Climate Change Hysteria

When it comes to science, some opinions are weightier than others. You do not establish scientific fact by polling citizens or even by polling scientists. You do not establish it by trotting out a motley band of celebrity high school dropouts and overwrought adolescents. 

Surely, we know that scientific research is based on skepticism. There is no such thing as settled science. The latter is merely a euphemism for dogmatic belief. The notion that people who disagree with the consensus view about climate change are “deniers” is decidedly unscientific.

Ginning up mass hysteria about an impending climate apocalypse has nothing to do with science. 

For that reason, we grant more authority to some scientists than to others. Among the most consequential climate scientists is one Richard Lindzen, retired professor of  atmospheric sciences at MIT. Lindzen is internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading climate scientists. For that reason his views are rarely reported. 

Now, the Tablet site offers up some of Lindzen’s thinking about the current debate. He believes that the current mania about global warming, along with our earnest efforts to shut down power grids and to jack up the prices of oil and gas are signs that our civilization is self-deconstructing. He even suggests that our competitors in the Middle Kingdom are happily cheering from the sidelines. 

Lindzen opens with the data about warming:

From a minimum in temperature around 1960 (basically the end of a modest cooling trend beginning around 1939, which led to concerns over global cooling) until 1998, the global mean temperature anomaly (the index used to describe the Earth’s temperature) did increase by about 0.5 degrees Celsius. That’s a small change compared to the typical change between breakfast and lunch, though the net increase since then has been relatively insignificant (except for a major El Niño in 2014-16) and appreciably less than predicted by all climate models. It should be noted that the increase was small compared to what was happening in any given region, and temperatures at any given location were almost as likely to be cooling as warming. Despite the fact that increases of CO₂ thus far have been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history, and despite the fact that there have been large increases in the Earth’s vegetated area largely due to increases in CO₂’s role in photosynthesis, governments seem to have concluded that another 0.5 C will spell doom.

It is worth noting that the increases in carbon dioxide have produce an increase in human welfare-- given that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but contributes to plant growth.

In China the government is building new coal-fired plants, to produce electricity. Are they, Lindzen asks, doing so in order to destroy the planet?

According to the Global Energy Monitor, China is planning the addition of 200 GW of coal-fired generating capacity by 2025. If we assume this is a four-year period and that a large-scale power plant is 1 GW, that would be about one plant per week over the next four years. Why would China intentionally pursue the presumed destruction of the Earth?Moreover, why are the Anglosphere and the EU pursuing hugely disruptive, destructive, and expensive policies intended to reduce their already largely irrelevant emissions?

What are the Chinese thinking? And, isn’t it strange that while they build more coal generating plants they also support climate alarmism in the West:

The answer to the first question is likely to be that China sees the threat of climate change as readily manageable regardless of what one believes about the underlying physics (remember that China’s leaders, as opposed to ours, tend to have technical backgrounds). But they also recognize that climate hysteria in the West leads to policies that clearly benefit China. Indeed, China is actually promoting activities like the Sino-American Youth Dialogue on climate change to promote climate alarm among young American activists.

Lindzen believes that the West is caught up in a religious fervor, that it is punishing itself for the benefits gained from the Industrial Revolution. The interesting part is that many of the Western policies that fight climate change require Chinese manufacturing:

Thus, it would seem that confronted with what is claimed is an existential threat over which we, in fact, have almost no influence, it seems obvious that the correct policy would be to increase resilience against disasters. Instead, the West is proposing to do the very opposite. It is hard to think of good or virtuous reasons for such a policy. Perhaps our policymakers have a pseudo-religious wish to expiate the sin of letting ordinary people reach comfortable middle-class standards of living. The encouragement of such policies by China is undoubtedly one of the reasons; certainly, many of the proposed Western responses (electric cars, windmills, and solar panels) will involve heavy investments in China, which dominates the global solar industry and is already the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles.

Of course, the science is anything but settled:

Debate over this issue has been avoided and even actively suppressed under the fatuous claim that the science is “settled.” Indeed by 1988 Newsweek had already claimed that all scientists were agreed on the subject, even though nothing could have been further from the truth. And the truth has been buried ever since. As former Energy Undersecretary for Science in the Obama administration Steven Koonin compellingly illustrates in Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, the issue remains far from actually being settled. The book relies entirely on the science from the official assessments of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and from similar official U.S. assessment reports. The vicious attacks on Koonin since the book’s release in May indicate the absence of almost any level of discourse. Yet, given what is at issue, the need for an open debate over both our assessment of climate science and the proposed policies is, indeed, desperately needed.

At a time when the nation is caught up in climate change fever, it is good to cast the cold eye of reason on the issues. No one is more qualified to do so than Richard Lindzen.