Dr. Richard Lindzen’s new paper: An Assessment of the Conventional Global Warming Narrative – Published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation – September 22, 2022: Climate change is “a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the US hobbling its energy system.” – “The Earth’s climate has, indeed, undergone major variations, but these offer no evidence of a causal role for CO₂.”
“Unless we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, this is likely only to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the current irrational demonization of CO₂.”
By: Admin – Climate Depot
Click to access 2022-09-22-Lindzen-global-warming-narrative.pdf
Richard Lindzen’s new paper: An Assessment of the Conventional Global Warming Narrative – Published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation – September 22, 2022
CO₂ is a particularly ridiculous choice for a ‘pollutant.’ Its primary role is as a fertiliser for plant life. Currently, almost all plants are starved of CO₂. Moreover, if we were to remove a bit more than 60% of current CO₂, the consequences would be dire: namely death by starvation for all animal life. It would not likely lead to a particularly cold world since such a reduction would only amount to a couple of percent change in the radiative budget. After all, a 30% reduction of solar radiation about 2.5 billion years ago did not lead to an Earth much colder than it is today, as we earlier noted in connection with the Early Faint Sun Paradox.
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The Earth’s climate has, indeed, undergone major variations, but these offer no evidence of a causal role for CO₂. For the glaciation cycles of the past 700 thousand years, the proxy data from the Vostok ice cores shows that cooling precedes decreases in CO₂ despite the very coarse temporal resolution (Jouzel et al.,1987, Gore, 2006). Higher temporal resolution is needed to show that warming preceded the increase in CO₂ as well (Caillon et al, 2003). For earlier variations, there is no suggestion of any correlation with carbon dioxide at all, as shown in Figure 9a, a commonly presented reconstruction of CO₂ levels and ‘temperature’ for the past 600 million years or so.
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This all leaves us with a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the US hobbling its energy system (a process that has played a prominent role in causing current inflation), while lifting sanctions for Russia’s Nordstream 2 pipeline, which was designed to bypass the existing pipeline through the Ukraine used to supply Germany. It has caused much of the European Union to ban exploitation of shale gas and other sources of fossil fuel, thus leaving it with much higher energy costs, increased energy poverty, and dependence on Russia, thus markedly reducing its ability to oppose Mr Putin’s aggressions. …
Unless we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, this is likely only to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the current irrational demonization of CO₂. Changing course will be far from a simple task. As President Eisenhower noted in his farewell address in 1961: The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
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Climate change ideology does fit Eric Hoffer’s description of a mass movement in The True Believer, a discourse on political extremism.
It is a subset of environmentalism, which has been active in it’s current form since the early 1960’s. It was even then a rework of John Muir mysticism, with emotion mattering much more than evidence. Most greens will not really admit Rachel Carson was mostly wrong, and ultimately destructive in her effects.
Carson was mostly wrong, and ultimately destructive in her effects.
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You don’t have to search very far to find graphs that show that the
death rate for malaria increased after the 1973 bans on DDT.
Which to them was a ‘feature, not a bug’
Silent Spring set the pattern of taking a minor truth — pesticides kill — and extrapolating that into a catastrophe — all songbirds extinct (hence silent). In the AGW case the minor truth is that CO2 and methane are minor GHGs.
I trust science — in particular the experimental scientific method. They made predictions bases on an hypothesis, they failed, ergo their hypothesis was wrong.
CO2s effect as a greenhouse gas is already as much as it can be. The hypothesis of CO2 significantly affecting climate has failed. It happens to be the reverse: ocean temperature affects how much carbonization it can hold so atmospheric CO2 follows, not leads temperature.
Science doesn’t lie. Scientists with an agenda have been known to.
I fully agree, OG!
I trust in the science; especially the geologic history of our current Ice Age!
Without intelligent intervention in the near geologic future, ALL life on Earth will die from CO2 starvation! And I don’t believe that the Marxists infecting our institutions are fully capable recognizing the problem; much less dealing with it logically!
