The Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) in cooperation with CLINTEL hosted a lecture by the world-renowned climate scientist Richard Lindzen. The online lecture was attended by around 200 people from around the world (including a group of climate activists who disturbed the talk. The recorded talk can be viewed here.
Professor Lindzen kindly agreed that his written speech could be posted here at CLINTEL. It follows below.
Richard S. Lindzen, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences, MIT
For about 33 years, many of us have been battling against climate hysteria. We have correctly noted
The exaggerated sensitivity,
The role of other processes and natural internal variability,
The inconsistency with the paleoclimate record,
The absence of evidence for increased extremes, hurricanes, etc. and so on.
We have also pointed out the very real benefits of CO2 and even of modest warming. And, as concerns government policies, we have been pretty ineffective. Indeed our efforts have done little other than to show (incorrectly) that we take the threat scenario seriously. In this talk, I want to make a tentative analysis of our failure.
In punching away at the clear shortcomings of the narrative of climate alarm, we have, perhaps, missed the most serious shortcoming: namely, that the whole narrative is pretty absurd. Of course, many people (though by no means all) have great difficulty entertaining this possibility. They can’t believe that something so absurd could gain such universal acceptance. Consider the following situation. Your physician declares that your complete physical will consist in simply taking your temperature. This would immediately suggest something wrong with your physician. He further claims that if your temperature is 37.3C rather than between 36.1C and 37.2C you must be put on life support. Now you know he is certifiably insane. The same situation for climate (a comparably complex system with a much more poorly defined index, globally averaged temperature anomaly) is considered ‘settled science.’
In case you are wondering why this index is remarkably poor. I suspect that many people believe that there is an instrument that measures the Earth’s temperature. As most of you know, that is not how the record was obtained.
Obviously, the concept of an average surface temperature is meaningless. One can’t very well average the Dead Sea with Mt. Everest. Instead, one takes 30 year annual or seasonal means at each station and averages the deviations from these averages. The results are referred to as annual or seasonal mean anomalies. In the following figures, we see the station data in black and the mean anomalies in orange. The spread of anomalies is much larger than the rather small range of change seen in the average. While the average does show a trend, most of the time there are almost as many stations cooling as there are stations warming. The figure you are familiar with omits the data points, expands the scale by about an order of magnitude (and usually smooths the curve as well). The total change in the mean is much smaller than what we experience over a day, a week or over any longer period. This is illustrated in the fourth figure. The residue we refer to as the index is pretty negligible. It may not even be a good measure of climate at all. Instead of emphasizing this, we look for problems at individual stations. This, I would suggest, is somewhat myopic.
The fluctuations show why changes of +/- 0.2 are meaningless.
The thickness of the black line represents the total change in global mean anomaly over the past 120 years. Although this change was accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history, we are told that its increase by about 30% will represent doom.
If this weren’t silly enough, we are bombarded with claims that the impacts of this climate change include such things as obesity and the Syrian civil war. The claims of impacts are then circularly claimed to be overwhelming evidence of dangerous climate change. It doesn’t matter that most of these claims are wrong and/or irrelevant. It doesn’t matter that none of these claims can be related to CO2 except via model projections. In almost all cases, even the model projections are non-existent. Somehow, the sheer volume of misinformation seems to overwhelm us. In case, you retain any skepticism, there is John Kerry’s claim that climate (unlike physics and chemistry) is simple enough for any child to understand. Presumably, if you can’t see the existential danger of CO2, you’re a stupid denier.
And, in case this situation isn’t sufficiently bizarre, there is the governmental response. It is entirely analogous to a situation that a colleague, Bruce Everett, described. After your physical, your physician tells you that you may have a fatal disease. He’s not really sure, but he proposes a treatment that will be expensive and painful while offering no prospect of preventing the disease. When you ask why you would ever agree to such a thing, he says he just feels obligated to “do something”. That is precisely what the Paris Accord amounts to. However, the ‘something’ also gives governments the power to control the energy sector and this is something many governments cannot resist. Information is unlikely to change this despite the fact that even the UN’s IPCC acknowledges that their warming claims would only reduce the immensely expanded GDP by about 2-3% by the end of the century – something that is trivially manageable and hardly ‘existential.’
