By Beth Daley, Boston Globe Staff

It is no surprise they grew to be friends.

Richard Lindzen and Kerry Emanuel are both brilliant and convivial. Both study the atmosphere and climate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where their offices overlooking the Charles River are one floor apart. In an academic world often dominated by liberals, both have strong conservative streaks and once agreed that the evidence for catastrophic man-made global warming just wasn’t there.

But then the climate changed between them. Friends became intellectual foes, dueling icons in one of the world’s most acrimonious political debates.

Friends had a hard time staying friends.

Lindzen, a leading specialist on atmospheric physics, has emerged as one of the most prominent climate change skeptics in the world. At age 70, he speaks at home and overseas, arguing that there is little to worry about from emissions of heat-trapping gases from power plants, factories, and cars. We should “go back to dealing with real science and real environmental problems such as assuring clean air and water,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Earth Day.

Emanuel, an equally respected researcher, emerged as a preeminent voice on climate change’s potential dangers after he published a paper three weeks before Katrina that suggested global warming might be making hurricanes more powerful. Named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine, Emanuel, 55, says he has been persuaded by the evolving science that man-made climate change is a real threat.

“I don’t see how a climate scientist can look at the evidence and not see risk,” he said recently.

Emanuel thinks Lindzen’s key theories don’t hold up, and just two weeks ago went public with his criticism, penning a tart letter to the editor rebutting Lindzen’s Journal piece - “irresponsible and misleading,” he called it, “advancing spurious hypotheses.”

Lindzen has implied that Emanuel is hyping the evidence and making a play for fame and funding in the age of Obama and Gore. In a letter savaging an opinion piece by Emanuel in the Globe, he branded the reasoning “more advocacy than assessment.”

In the Ivory Tower, these are fighting words.

The story of the scientists’ relationship is much more than a curiosity. The fact that these serious-minded colleagues and longtime friends disagree so vehemently highlights the immense difficulty of finding common ground on human-caused global warming. That’s because their disagreements are not just about interpretations of scientific data, but about how they assess the risks, amid the uncertainty over global warming’s future impact.

Their divide mirrors a much larger political split, as the US Senate begins to debate a climate bill written in large part by Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry. All parties to the debate have the same evidence to draw on; their conclusions are another matter. Lindzen and Emanuel’s collision spotlights the ultimate sticking point: What steps should we take, and at what cost? That is: How much insurance against the possibility of catastrophe should a prudent planet buy?

“If these two guys can’t agree on the basic conclusions of the social significance of [climate change science], how can we expect 6.5 billion people to?” said Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado at Boulder professor who writes a climate blog.

Meeting at MIT Emanuel had to laugh. He and Lindzen were at lunch in a university dining hall in the early 1980s, shortly after both arrived at MIT in what is now the program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate.

Emanuel, who had recently voted for Ronald Reagan, was espousing his views. Lindzen, at that time a registered Democrat, looked up and said, as Emanuel recalls: “You’re to the right of Attila the Hun.”

It was classic wry Lindzen and Emanuel found himself drawn to this colleague with the bushy beard and piercing eyes, this entertaining conversationalist with wide-ranging interests, from food to photography. Emanuel, who is more buttoned-down and cautious - he dislikes attending large sporting events because the crowd mentality unsettles him - saw a little of himself in Lindzen’s aversion to the status quo.

Lindzen delights in questioning many assumptions that most people accept as truths. He smokes Marlboro Lights and doesn’t worry much about dying from them. He doubts that acid rain was ever much of a problem.

In 1988, he began questioning an emerging environmental issue: Man-made climate change. An economist had written him, saying he had been interrupted by then-Senator Al Gore at a Washington lunch for daring to suggest that there was uncertainty about the case for global warming.

“That’s when I thought, wow, things have gotten really out of hand,” Lindzen said recently.

