical credentials, he has also questioned the exceptionally well-demonstrated link between smoking and cancer (Schendler 2007; Littlemore 2011).
Apparently, Lindzen is not held in high repute by his former colleagues at MIT (e.g., Hirji 2017) while other assessments of the contributions of Richard Lindzen are available from DeSmog (undated a) and Skeptical Science (undated a) while Littlemore (2010) reports on a debate between Lindzen and climate scientist Andrew Dessler where Lindzen was reported not to do well.
Over the years I have met many individuals, including scientists, who exhibit a particularly strong quirk of being contrarians whenever confronted with an accepted opinion. Seemingly, they often reject it simply for the sake of being contrarian. Lindzen seems to fall in that category.
Given all that, Dr. Richard Lindzen is a climate scientist (retired) and has for long been one of the 1 – 3% of climate scientists who reject the consensus among climate scientists that the planet is warming, and the human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause.
Unlike Lindzen, William Happer is not a climate scientist. Indeed, his profile at the Cato Institute (Cato undated) stated he is: “Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Princeton University, is a specialist in modern optics, optical and radiofrequency spectroscopy of atoms and molecules, radiation propagation in the atmosphere, and spin-polarized atoms and nuclei.” Note a total absence of anything related to climate. More information about Happer can be found at Skeptical Science (undated b) and. DeSMog (undated b).
Both Lindzen and Happer have long records of accepting funding from the fossil fuel industry largely to promote the argument that fossil fuels and the product of their combustion are not a climate problem. The fossil fuel corporations continue to fund such disinformation despite the fact that their own corporate research scientists have reported to their Executives since the 1950s exactly what the climate science consensus currently is (e.g., Taylor 2023; Millman 2024).
Despite its carefully designed appearance, this is not a peer-reviewed journal article, but a web link promulgated by the Carbon Dioxide Coalition, a Happer entity apparently funded largely by fossil fuel sources or their surrogates (Waldman 2019). The L&H document, therefore, is a ‘vanity press’ publication by Happer. That reality alone should cause skepticism since it falls solidly into the ongoing fossil fuel campaign of promoting disinformation. This parallels the tobacco campaign undertaken for years to divert the public from what the medical science revealed about the link between smoking and an array of health conditions, a history recounted in the documentary video ‘Merchants of Doubt’ based on the book ‘Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming’ (Oreskes and Conway 2010).
It is not inevitable that researchers funded by fossil fuel corporations will provide a false narrative as is evident from the fossil fuel corporations’ scientists who, as noted above, have argued since the 1950s about the dangers of fossil fuel combustion. However, when the fossil fuel corporate marketing narrative, as presented in this document, runs counter to the evidence from their own researchers, skepticism should be stimulated further. It is also worth noting that both Lindzen and Happer have, as evident from their history of organizational associations, deeply rooted partisan commitments (DeSmog undated a; DeSmog undated b)