Feeblemindedness
In trying to understand the success of this claim that climate change due to CO2 is an existential threat, I propose to look at an analogous scare: the widespread fear in the US in the early 20th Century of an epidemic of feeblemindedness. I will also return to C.P. Snow’s two-culture description in order to see why the alarmist scenario appeals primarily to the so-called educated elite rather than to the common people.
Over twenty five years ago, I wrote a paper comparing the panic in the US in the early 1920’s over an alleged epidemic of feeblemindedness with the current fear of cataclysmic climate change. ((1996) Science and politics: global warming and eugenics. in Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved, R. Hahn, editor, Oxford University Press, New York, 267pp (Chapter 5, 85-103))
During this early period, the counterpart of Environmentalism was Eugenics. Instead of climate physics as the underlying science, we had genetics. And instead of overturning the energy economy, we had immigration restriction. Both advocacy movements were characteristically concerned with purity: environmentalism with the purity of the environment, eugenics with the purity of the gene pool. Interestingly, Eugenics did not start with a focus on genes. It was started around 1880 by biometricians who used statistical analysis to study human evolution. Among them were some of the founders of modern statistics like Pearson and Fisher. Given the mathematically sophisticated origin of the movement, it should come as no surprise that it didn’t really catch on. It only became popular and fashionable when Mendelian genetics was rediscovered around 1900, and things like feeble mindedness were suggested to be associated with a single recessive gene. It is pretty clear that such movements need an easily understood, allegedly scientific but actually pretty absurd narrative. The people needing such narratives are not the ordinary citizen, but rather our educated elites. Prominent supporters of eugenics included Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, the racist founder of Planned Parenthood, the Bishop of Ripon, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis, and many others. The supporters also included technically adept individuals who were not expert in genetics. Alexander Graham Bell for example. They also need a policy goal. In the early 1920’s, Americans became concerned with immigration, and it was argued that America was threatened with an epidemic of feeblemindedness due allegedly to immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.
Details of this situation are in my paper which you can request by email. The major takeaway points are the following:
- Elites are always searching for ways to advertise their virtue and assert the authority they believe they are entitled to.
- They view science as source of authority rather than a process, and they try to appropriate science, suitably and incorrectly simplified, as the basis for their movement.
- Movements need goals, and these goals are generally embedded in legislation.
- The effect of legislation long outlasts the alleged science. The Immigration Reduction Act of 1924 remained until 1964.
- As long as scientists are rewarded for doing so, they are unlikely to oppose the exploitation of science.
In the case of eugenics, government funding was not at issue, but private funding did play a role, and for many scientists, there was the public recognition of their relevance.
For example, Jennings, a professor of genetics at Johns Hopkins University, in his 1930 book, The Biological Basis of Human Nature states: “Gone are the days when the biologist … used to be pictured in the public prints as an absurd creature, his pockets bulging with snakes and newts. … The world … is to be operated on scientific principles. The conduct of life and society are to be based, as they should be, on sound biological maxims! … Biology has become popular!” Privately, Jennings opposed the political exploitation of genetics.
Educated elite
C.P. Snow’s discussion in 1959 of the two cultures suggests why it is the educated elite that is most vulnerable to the absurd narrative. Snow was an English physicist, novelist, government advisor.
Here is his description of the non-scientific educated elite.
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists.
Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern
physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.
What C.P. Snow failed to note, I think, is that the group he describes is actually aware of their scientific ignorance, and this leaves them very insecure. This accounts for their need for simple narratives, however wrong. It allows them to believe that they actually do ‘understand’ the science, and, as we see, they become arrogantly proud of their alleged accomplishment. Of course, they forget that their ignorance extends to understanding what science actually is. They forget that the opposite of Science is ‘The Science’. The situation is compounded when one comes to climate where most scientists are also ignorant, but where their support for the narrative comforts the non-scientists. On top of all this, I suspect that in a long period of wellbeing, this elite feels the need to show that they too have met challenges – even if the challenges are purely imaginary. This seems particularly true for young people who are confronted with stories of the courage of the ‘greatest generation’.
One should note again that most ordinary people don’t have these problems.