He reviewed the evidence and came away a skeptic about the projections of future catastrophe. He came to see opportunism in some of those loudly sounding the global warming alarm - especially as they raced to obtain a piece of the growing pot of federal research funding on the topic. The professor who once cast his presidential vote for Democrat Michael Dukakis became a Republican.

Back then, Emanuel agreed there wasn’t yet enough evidence. Computer models that tried to project future warming were woefully inadequate. Temperature data showing recent warming didn’t demonstrate a clear trend.

Emanuel would borrow Lindzen’s slides for his talks and the duo would have lunch and the occasional dinner together. They weren’t best friends, but far closer than mere colleagues. In 1990, Emanuel’s future wife, Susan, who was living in France at the time, attended a scientific talk he gave in England. Lindzen was there and asked a question of Emanuel that Susan saw as hostile. She marched up afterward to give him a piece of her mind - and ran headlong into his charm.

It wasn’t long before she was friends with Lindzen and his wife, Nadine, a native of France. Emanuel and Susan stayed at the Lindzens’ apartment in Paris. The Lindzens visited a home the Emanuels bought in Burgundy. Back home, the couples began dining three or four times a year - get-togethers that would continue even as the husbands’ scientific views diverged.

Hurricanes and warming In an early 1990s paper, Lindzen challenged a widely-accepted assumption about global warming - that the amount of water vapor will increase in the atmosphere as the earth heats up, amplifying warming.

To the contrary, he argues, water vapor and clouds could actually have a cooling effect.

“There is, in the system, a negative feedback,” Lindzen says.

Intrigued, Emanuel tried to verify Lindzen’s analysis with his own calculations. He - and other scientists - couldn’t, and Emanuel began to think that his friend may have gotten it wrong.

As the decade progressed, Emanuel said it became hard for him to ignore the growing evidence that man-made climate change could indeed cause problems. Computer models of the climate, while still imperfect, improved, and there were 10 more years of temperature data. He was swayed.

“It’s like a trial,” Emanuel said in an interview. “None of the evidence is perfect, but it all points in one direction.”

In August 2005, Emanuel published a paper in the journal Nature that linked rising North Atlantic and North Pacific sea surface temperatures, possibly from global warming, to fiercer hurricanes in the previous 30 years. Hurricanes are fed by warm ocean water, and he projected they would become more powerful if climate change continued heating oceans.

Later that month, Katrina slammed into New Orleans, catapulting Emanuel to fame. The link between hurricanes and global warming instantly gained a much wider audience: Promotions for the Al Gore global warming movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” featured smokestack emissions fueling a hurricane.

According to his friends, the mild-mannered and deliberative professor was unprepared for the limelight.

He came to be viewed, Pielke said, “not as scientist but a symbol in the debate.”

So-called hurricane wars broke out among climate scientists. Colleagues, including Lindzen in private, questioned Emanuel’s findings, and Emanuel himself came to temper his conclusions. Earlier this year, hurricane specialists - including Emanuel - agreed that it is not clear warming oceans have already made hurricanes fiercer, but that it is likely they eventually will.

Still, immersion in the controversy seemed to help Emanuel find a public voice. He wrote a 2007 article in a national magazine, the Boston Review, explaining climate change science, and it was made into a book. He penned an opinion piece in The Boston Globe this past February. His message is measured: Climate change may not be as bad as some computer models predict, but the odds are just as good it could be worse.

Lindzen watched his colleague become a media star with growing unease.

He says that man-made emissions are a small factor in climate change and doesn’t agree that global warming poses a worrisome threat; and his water vapor theory is not the only reason. “The evidence as I see it says that the risk is so small,” he said in an e-mail. “We are proposing trillion dollar solutions to a problem that is much less serious.”

He began to see questionable motivations in Emanuel’s transformation into a scientist outspoken about the possible dangers from global warming.

Emanuel “would tell me that he really felt that it would be a mistake not to take advantage of the issue...there is funding… it could benefit the department,” Lindzen said in an interview. “I always took a more moralistic view. There has to be a foundation.”

What had been an academic dispute was about to become personal.

Debate gets hotter Emanuel, after casting an uncharacteristic vote for Obama in part because of his promise to combat climate change, threw a small inauguration party with his wife in their Lexington home.

Lindzen wasn’t happy about Obama’s win, of course, but he and his wife good-naturedly went to be with friends. Champagne flowed.

But Obama’s inauguration proved to be a turning point, both for climate policy and for Lindzen and Emanuel. The new president’s pledge to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and international climate treaty talks, catapulted global warming into the headlines like never before. With the stakes raised, the climate debate became more polarized and venomous, and scientists including Lindzen and Emanuel were tugged into the fray.

In March 2009, Lindzen took a jab at Emanuel and another colleague in a speech for the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, that assailed the political nature of climate science and funding. Lindzen said many scientists endorse man-made global warming because it “just makes their lives easier.”

“For example, my colleague, Kerry Emanuel, received relatively little recognition until he suggested that hurricanes might become stronger in a warmer world,” the speech reads. “He then was inundated with professional recognition.”

The comments, while literally true, suggested that Emanuel’s science was tainted by other motivations. Emanuel won’t talk about the incident, other than to say that he never spoke to Lindzen about the speech and that he’s over it. Lindzen said his words were interpreted incorrectly by some people. Among several MIT colleagues, however, the comments became infamous.

In July, Emanuel confronted his friend after he saw that Lindzen had signed on to a strongly worded letter to Congress by climate skeptics. “We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact there is no such evidence; it doesn’t exist,” the letter said.

Emanuel fired off an e-mail asking Lindzen to explain himself. Of course there was evidence, Emanuel argued, and Lindzen knew it.

“I saw it as untruthful,” Emanuel said in an interview. “And it was to Congress.”

Lindzen agreed the letter could have been written better, but felt it needed to get to Congress as soon as possible.

Months later, Emanuel and Lindzen participated in MIT’s The Great Climategate Debate, about the significance of a batch of leaked e-mails among top climate scientists, which had sparked questions about their integrity and data.

Emanuel sat next to Lindzen at the event last December. At one point - as the two sparred about funding sources for climate skeptics and scientists - Emanuel stopped in midsentence.

He touched Lindzen on the shoulder, and said: “By the way, I want to make something very clear. He’s not part of the machine. Dick Lindzen is his own machine.”

Lindzen laughed. But the pleasantry could not mask a tough year for their relationship. Lindzen attended Emanuel’s annual department Christmas party in his home, and the two saw each other at an autumn wedding, but they have not picked up the phone to socialize with each other in the past year.

Then late last month, Emanuel publicly scolded Lindzen for his Earth Day piece.

“Mr. Lindzen clings to his agenda of denial,” Emanuel wrote.

When asked whether his relationship with Emanuel has changed because of their views on global warming, Lindzen said opaquely in an e-mail, “That is a complicated question.”

Emanuel is also loath to talk about it. He acknowledges, however, that their relationship has become “strained.”

by Chip Knappenberger

“The global temperature “savings” of the Kerry-Lieberman bill is astoundingly small - 0.043C (0.077F) by 2050 and 0.111C (0.200F) by 2100. In other words, by century’s end, reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% will only result in global temperatures being one-fifth of one degree Fahrenheit less than they would otherwise be. That is a scientifically meaningless reduction.”

Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman have just unveiled their latest/greatest attempt to reign in U. S. greenhouse gas emissions. Their one time collaborator Lindsey Graham indicated that he did not consider the bill a climate bill because “[t]here is no bipartisan support for a cap-and-trade bill based on global warming.” But make no mistake. This is a climate bill at heart, and thus the Kerry-Lieberman bill sections labeled “Title II. Global Warming Pollution Reduction.”

So apparently someone thinks the bill will have an impact on global warming. But those someones are wrong. The bill will have no meaningful impact of the future course of global warming.

That is, unless the rest of the world - primarily the developing nations - decide to play along.

