MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen Rejects ‘Climate Change’ As ‘A Quasi-Religious Movement Predicated on An Absurd ‘Scientific’ Narrative’ – Watts Up With That?

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.”

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.

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.

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.

“It may be worth noting that the Working Group I report (the part dealing with the science) of the UN’s IPCC never suggests that 0.5°C of additional warming represents an existential threat. Indeed, it doesn’t suggest existential threats at all”
Richard Lindzen, CO2 Coalition pic.twitter.com/h4K15ShH7C

— Patrick Moore (@EcoSenseNow)