Lindzen-Happer Statement to National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Richard Lindzen
Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
William Happer
Professor of Physics, Emeritus, Princeton University
August 25, 2025
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gases and US Climate: Evidence and Impacts 500 Fifth Street, NW Washington, DC 20001
Re: The Committee’s Charge to Review Evidence Whether Anthropogenic Emissions of Greenhouse Gases to the Atmosphere Are Reasonably Anticipated to Endanger Public Health and Welfare in the United States.
We appreciate the opportunity to submit science related to the Committee’s charge, including its “focus on evidence gathered by the scientific community since 2009.”
We are career physicists with a special expertise in radiation physics, which describes how carbon dioxide and other GHGs affect heat flow in Earth’s atmosphere, and in the dynamics of atmospheric transport of energy and momentum on our rotating planet Earth. We are both members of the National Academy of Sciences, and our CVs are attached. In our scientific opinion, the Endangerment Finding (“EF”),1 is not based on science for four separate reasons:
1. It is based on unscientific evidence.
2. It failed to consider the physics that demonstrates that increasing carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases (“GHGs”) and fossil fuel use will have a trivial effect on temperature and cannot and will not cause catastrophic warming and extreme weather.
3. It failed to consider the essential benefits of carbon dioxide to life on Earth, including that doubling carbon dioxide from today’s 420 parts per million to 840 ppm will increase the world’s food supply by 40%.
4. It failed to consider the science that eliminating carbon dioxide and fossil fuels will have disastrous effects for Americans, America, the poor and people worldwide.
Therefore, for these four reasons separately and together, science demonstrates that human emissions of carbon dioxide and other GHGs and the use of fossil fuels cannot endanger public health and welfare in the U.S. and instead provide benefits to public health and welfare. Thus the Endangerment Finding should be repealed ASAP. Scientific details follow and in our attached June 7, 2025 paper, “Physics Demonstrates that Increasing Greenhouse Gases Cannot Cause Dangerous Warming, Extreme Weather or Any Harm.”
Read the complete statement here: