The Last Voice of Reason? Richard Lindzen: A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action

Last year in Cancun, politicians agreed to gather in and divide up more than $100,000,000,000 per year to "avert" climate disaster. This, the result of political and scientific "analysis" of the effects of minute temperature changes over the past few decades, and on speculation, manipulation and "proxy data" (i.e., made up to fill in gaps) to model trends for the future of the climate.

MIT Professor of Meteorology, Richard Lindzen believes it is an unwarranted and insupportable reaction to a "catastrophe" made up to serve other purposes than prediction of climate changes over time, or man's effects on them.

He sums up this hysterical scenario:

"The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well."

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But, the AGW faithful will retort, small changes accumulate - there is "feedback" that magnifies effects beyond what data show to be true.

To which Lindzen points out:

"For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century.
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Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat."

No, the high priests of AGW will argue, there is a "consensus" that says man is destroying the atmosphere with CO2.

Lindzen notes:

"When an issue like global warming is around for over twenty years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence, and donations are reasonably clear. So too are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of CO2 is a dream-come-true. After all, CO2 is a product of breathing itself. Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for ‘saving’ the earth. Nations have seen how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. But, by now, things have gone much further."

While Professor Lindzen acknowledges errors in some of his earlier research, he uses independent data and the research of other experts to provide the scientific explanations against blind faith in the AGW theory.

The science for and against AGW is NOT settled; high priest Phil Jones says so himself!

Cogent factual analysis of the current responses, and summaries of the underlying data and studies on BOTH sides of the argument, as presented in this recent report, are well worth consideration by AGW advocates as well as non-believers who find themselves drawn into the hysterics.

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