In fact, the United States and the rest of the developed countries have little role to play in the future course of global warming except as developers of new energy technologies and/or as guinea pigs of making do with less fossil fuels.

Our attempts at domestic emissions savings will have only minimal direct climate impact, but instead they will serve as an example for the developing world of what, or what not, to do. So if Kerry and Lieberman were interested in directly tackling the climate change issue, they would be working with China’s National People’s Congress to draft legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not the U. S. Senate.

But, everyone already knows this, as we demonstrated the non-impact of U.S. emissions reduction efforts in Part I and Part II of our analysis of last summer’s Waxman-Markey offering. And as far as the global warming goes, Kerry-Lieberman’s The American Power Act of 2010 is similar to Waxman-Markey’s American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

Kerry-Lieberman’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions reduction schedule is 17% below 2005 emissions levels by 2020, 42% below by 2030, and 83% below by 2050. Compare that to Waxman-Markey’s 20% reduction in emissions (below 2005 levels) by 2020, 42% by 2030, and 83% by 2050. Except for a bit of relaxation of near term targets, the bills’ long-term intentions are identical.

The impact of this slight emissions difference on the resulting future global temperature savings is not manifest until the third digit past the decimal point - in other words, thousandths of degrees C. Climatologically, in other words, the bills are identical.

As in our prior analyses, we use the same techniques employing a climate model simulator to derive global temperature (and sea level) projections from the greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. We use the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) “business-as-usual” scenario (A1B) as the baseline, and then modify it to take into account the Kerry-Lieberman emissions targets for the U.S.

Figure 1 compares the global temperature projections from the business-as-usual (BAU) scenario with the Kerry-Lieberman adjustments. The BAU scenario produces a temperature rise (over the 1990 global average temperature) of 1.584C by the year 2050 and 2.959C by 2100. The Kerry-Lieberman adjustments produce a temperature rise of 1.541C by 2050 and 2.848C by 2100.

Figure 1. Projected global temperature rise from the IPCC’s business-as-usual (A1B) scenario (black curve) and the Kerry-Lieberman emissions scenario (red curve).

The global temperature “savings” of the Kerry-Lieberman bill is astoundingly small - 0.043C (0.077F) by 2050 and 0.111C (0.200F) by 2100. In other words, by century’s end, reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% will only result in global temperatures being one-fifth of one degree Fahrenheit less than they would otherwise be. That is a scientifically meaningless reduction.

Figure 2 shows that the impacts on future sea level rise projections are equally insignificant. Instead of a projected sea level rise of 15.1cm by 2050, the Kerry-Lieberman bill produces a rise of 14.9cm. By 2100, the BAU projected rise is 37.1cm and the Kerry-Lieberman rise is 36.0cm. A century’s end sea level rise savings of 1.1cm, or 0.43 inches. Too small to be of consequence.

Figure 2. Projected global sea level rise from the IPCC’s business-as-usual (A1B) scenario (black curve) and the Kerry-Lieberman emissions scenario (red curve).

As I mentioned previously, the real impact of the Kerry-Lieberman bill only emerges if it is applied to the rest of the world, and in particular the world’s developing nations.

Figure 3 shows the global temperature projections from the BAU scenario, along with the successive adherence to the Kerry-Lieberman emissions schedule by the U.S., the OECD90 countries (industrialized countries including the U.S., Western Europe, Australia and Japan), and the entire world. Basically, unless the developing world comes on board, the world’s future temperature pathway will be largely unchanged.

Figure 3. Projected global temperature rise from the IPCC’s business-as-usual (A1B) scenario (black curve) and the Kerry-Lieberman emissions scenario as applied to the U.S. (red curve), the OECD90 countries (magenta curve), and the entire world (blue curve).

Granted, all my numbers may change a bit if different assumptions are made about the baseline scenario, the particulars of international cooperation, or the various parameters of the climate model simulator (for example, I used a climate sensitivity of 3.0C). But the bottom line will remain the same-climatologically, the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act, in and of itself, is a meaningless bill. To make it effective, it must involve the world’s developing counties. Read more here.