The religion of neo-Marxism will have to be eradicated from our societies before humanity can ever hope to reach our true potential; not only is this religion anti-human, it is also anti-Life!
“The religion of neo-Marxism will have to be eradicated from our societies before humanity can ever hope to reach our true potential”
The first step in doing that is to get rid of the leftwing media and their lies, which is what got us in this predicament in the first place.
People can’t govern themselves properly without knowing the truth and the leftwing media distorts the truth constantly, so we end up electing imbeciles like Joe Biden.
After a lifetime in academia, the first thing I’d do is removed all public money from universities until they honor the tenure agreement. No more partisan teaching.
Same for K-12. I once opposed vouchers. Now I see them as a good tool to defund the public schools that have so thoroughly betrayed their mission and the students. Let parents send the money and their children to schools of sound pedagogy.
The conceited head of the division in the department where I took my PhD was a computational chemist who used to also make the molecules to test his computations. I also saw him argue with an invited speaker that his computations were better than some other guy’s real world measurements.
A good friend, one of his students, once lamented (in the pub) that “he hasn’t made a molecule in ten years.”
My supervisor made me do both with one molecule. The measured data fitted a near perfect expected straight line on an Arrhenius plot (Arrhenius did many things). The result was significantly different from the calculated value, calculated by both myself and a computational colleague of my supervisor.
I was rather disappointed. He never pressed me to publish the results, but I did learn something.
The hysteria and rapid spread of belief in a “climate crisis” has a lot in common with the witch hysteria in Europe (16th – 18th centuries) which, paradoxically coincided with the enlightenment.
Kevin,
The witch hunts of Europe and Early America were led by the ignorant and superstitious!
The Climatastrophe crowd is led by the highly educated (indoctrinated) with a large sprinkling of the wealthy elites who recognize a good grift when they see one! Of course, there are the willfully blind trying to establish their religious bona fides, like our very own wannabe; St. Nick!
Being “highly educated” doesn’t prevent one from being “ignorant and superstitious”. There is ample proof of this in the Global Warming community.
Educated beyond their ability to think.
The wealthy elites led much of the witch hunting. No better way to get that piece of land that you wanted, cheap, than by accusing that stubborn SOB that wouldn’t sell of being in league with Satan.
I think you may be close to the truth on that.
We ought to apply the scientific method…
3 weeks to Christmas and you’re telling there’s no such thing as St. Nick… I’m sure my kids can handle it but I can’t… and won’t. At least the Old St. Nick tale has a happy ending unlike this AGW fantasy.
Merry Christmas
Perhaps we should have raised our kids on the story of the first (real) Santa? He anonymously gave unsolicited gifts to really needy people – not spoilt kids with an attitude of entitlement. A mere century ago my father’s parents did not buy Christmas gifts. With 7 children they could not afford to but his mother, months ahead, prepared a parcel of treats for each of her children.
Bob,
I think abolition man was referring to St. Nick Stokes, who pops down the chimney here occasional to defend the “consensus”.
No paradox, Kevin. The witch-hunts were the then establishment’s reaction to the burgeoning Enlightenment.
A better analogy is the use of human sacrifice to purportedly control the weather, a practise used in many societies for millenia. Since we know that the sacrifice didn’t work to control the weather why did it persist? I maintain that what it did control was public unrest. If Klaus Schwab and the Schwabian Cult have done anything that approaches intelligent, it was reconstituting weather fear as a means of subjugating the populous. We are perhaps culturally predisposed to promises of being saved from the weather.
There’s nothing quasi about the climate change religion. It is, like all religion, an irrational belief that many people find useful for organizing their psycho-social integration, manipulated by economic power structures for their own ends.
“There’s nothing quasi about the climate change religion.
It is, like all religion,……”
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It’s unlike all other religions because the United States
government is a primary proselytizer.
Yes, and that rather flies in the face of the Constitutional ban on any government sanctioned religion.
