Top Climate Scientist Nails the Global Warming Myth

The United Nations is to vote later this week for a climate treaty "on steroids" - stronger, more all-encompassing and more legally binding than the ailing Paris accord.
AP/Francois Mori

In its latest hysterical bulletin, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has urged that we need to spend $2.4 trillion a year between now and 2035 to avoid the potentially catastrophic consequences of ‘climate change.’

But the truth is that ‘climate change’ – at least as perceived by the IPCC – is bunk and all that expenditure (which, added up, amounts to a sum greater than the entirety of global GDP) would be a complete waste of money.

Or, as Professor Richard Lindzen, arguably the world’s greatest expert on the subject rather more elegantly put it in a lecture in London last night:

An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct ‘knowledge,’ and is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization.

Lindzen, who for 30 years was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is probably the scientist most loathed and feared by the climate alarmist establishment. That’s because he knows the subject rather better than they do and has never been bested in argument.

He is withering in his contempt for man-made global warming theory, as he demonstrated in some scientific detail at the annual lecture of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, hosted by its president (Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer) Lord Lawson.

You can read the full text here.

The global warming scare has little to do with science, Lindzen began by noting, but is rather the product of ignorance of science.

Hence his lecture title: Global Warming for the Two Cultures.

This was a reference to the influential lecture given in the Fifties by the novelist and physical chemist CP Snow in which he decried the scientific ignorance among the supposedly educated elite.

Little has changed since, said Lindzen:

While some might maintain that ignorance of physics does not impact political ability, it most certainly impacts the ability of non-scientific politicians to deal with nominally science-based issues. The gap in understanding is also an invitation to malicious exploitation. Given the democratic necessity for non-scientists to take positions on scientific problems, belief and faith inevitably replace understanding, though trivially oversimplified false narratives serve to reassure the non-scientists that they are not totally without scientific ‘understanding.’ The issue of global warming offers numerous examples of all of this.

Later he singled out former Secretary of State John Kerry for especial scorn.

Former senator and Secretary of State John F. Kerry is typical when he stated, with reference to greenhouse warming, ‘I know sometimes I can remember from when I was in high school and college, some aspects of chemistry or physics can be tough. But this is not tough. This is simple. Kids at the earliest age can understand this’. As you have seen, the greenhouse effect is not all that simple. Only remarkably brilliant kids would understand it. Given Kerry’s subsequent description of climate and its underlying physics, it was clear that he was not up to the task.

Lindzen’s scientific case against the man-made global warming scare is essentially this: the world’s climate is a chaotic system whose workings, even after decades of intense study and billions of dollars of research funding, scientists have but barely begun to comprehend. Yet here they are deciding on the basis of no convincing evidence to pin the blame on just one of the many contributory elements to climate – carbon dioxide – and trying to persuade us that this trace gas is somehow the master control knob.

This notion is so ridiculous, he said, it is close to “magical thinking”.

Now here is the currently popular narrative concerning this system. The climate, a complex multifactor system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged temperature change, and is primarily controlled by the 1-2% perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable – carbon dioxide – among many variables of comparable importance. This is an extraordinary pair of claims based on reasoning that borders on magical thinking. It is, however, the narrative that has been widely accepted, even among many sceptics.

Until the late 80s, not even climate scientists subscribed to this theory. It only took off for political reasons and because there was so much money to be made from it.

When, in 1988, the NASA scientist James Hansen told the US Senate that the summer’s warmth reflected increased carbon dioxide levels, even Science magazine reported that the climatologists were sceptical. The establishment of this extreme position as dogma during the present period is due to political actors and others seeking to exploit the opportunities that abound in the multi-trillion dollar energy sector.

Elites are much more susceptible to this nonsense than ordinary people.

As Lindzen explained, elites are less interested in truth than in what is convenient.

1. They have been educated in a system where success has been predicated on their ability to please their professors. In other words, they have been conditioned to rationalize anything.

2. While they are vulnerable to false narratives, they are far less economically vulnerable than are ordinary people. They believe themselves wealthy enough to withstand the economic pain of the proposed policies, and they are clever enough to often benefit from them.

3. The narrative is trivial enough for the elite to finally think that they ‘understand’ science.

4. For many (especially on the right), the need to be regarded as intelligent causes them to fear that opposing anything claimed to be ‘scientific’ might lead to their being regarded as ignorant, and this fear overwhelms any ideological commitment to liberty that they might have.

None of these factors apply to ‘ordinary’ people. This may well be the strongest argument for popular democracy and against the leadership of those ‘who know best.’

The scientists, meanwhile, don’t know nearly as much as they pretend they know. And in any case, many of them have been corrupted by money or their left-wing politics.

1. Scientists are specialists. Few are expert in climate. This includes many supposed ‘climate scientists’ who became involved in the area in response to the huge increases in funding that have accompanied global warming hysteria.

2. Scientists are people with their own political positions, and many have been enthusiastic about using their status as scientists to promote their political positions (not unlike celebrities whose status some scientists often aspire to). As examples, consider the movements against nuclear weapons, against the Strategic Defense Initiative, against the Vietnam War, and so on.

Scientists are also acutely and cynically aware of the ignorance of non-scientists and the fear that this engenders.

But what about all the scary “proof” that global warming is happening? Lindzen has no truck with any of it.