Our task is to show the relevant people the overall stupidity of this issue rather than punching away at details. In focusing on the details, we are merely trying to showcase our own specialties. My use of the word ‘merely’ is probably unjustified; the details can, in fact, be scientifically important. However, we are not considering either our target audience or the intrinsic absurdity of the issue. It is likely that we have to capitalize on the insecurity of the educated elite and make them look silly instead of superior and virtuous. We must remember that they are impervious to real science unless it is reduced to their level. When it is reduced to their level, it is imperative that we, at least, retain veracity. Whether we are capable of effectively doing this is an open question.
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BEST use all the crappiest data they can find, then manically “adjust” it using regional expectations and other homogenisation fallacies to try to get a match the all the other crap data mal-adjusted series.
It is a load of statistical FARCE, with no evidence that it even slightly resembles reality in any way what so ever
Using Hockey Stick charts, like BEST, for anything, is useless. It’s just perpetrating the “hotter and hotter” climate Lie.
I wonder if I will live to see the day when school children giggle at the utter silliness of the “greenhouse effect”.
Myriad ocean warm pools currently across two tropical oceans regulating to 30C and Atlantic very close to reaching 30C for the first time in 2021:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/ocean/surface/currents/overlay=sea_surface_temp/orthographic=-26.11,-8.77,376/loc=-19.211,5.134
The radiating temperature of Earth is whatever it is as a result of the ocean surface temperature control of the tropical oceans. Taking the radiating temperature and albedo as givens is the blindspot that “greenhouse effect” creates. Both albedo and radiating temperature are a function of the thermostatic limit on ocean warm pools. The surface temperature limiting process is a consequence of water vapour above the freezing level in the atmosphere, catapulted to great altitudes during convective cloudburst then taking 30 to 40 hours to deposit as reflective ice due to radiative cooling. There is only a brief period of clear sky before the next cloudburst and the cycle starts again.
It will be interesting to see their response to the coming cold.
Only sufficient cooling can change the message.
The past four months of cooling, if extended, will do that (fingers crossed).
To use a parable,
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to change the message. With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.
Really? A warmer world with more rain, longer growing seasons, more arable land and CO2 augmented agriculture is a problem?
As hard sells go, “Selling an ice box to an Eskimo” pales in comparison.
But the hard sell has been accomplished and stands as testimony to the power of the media and propaganda.
Yes, the whole issue is absurd.
The really crazy aspect of all this can be seen in the comments section of Ars Technica stories on climate. There is one today about the possible Biden Administration plan to set mileage fuel economy requirements so low that no ICE engined automobile will be able to meet them. Thus making ICE cars unlawful by the back door.
Well, glance through the comments. Regular readers will know that all dissenting voices are regularly banned from commenting. But the chorus of approval and alarm is still very striking.
And the totally crazy thing is that all these people really seem to think that moving to all electric cars IN THE USA will somehow save the planet. Its not just that they are under the delusion that we are all doomed unless we ‘do something’ about CO2 emissions. Its not even that they seriously think that moving cars to electric power trains will lower emissions.
The complete madness is that, even conceding that, they all really believe that if the USA moves to all electric cars, this will make a measurable impact on global emissions. They all really believe that this must be done to save the planet, have a viable environment for our children, this kind of thing. It never occurs to them that the soaring rate of emissions in other countries make any reductions the US makes by way of regulating cars invisible. Even on the most optimistic estimates if the US manages totally to eliminate vehicle CO2 emissions, the reduction would be eaten in a couple of months by the increases in China, India, Indonesia etc.
It will be totally pointless, even if the crazed assumptions trumpeted as obvious truth by the commentariat were true.
Its unbelievable. The Ars readership and commentariat must be among the more technically educated and intelligent in the country. Why on earth do they not see that the proposed possible measures cannot rationally be described as ‘tackling climate change’?
Or is it possible that the commenters are all astroturfers in pursuit of some unacknowledged political agenda having nothing to do with climate? And that this agenda is being pursued and endorsed by the editorial team and the owners, Conde Nast?
It has to strike any objective observer as complete mass hysteria. Lindzen is right to compare it to the Eugenics mania, or indeed many other waves of mass delusion which have swept across humanity in recorded history.