The term ‘irrational belief’ is applicable to climate alarmism, as well as to socialism in all its forms, since there exists ample evidence to oppose these beliefs. You may find the beliefs of religious people incredulous, but unless you have opposing evidence, it’s not accurate to consider them irrational.
It’s still proving a null hypothesis, though.
Same with CO2 – null hypothesis, but the cultists will merely beg the question, but something must be causing GW! [bangs head against wall]
It’s OK to consider religious people as irrational because religion isn’t based on rationality- it’s based on faith and wishful thinking. What I find annoying is when religious people attempt to show that they are rational with the likes of creationism, which is incredibly stupid. I often told religious friends “give up with trying to prove your religious beliefs – it’s OK if you have faith- you aren’t going to convince me or anyone else with rational like arguments, like creationism”.
Your ‘religious friends’ may lack empirical evidence to support their beliefs – after all it’s called faith – but I can assure you they’re not working to enslave you and/or to force your return to a subsistence existence. Conversely, the socialists, and their useful idiots in the climate change movement, are successfully doing these things, which is ironic since there exists much empirical evidence to actually oppose their beliefs.
While you may refer to both groups as ‘irrational’, only the latter seeks to harm you in the face of compelling empirical evidence that they are wrong to do so, which is why I respectfully disagree with its application to people of faith.
One last note. I repeatedly use the term ‘empirical evidence’, above, because that was the standard by which the Enlightenment’s modernism was going to free mankind from its faith by fully revealing how the universe ‘works’.
Unfortunately, in fully failing to do so, this left the door open to the idea that there is no such thing as objective reality, hence the return of socialism as a potent political force and the attendant rot of ‘post-modernism’ that pervades throughout academia and many other Western institutions.
Frank,
It would seem that humans in general require some sort of belief in a higher power, concrete definitions of good and evil, and a myth of an earlier Paradise that can be regained by proper thought and action. If this is the case, it is far more rational to support religions that are based on the Ten Commandments or the teachings of Buddha than the writings of a sociopathic misogynist like Marx!
The great leaps forward in human history have all occurred under the protection of humanitarian religions; Marxism, in all it’s iterations is decidedly ANTI-human! Comparing the two is like conflating Light and Dark; a blind man can do it far better than anyone with sight!
I agree. It’s not my intent to proselytize in favor of any religion, as I strongly oppose coercion in principle. Rather, I see societal merit in the belief that we cannot abuse our fellows without negative consequences to ourselves. Socialists don’t believe this, nor do radical environmentalists who hold that we are no more worthy of existence than any other organism.
Well, it has been said that whereas people who don’t believe in God don’t believe in anything, but in fact will believe anything.
Yes, it’s been said. But it is patently not true, dismissive and tantamount to calling someone a “denier”.
“You may find the beliefs of religious people incredulous, but unless you have opposing evidence, it’s not accurate to consider them irrational.”
Having been raised a Christain and studied the King James Bible and New Testament which I include the Torah that much of the Bible is based upon there is nothing in them that proves the existence of “God” but is filled with a history of people who Believe there is a “God” that they base their faith in for salvation and excuses of their plight of hardships as the will of “God.”
Mainstream Media has been the propaganda 4th arm of governments for the socialist ideologies for over a century as they censor and demonize those on the right of the political spectrum. The political right supports the ideologies of Free Enterprise that Karl Marx called Capitalism in his Communist Manifesto that through the educators in the institutions of indoctrination say is a form of slavery. The best way known to change a country is to indoctrinate the youth against the beliefs of the parents and in America this began with the federal funding of schools, as they could then dictate whatever is taught.
Fascism is a form of government based upon Corporatism that is Economic Fascism between the government support of big corporations that support the government by the revenue they create through the tax breaks and subsidies the get. In America both sides of the political spectrum support this Economic Fascism in the types of businesses they support. Both Democrats and Republicans supported Oil subsidies in 1916 and for wind alternative energy in 1991 but the democrats took a hard left against fossil fuels and for “Green Energy” under Obama which Biden’s “War on Fossil Fuels” came from.
