"The Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) in cooperation with CLINTEL hosted a lecture by the world-renowned climate scientist Richard Lindzen.
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.
... 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.
... I want to make a tentative analysis of our failure.
... the whole narrative is pretty absurd.
... 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.’
... 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.
... 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.
... 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.
... It may not even be a good measure of climate at all.
Instead of emphasizing this, we look for problems at individual stations.
... The fluctuations show why changes of +/- 0.2 are meaningless.
... the total change in global mean anomaly over the past 120 years.
... was accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history, we are told that its increase by about 30% will represent doom.
... 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.
... the sheer volume of misinformation seems to overwhelm us.
... 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.
... 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.
... 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.
... 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.
... 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.
... 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.
... when one comes to climate where most scientists are also ignorant, but where their support for the narrative comforts the non-scientists.
... 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.
... 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."