By Iain Murray

Three separate events late last year knocked the air out of international climate alarmism. Combined, they put the kibosh on global warming legislation in the United States for the foreseeable future. Now the only ones keeping such legislation alive are a handful of powerful special interests. Contrary to what you normally hear, big business is pushing, not opposing, climate legislation.

The first event was the scandal that became known as “Climategate.” A public release of emails between climate scientists, at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, showed clear evidence of collusion to subvert the scientific process for political ends. The emails also showed those scientists engaging in a cover-up in possible violation of Britain’s Freedom of Information laws. Polls following Climategate showed that it shattered public trust in climate science.

Climategate was followed by a series of embarrassing admissions that some conclusions in the reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were based on unsupported assertions by some scientists and on claims from non-peer-reviewed ("grey") literature.  As a result, climate alarmists’ main argument - the appeal to scientific authority - no longer carries much weight. Attempts to whitewash Climategate have fallen flat and on deaf ears.

Finally, the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen ended in failure. After years of touting the talks as the route to a bigger, better Kyoto Protocol, climate alarmists stood by helplessly as the developing world bypassed Europe and forced President Obama to agree to something very similar to the Bush administration’s climate policy. Long before Climategate, major developing countries, including India and China, had rejected binding reductions in emissions as an unjust restriction on their poverty-fighting efforts. Any attempts to sign them up to this agenda were doomed to failure from the start.

The Copenhagen talks were a turning point for international negotiations, but not in the way environmental advocacy groups expected. Previously, negotiations for a new global climate treaty had been driven by Europe, with the U.S. (and Australia in the Howard years) acting as a brake. The Kyoto Protocol was favorable to Europe, because it allowed it to bank emissions reductions that had already happened - as in, for example, Britain’s emissions reductions from its “dash for gas” in the early 1990s - well before Kyoto was signed.

Most developing countries backed the American position. So by the time of the Copenhagen summit, the gap between Europe’s position and that of the major developing countries had grown so large, that President Obama was forced to choose between them. Wisely, he chose the developing world, a decision that leaves Europe marginalized in climate negotiations. French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to realize this, and figures the only climate policy options he has left is the threat of a carbon tariff - which could lead to a destructive trade war between North and South.

For America, the bottom line to all this is that the two strongest arguments for a global warming bill - scientific authority and international pressure - are gone. All that is left is an unseemly collection of environmental ideologues and their strange bedfellows in large companies hoping to profit from a global warming bill. For these companies and environmental groups - who joined forces in something called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership a few years ago -the various subsidies and other incentives in a global warming bill held the promise of a significant guaranteed income stream.

My organization, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), predicted this back in 2001. Professor Ross McKitrick, in a paper he authored for CEI, demonstrated how a cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gas emissions would actually create a “carbon cartel” which would yield significant economic gains for the members of the cartel at the expense of consumers, taxpayers, and the economy as a whole.

Today, the only major constituency lobbying for greenhouse gas legislation is this cartel, which includes companies like General Electric, Dow Chemical, General Motors and Duke Energy. In the classic formulation of Clemson University economist Bruce Yandle, they represent the self-interested “bootleggers” to the environmental groups’ self-righteous “Baptists” - two groups that lobbied for prohibition, but for very different reasons. Whether the motive is salvation or profit, the practical result is the same.

The bootleggers are now the Baptists’ only hope. Not for nothing did Sen. John Kerry (D.-Mass.) boast that his American Power Act, introduced today, was largely written by the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. That’s worth keeping in mind the next time left-wing environmentalists criticize global warming skeptics for allegedly being backed by big business. In truth, big business is backing global warming legislation and skeptics are doing their best to stop them from inflicting further harm on America’s struggling economy.

Iain Murray is Vice-President for Strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (www.cei.org)

Read more at the Washington Examiner here.