Under this Economic Fascism where the government subsidies support of Alternative Energies grew industries by creating employment in fields previously unknown. Employment and the creation of manufacturing of products creates taxation that increases government revenue – just like supporting of Fossil Fuels Exploration did on the 20th century. Unlike Free Enterprise where the population picks the winners and losers by the products and services they buy, Economic Fascism picks the winners to create the losers that has increased the Cost of Living for everybody.
I agree with much of what you say, but have a question about ‘[b]oth Democrats and Republicans supported Oil subsidies in 1916…’ . Sounds a lot like something one might read in ‘Mother Jones’, e.g.:
‘1916 – The petroleum industry takes off as Americans’ love affair with the automobile begins. A new tax provision allows oil companies to write off dry holes as well as all “intangible drilling costs” in their first year of exploration. Over the next 15 years, oil and gas subsidies will average $1.9 billion a year in today’s dollars.’
Ironically, the belief that government’s allowing for the write-off of expenses against revenues constitutes a ‘subsidy’ is a religious shibboleth of the Left.
Whatever floats your boat. Whenever the government provides funds to a business in any form is still corporatism because it helps the business absorb cost or losses they then use elsewhere. Just like when a state or city gives tax breaks to companies to build in their state or city it is still corporatism as both benefits financially as it will generate taxation to the government.
When there are defined connections between things it proves a conspiracy, and it is no longer a theory. The majority here know that carbon dioxide has very little effects on temperature and yet government officials support that it does cause climate change. That is a conspiracy that is not a theory because facts prove it is B. S. Whilst the Corporatism they have created based upon lies has generated trillions of dollars over decades of manipulating the population into believing their B.S. that the majority of the population has only seen their cost of living multiply and aren’t intelligent enough to understand they are the cause of their own financial losses by voting for those idiots.
Unfortunately, it is much more costly to the populace when economic fascism picks the losers than when free enterprise does the picking.
Absolutely the point I was making, if I wasn’t clear enough to understand it.
The narrative is politically useful for the United Nations. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United Nations has had no real reason to exist. Its principal mandate, to prevent a European land war, was no longer relevant. Indeed, this mandate failed entirely this year in February.
So, global warming/climate change was a useful way for the UN to renew its relevancy in international politics. The ability of the UN to arrange for ceasefires or suspension of hostilities was already long ago discredited by the collapse of the UN Oil-For-Food program, started in 1995 and terminated in 2003. The failure of the UN in its prime mandate of European land war was made impossible by the defective nature of its governance by the UN Security Council.
Hence, global warming was an easy escape hatch for an organization with no reason to exist otherwise. The UN is not the only international organization with no reason to exist. The International Energy Agency (IEA) is another. It’s become nothing more than propaganda for so-called renewable generation.
I’ve long believed that the rise of alarmunism coinciding with the fall of the USSR was no coincidence.
Quite right. It’s no coincidence at all. In the 1970s-80s, Europe and much of the rest of the world was riddled with lots of Communist parties. In the case of France, they could usually rely on about 10% of the national vote for election to the Chamber of Deputies.
All of these Communists had to go somewhere. This was the time at which the electoral strength of the various European Green parties started to mushroom.
I can remember the ridiculousness of the month of collapse of the Berlin Wall. For a short time, the various western Communist parties were touting the ideological excellence of the Albanian hill bandit Enver Hoxha. It mattered not the slightest that Hoxha died in 1985. What mattered was that Albania was the last Stalinist dictatorship left in the world.
Apart from Cuba. Which remains a Stalinist dictatorship.
“alarmunism” – you, sir, have just added a great word to my vocabulary!
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
— Charles MacKay
Are any members of U. S. or European officialdom reading these reports?