As one of the protagonists in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, says, as the town starts to come to its senses after the madness and the killings, “There are no witches”.
No, there really are not.
One good push-back argument is to point out that 90% of the outspoken warmists are Democrats (and members of various Green pressure groups). They are not the avatars of disinterested observation and reasoning the word “scientist” connotes. Such biased persons, plus careerists, are disproportionately recruited into climate siience.
Another good push-back argument is to propose adoption of nuclear power instead of renewables. The disputed issues here are fairly few and comparatively clean.
A third good push-back argument is that rushing into renewables has been a disaster for the most aggressive pioneers (Spain, Ontario, and Germany), and a pending disaster for the rest.
Nassim Taleb has a chapter about the educated elite.
Worth reading. “The Intellectual Yet Idiot”
Professor Lindzen’s comparison of Imaginary Climate Crisis with eugenics is very apt. The German NSDAP leadership was heavily (and gratefully) influenced by the American theories on race. As we all know that led to catastrophe. Today, the “Elites”, by following the false climate “science” are leading the world to a new catastrophe.
…and while Hitler signed off on a eugenics programme in 1942, he rescinded it four months later. America’s official eugenics programme ran until 1957. England never stopped theirs, as far as I can see, same with the Netherlands. Only they call it gender equity now.
Neither Snow nor Lindzen fully grasp the ‘elites’ in regards to Science.
To ‘elites’ Science is a faith. An infallible one at that.
It’s practitioners are treated as priests. (It is not uncommon for arrogant scientists to write books saying their fellows studying their narrow discipline are High Priests.)
Scientific Theories are treated as revelations. Elites are eager for such pronouncements. And they are constantly using and abusing them to back up their current view of the world.
After eagerly asking you to confirm their errors, they quickly close their ears the moment you point out said error.
Relativity doesn’t mean all things are relative. It even has an absolute, the speed of light.
The Uncertainty Theorem doesn’t mean you can’t know anything. It says there is a very very small limit to how well two coupled things can be known and that the more precisely you know one, the less knowledge you have of the other. But the limit is so very very small that for large things, we can for all practical purposes know both things.
On and on, theorems are deployed as philosophical and metaphysical ‘truths’ to back up the tenets of the ‘elites’ faith.
The same people who use science to justify their elite status are themselves ignorant. They know they are ignorant, but they refuse to accept instruction. They wield science to attack others. And they use it to justify their actions. And they do both fully aware of their ignorance and absolutely refusing to learn.
Science has been perverted into a faith. Remember that the next time they question your belief in science.
George Orwell: “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”.
Nothing will change until their lunar prescriptions fail. Most notably the failure of electricity grids with unreliables. When the lights go out or rather the rolling blackouts begin in earnest there’ll be no place to hide. They simply cannot create a reliable system from unreliable componentry and electrochemical storage won’t cut it particularly trying to run transport with it at the same time. The Groupthink idiots are getting more desperate by the day with their lunatic notions-
Infrastructure Victoria panel calls for end of new petrol car sales, amid slow take-up of electric vehicles (msn.com)
Change the message, are you kidding?
If Dems can roll out an infrastructure stimulus with a straight face with only 5% ($115 B) going toward highways and bridges, they can do anything. And for good measure most of the media uses the photos from this 5% of bridges and highways under their headlines to support them with generalizations and pressure tactics to approve it. If they can pull that off again after doing the same 5% deal back in the Obama stimulus, then surely they can stay on course with a climate narrative where the math and science are more complicated for public misdirection plays.
That would be their carbon neutral GND infrastructure stimulus would it?
Great material, and great message. It’s too bad there is no forum where this is ever seen by the average person. It does not matter how good a message you have if it is repressed and censored by every communications platform out there.
I personally think the biggest problem we have in getting our skeptical views accepted is that most people, especially the younger ones, have no sense of ‘deep time’. All geologists understand this and that is why most are skeptical…the others are mainly in government funded jobs/careers. Astronomers understand even deeper time.