What about the disappearing Arctic ice, the rising sea level, the weather extremes, starving polar bears, the Syrian Civil War, and all the rest of it? The vast variety of the claims makes it impossible to point to any particular fault that applies to all of them. Of course, citing the existence of changes – even if these observations are correct (although surprisingly often they are not) – would not implicate greenhouse warming per se. Nor would it point to danger. Note that most of the so-called evidence refers to matters of which you have no personal experience. Some of the claims, such as those relating to weather extremes, contradict what both physical theory and empirical data show. The purpose of these claims is obviously to frighten and befuddle the public, and to make it seem like there is evidence where, in fact, there is none.

Just to repeat that last important point: Lindzen believes that there is no real-world evidence that supports man-made global warming theory. None.

Lindzen concluded:

What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness as well as a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays. False claims about 97% agreement will not spare us, but the willingness of scientists to keep mum is likely to much reduce trust in and support for science. Perhaps this won’t be such a bad thing after all – certainly as concerns ‘official’ science.

There is at least one positive aspect to the present situation. None of the proposed policies will have much impact on greenhouse gases. Thus we will continue to benefit from the one thing that can be clearly attributed to elevated carbon dioxide: namely, its effective role as a plant fertilizer, and reducer of the drought vulnerability of plants. Meanwhile, the IPCC is claiming that we need to prevent another 0.5◦C of warming, although the 1◦C that has occurred so far has been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history. As we used to say in my childhood home of the Bronx: ‘Go figure’.

Read more at www.breitbart.com

Trackback from your site.

Comments (4)

  • Avatar

    John Turmel

    |

    JUSTIN TRUDEAU STOPS CLIMATE FROM CHANGING?
    He’s Justin Trudeau, leading fight to stop our climate change,
    Calls CO2 “pollution.” Carbon tax he will arrange.
    As Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth says record-setting heat,
    Catastrophe is looming if the change we do not beat.
    But in Two Thousand Nine, the fraud’s exposed in Climategate,
    Where Michael Mann used “trick to hide decline” since ‘Ninety-Eight.
    Some say his trick’s just neat new scientific way to go,
    It’s not his “trick” but it’s the “hide” offending ethics so.
    They grudgingly admit there’s been a “Pause” in rise, benign,
    Yet “trick” was not to hide a “Pause” but used to hide “Decline.”
    Mann wouldn’t show his data to his hockey stick graph clear,
    Caught fudging numbers so the warmer times would disappear:
    Medieval Warming Period, eight hundred years ago,
    Greenland was green and Britain even able grapes to grow.
    Mann’s hockey stick omits four centuries of high-temp climes,
    Hides even recent Dust-Bowl days of Dirty Thirties times.
    When Global Warming “paused,” alarmists had to change the name,
    To “Climate Change” so up or down, they get to win the game.
    Real temperature’s measured in “Degrees” where up’s more hot,
    But up some “Climes” of Climate Change are units never taught.
    We know their “Climate Change” means really “Warming,” not a “Freeze,”
    So why’d they change the name when both are measured in “Degrees?”
    If they had stuck with “Global Warming,” as the temp went down,
    Your own thermometer would show they’ve played you for a clown.
    The scientific journals censored all the truth who knew,
    While William Connolley at Wikipedia did too!
    All honest research faced corrupted peer review to win,
    While prostitute researchers furthering the scam got in.
    With thirty thousand-scientist petition stating why,
    We, humans aren’t to blame, it’s ball of fire in the sky!
    They claim “Percent of 97 scientists agree,”
    But nine hundred’n seventy thousand signatures don’t see.
    As Youtube shows David Suzuki crushed for all to see,
    He couldn’t even name the data sets on Oz TV.
    He wants to jail those he can’t beat in open fair debate,
    “I was arrested in the Soo!” kept shut up by the State.
    Professor Keating flaunted “Thirty Thousand Dollar” bet,
    “None can disprove my claim: It changes.” Safe as it can get.
    Since climate always changes, it’s a bet no one can meet,
    A false bravado with but only one sure way to beat.
    So Great Canadian Gambler raised him unexpectedly:
    “A Hundred says next year is colder, measured by ‘Degree.'”
    Though flashing Thirty Gs on wager that could not be faced,
    He folded to my C-Note raise. My post he then erased.
    If said “None can disprove my claim: “Mars will invade. Behold!”
    Just say “I bet they won’t next year!” to watch the scammer fold.
    The liars backing down from public bet lose “Trust-Me Cup.”
    “Cash says: Won’t happen soon!”‘s the only way to shut them up.
    Green candidate in Twenty Twelve Toronto-Danforth race,
    Where Adriana Magnutto-Hamu said to my face,
    “I’ll make the $100 bet that temperature will rise.”
    But 6 years later, welched on paying hundred dollar prize.
    Sun-spots have disappeared, a mini Ice Age on the way,
    With Engineering drop-out onto whom the blame we’ll lay:
    So Trudeau’s culpable by peddling untrue warmth reports,
    For every schmuck found frozen dead still in Bermuda shorts.
    With “Scientists” who hid decline, their data, won’t bet too,
    Til Greenland’s green again! I question what they said they knew.
    Still fooled by “trick to hide decline,” still Justin leads the way,
    “I tried to stop climate from changing” on his resume.

    Reply

    • Avatar

      John Doran

      |

      Not bad. 🙂

      Reply

  • Avatar

    Alan Stewart

    |

    The vulgar pride of intellectuals. They have no humility. They have no understanding of empirical knowledge. They only have understanding of their personal cerebral mirrors. Parsed from Thomas Sowell: Intellectuals and Society.

    Reply

Leave a comment

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
Share via