They all read them. The first question that runs through their minds is “is there anything in here I can use to my advantage?”. The second one is “is there anything in here I need to discredit in order to protect my position?”
If it is right or not never even crosses their minds.
Richard Lindzen is always concise, measured, sane and sometimes witty: ‘scientists have an interest … the reward for solving a problem is having your funding ended so there is intrinsic pressure to make sure a problem never disappears’.
His appearance at a UK energy and climate change committee hearing in 2014 (from 1:40) is a model of how to deal patiently with pompous pea-brained politicians.
This Lindzen quote from 2014 is a favorite:
CBS Boston
“Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come
true for politicians. The opportunities for taxation, for policies, for control,
for crony capitalism are just immense, you can see their eyes bulge,”
https://ajustclimate.org/
“A VISION FOR AN EQUITABLE AND JUST CLIMATE FUTURE”
“The Equitable and Just National Climate Platform advances the goals of economic, racial, climate, and environmental justice to improve the public health and well-being of all communities, while tackling the climate crisis.”
There is no climate crises. Those people are either misguided or just grifters.
It’s one thing for some foolish people to think there is a climate crisis- it’s also OK for some people to think leftish politics are fine- I don’t agree but I give them a right to believe what they want- what really gets me is when they link the two and try to force both on us with relentless propaganda.
And expect us to pay for the propaganda.
It’s good to know that two grammar edits puts someone in moderation for spam.
And why is it “good to know”?
Another guest at the party complaining about the host’s food but not even bringing a bottle of wine to the feast?
It’s a software glitch, michael. Nothing personal.
Richard Lindzen is in IMHO is (one of) the most important climate scientists today whose paradigm of climate as being largely driven by internally generated variability is the most correct and accurate. A much needed voice dissenting from the “passivist” view that climate is passive and only changes from outside forcing. Most climate scientist devotion to the passivist is so complete and helpless that they are psychologically incapable of comprehending the existence of any other view.
I think that needs to read “largely driven by natural variability” and “only changes from ‘unnatural forcing.”
This is when we’re supposed to believe that an MIT scientist is finally discovered to be a moron, right?
Your comment isn’t very clear. Are you calling Lindzen a moron?
I think it’s the opposite that he’s supporting Lindzen in an ironic/ sarc way which always risks being misunderstood on blogs.
Ask student climate protesters a few elementary geography questions with reference to the Köppen classification map. For good measure, add a science question on the importance of CO2 for life. I would not be surprised if most would be stuck.
I would challenge them: If you cannot give an answer to what is already known, you certainly cannot make claims about what you think might happen 8 or 28 or 78 years hence. However, they would not dare to reason because it may force them to change their minds.
From the article: “Unless we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, this is likely only to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the current irrational demonization of CO₂.”
No doubt about it.
Coincidentally, I had seen a link to this GWPF document by Lindzen and read it yesterday. He reviews the “characteristic emission level” concept in section 1 – The Popular Narrative. “Adding an infrared absorbing gas (i.e. a greenhouse gas) elevates the characteristic emission level and, because of convection, this level is colder than 255K. In order to reestablish equilibrium with net incoming radiation, it must be warmed back to 255 K, thus raising the temperature of the entire atmosphere below this level. This is the essence of the so-called greenhouse effect.”
This is not in dispute with the climate consensus view as a static concept. But the atmosphere is not static. It is also the working fluid of its own heat engine operation at local to global scale.
Can any of the climate scientists who claim we ought to expect harmful warming from non-condensing GHGs such as CO2 point to the characteristic emission level in these images? (Note that 255K is -18C on the “brightness temperature” scale.) No. It is a huge array of highly variable emitter elements. The static concept is misleading and incomplete. The motion and the formation and dissipation of clouds changes everything about what to expect to happen to the energy involved in the incremental increase in the static effect. It looks like the output of a highly self-regulating heat-engine response to absorbed solar energy. And if so, there is no reason to think that climate danger from GHG warming must be the end result. Watch from space. The evidence does not support the popular “consensus” narrative about how it works.
https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk_band.php?sat=G16&band=16&length=12
Sounds like he was just describing “the popular narrative,” not endorsing or agreeing with it, given the “title” of the “section.”