Politicians understand 3 or 4 year election cycles at best and most people only understand time scales on a century or so comparable to their lives. But you do need to be able to grasp deep time to see the longer and very important cycles that rule our world and climate. Most people think that ice ages were unimaginably long ago that they aren’t important any more. They don’t grasp that the Little Ice Age was really only yesterday, nor do they grasp that ice ages have always come and gone and will continue to do so unrelated to any CO2 changes.
Better science education would be a big help but the trend seems to be going the wrong way, at least here in NZ.
This is an incredibly important message from the most significant thinker in the subject of climate and the political climate alarmist movement.
Among the rivers of verbiage on the subject Richard Lindzen’s clear analysis reduces the issue to its essential core – the elite’s need for a story reinforcing their superiority, and simultaneously their power.
Seeing this is indeed much more important than just “punching away at the details” and everyone showcasing their own speciality.
It really is about exposing the nakedness of the emperor class.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Professor Lindzen´s article is more than actual. The climate realist side should also convince ordinary people (american Joe and Jane in US, Otto Normalbürger in Germany) that climate alarmismus would be eventually a hoax. However, ordinary people are not scientists, and the overwhelming majority of articles, contributions, etc. from the climate realists (even at WUWT) are simply not understandable for ordinary people. On the other side the climate alarmists could indocrinate the ordinary people (especially the youth) very successfully by simple marketing methods and easily understandable messages. Why not to learn from the other side? The first steps in this direction have already been taken, however we should do more. An excellent example would be the presentations from Dr. R. Spencer on the climate crisis (one in February 2020 in Pasadena, the other one on 19. January 2021 for “Friends of Science” in Canada). However this is not enough. As am not a native speaker, and one picture tells more than thousand words, let me illustrate my points on some references from Germany: How will be indoctrinated for example young people in Germany. Although the text is mostly in German, it is felt that everbody reading this thread will understand the situation. So the first item is a link for a major climate alarmist web page in Germany: https://www.klimafakten.de/fakten-statt-behauptungen/basiswissen The web page advices climate activists how to argument in favour of climate alarmism and how to argument agains climate “sceptics”. Some examples for posters:
How to argument against climate sceptic:
Even a version in English would be available:
Basic course against climate realist disinformation: https://www.klimafakten.de/meldung/p-l-u-r-v-dies-sind-die-haeufigsten-desinformations-tricks-von-wissenschafts-leugnern
A poster even in English: https://www.klimafakten.de/meldung/p-l-u-r-v-dies-sind-die-haeufigsten-desinformations-tricks-von-wissenschafts-leugnern
List of “facts” (from climate alarmist point of view) and the answers (a similar first experiment could be found now on the WUWT page (“climate fail files”, “everythingclimate”, “reference pages”)). However this is not enough.
Additionally you can find detailed advices ho to deal with different age groups even in the pre-elementary school age. The most methodologies are rather well known from marketing and sales trainings: How to sell something to different customer groups.
Do we like or not, also we should follow this track. Otherwise we (climate realists) shall be treated as a somewhat excentric and mentally ill “elite science group” with exotic theories in an ivory tower. To work out dokuments, methodologies, stories, understandable messages, etc. as above is not easy, and a cooperation with good graphical guys would be necessary. However, we dont have any other choice, and we don´t have too much time.
It is felt that the world approaches a real Seldon-crisis due to climate alarmism. The to-be-or-not-to-be question would be: How to cope with this crisis. It is felt, that Professor Lindzen and Dr. R. Spencer have already done the first steps in the right direction. Maybe we should follow them with the right contributions.
I’ve spelt out an ethical implication of Lindzen’s argument here
https://cliscep.com/2021/04/09/ethical-implications-of-an-argument-by-richard-lindzen/
The reality is that these arguments will change nothing.
Climate has become a policy vehicle for any and all issues that would not normally get public support. The biggest of which is creating a global fiat currency of monetized CO2 emissions. Argue against that.
https://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/publication/the-economics-of-climate-change-the-stern-review/
Its main findings of The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review included:
etc etc
Let’s really change the message. I was thinking about oxygen. The atmosphere is 21% oxygen yet only plants can make oxygen. How is it that a compound that is only .004% of the atmosphere can maintain an oxygen level of 21% or are we all doomed because cutting back on co2 will deplete oxygen and then we are dead. We therefore need more co2 not less.