Agree. Although about the theoretical static greenhouse effect, he does not disagree with it and neither would I. The proponents of the rest of the popular narrative, however, can’t seem to snap out of the mesmerized trance as they focus on the static effect and ignore the bigger picture.
I would like to express the highest regard for Richard Lindzen’s views on the global warming question. He has made good sense to me from early on.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/71/3/1520-0477_1990_071_0288_sccgw_2_0_co_2.xml
Biosphere growth is increasing so substantially that the water captured offsets a portion of sea level rise, maybe more than any increase from warming.
https://mobile.twitter.com/aaronshem/status/1594718625717444610
https://mobile.twitter.com/aaronshem/status/1594718629274206210
The more recent numbers are much more substantial. 2022 land carbon is estimated to be 3.4gigatons (https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4811/2022/), upping estimates to 5.1 gigatons water from photosynthesis for dry mass increase of 8.5 and 28.3 wet mass. This equates to 24.9 km^3 of water capture for 2022. This is about 33% of annual land water accumulation (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1704665115).
You cannot argue successfully against religion with science. Most people are persuaded by emotion over logic.
Al Gore lost credibilty because he did not practice what he preached. So it has been throughout history.
Why are activists not throwing paint on private limos, yachts and jets? Why does Antifa not come out against Hollywood and the huge carbon footprints of the wealthy?
fredberple
“Why does Antifa not come out against Hollywood and the huge carbon footprints of the wealthy?”
If they did that, especially if in a Portland, burn it, kind of way, might they stop being paid?
They might not be to your taste, or mine, but most certainly know which side their bread is buttered . . .
Auto
With the science here, I’m at a “liberal arts grad who took Physics for Poets in College” level. Having said that, I did spend 4 years in seminary…. and in every way I can think of, “Climate Change The Movement” long ago became a religious movement. AS did “Population Bomb” before it. Malthusian hysterias in general are all about religious concepts for the non-religious — starting with the apocalyptical idea that the world will soon end due to the sins of humanity.
It is true that the conviction that non-believers are heretics to be punished is the definition of of a zealots religion.
Having a Master of Divinity from Vanderbilt, I realized many years ago that environmentalism had become a religion in its own right – and I was a little late to that understanding. The late Freeman Dyson had already written about exactly that in The New York Review of Books, although he approved. My own treatment of environmentalist religion is here: Environmentalist Religion Explained.
I also note that whenever someone tells me I should just “trust the experts” or yield to “the science,” I know they have conflated two very important but distinct things. First, the discipline of science itself and second, the scientists who practice that discipline. For while science can be said to be a moral discipline, it by no means follows that scientists are automatically moral persons. Scientists may be as venal, greedy and grabbing as anyone; simply possessing certain degrees and credentials does not cleanse their souls. When scientists – at least a large number of them – figure out that money, honors, awards, and positions will follow from some but not other scientific declarations, then it is all too easy and self-justifiable for them to accept a political leash.
Anyone who wishes to follow the science must first find the money trail and follow it. That’s where you will find the science.
Not sure where, but I recently saw a meme of Mr. Bean standing in a field with a puzzled look and a caption that read: I try following The Science, but it keeps leading me to The Money!
I might be missing something here, but the graph in Figure 6, page 7, has a vertical scale in degrees Centigrade. It looks to me like it should be in Fahrenheit.
From Richard Lindzen’s paper:
“It did not address the issue of so-called ‘impacts’, whereby any observed change in anything is immediately claimed as evidence for the impact of CO₂.”
This is rather like Critical Race Theory, which claims that any inequalities between Blacks and Whites must be due to White racism. (And btw, according to CRT, anybody doubting that all inequalities between Blacks and White are due solely to White racism is being racist!)