How climate delusion is rooted in hatred of ordinary workers who could own a house and a car

“Let us hope that we will wake up from this nightmare before it is too late.”

By Richard S. Lindzen, Professor Emeritus, MIT

Professor Richard Lindzen recently spoke in Brussels, at the invitation of the Hungarian political think tank MCC, on the role of consensus in political movements that claim to be scientifically based (as is the case today for climate). Below is the full text of his speech. “Let us hope that we will wake up from this nightmare before it is too late.”

Source : https://pgibertie.com/2024/09/03/le-professeur-lindzen-explique-comment-le-delire-climatique-trouve-sa-source-dans-la-detestation-des-travailleurs-ordinaires-qui-pouvaient-posseder-une-maison-et-une-voiture/

Via PATRICE GIBERTIE'S BLOG - geopolitics, economy, education

Posted on September 3, 2024 by pgibertie

Science is a mode of investigation rather than a source of authority

Modern history has given rise to several examples of political movements that claimed to have a scientific basis. From immigration restrictions to eugenics (in the United States after World War I), to anti-Semitism and racial ideology (in Hitler's Germany) and communism and Lysenkoism (under Stalin).

Each of these movements claimed a scientific consensus that allowed highly educated citizens, who were ignorant of science, to see their anxieties linked to their ignorance alleviated.

Since all scientists were supposed to agree, they did not need to understand science. In fact, "science" is the opposite of science itself. Science is a mode of inquiry rather than a source of authority. However, its success has earned it a certain authority in the public mind, and this is what politicians often envy and try to appropriate.

Climate exploitation fits into the previous pattern, and as with all the previous ones, science is actually irrelevant. At best, it is a diversion that has led many of us to focus on the many misrepresentations of science in what was a purely political movement.

I would argue that the obsession with decarbonization (i.e. Net Zero) has its roots in the reaction to the amazing period after World War II, when ordinary working people could own a home and a car.

I was a student in the 1950s and early 1960s. The mockery of the bad taste and materialism of these so-called ordinary people was rampant. With the Vietnam War, things were amplified as the working class was drafted while students sought deferrals from the draft. Students, at that time, were still a relative elite; the massive expansion of higher education was just beginning.

For the new revolutionaries, however, the enemy was not the capitalists, but rather the working middle class. They understood that it was easy to buy the capitalists.

I think it would be a mistake to ignore the traditional focus of revolutionary movements on the means of production. The vehicle for this struggle has been the capture of the environmental movement. Before 1970, this movement focused on issues such as whales, endangered species, the landscape, clean air and water, and population. However, with the first Earth Day in April 1970, attention turned to the energy sector, which, after all, is fundamental to all production and, therefore, involves trillions of dollars.

In the 1970s, attention turned to CO2 and its contribution to global warming via the greenhouse effect. The appeal of CO2 control to political control zealots was obvious. It was the inevitable product of any combustion of carbon-based fuels. It was also the product of respiration.

There was a problem, however: CO2 was a minor greenhouse gas compared to naturally produced water vapour. Doubling CO2 would only cause less than 1 degree C of warming. A paper from the early 1970s by Manabe and Wetherald came to the rescue. Using a highly unrealistic one-dimensional model of the atmosphere, they found that assuming (without any basis) that relative humidity remained constant as the atmosphere warmed would produce a positive feedback that would amplify the impact of CO2 by a factor of 2. This violated Le Chatelier's principle that natural systems tend to oppose change, but to be fair, this principle was not something that had been rigorously proven. Positive feedbacks now became the basis of all climate models, which now produced responses to a doubling of CO2 of 3 degrees C and even 4 degrees C rather than a paltry 1 degree C or less.

The enthusiasm of politicians became boundless. Elites, who had shown themselves to be virtuous, promised to reach carbon neutrality within a decade, two or three, with no idea how to do it without destroying their societies (and, with offshore wind, killing marine mammals). Ordinary people, faced with impossible demands for their own well-being, did not find a few degrees of warming very impressive, because the projected warming was what everyone successfully negotiates every day.

By contrast, most educated elites have learned to rationalize anything to please their professors—a skill that makes them particularly vulnerable to propaganda. Few ordinary people, by contrast, would consider retiring to the Arctic rather than Florida. Enthusiastic politicians, faced with this resistance, have frantically changed their narrative. Instead of emphasizing the tiny changes in their temperature measurement (which is itself a false measure of climate) , they now point to the weather extremes that occur almost daily somewhere on the planet as evidence not just of climate change, but of climate change due to rising CO2 (and now even more negligible greenhouse gas contributors like methane and nitrous oxide), even though these extremes show no significant correlation with emissions.

From a political perspective, extremes provide convenient images that have more emotional impact than small temperature changes. The desperation of political figures often goes beyond this, claiming that climate change is an existential threat (associated with so-called “tipping points”), even though the official documents (e.g., IPCC Working Group 1 reports) produced to support climate concerns never come close to making this claim, and there is no theoretical or observational basis for tipping points.

It should be noted that there has been one exception to this focus on global warming: the issue of ozone depletion. But even that issue has its uses. When Richard Benedick, the American negotiator of the Montreal Convention that banned Freon, visited MIT on his way back from Montreal, he rejoiced at his success but assured us that we had not seen anything yet; we would have to wait and see what they would do with CO2. In short, the ozone issue was a test run for global warming. True, the EPA's activities still include conventional pollution control, but energy dominates.

Of course, the lure of power is not the only thing that motivates politicians. The ability to provide trillions of dollars to reorient our energy sector means that there are beneficiaries of those trillions of dollars, and those beneficiaries have to share only a small percentage of those trillions of dollars to support those politicians’ campaigns over many election cycles and to ensure that those politicians support the policies associated with the reorientation.

It is obvious that the claim of consensus has always been propaganda, but it also has its interesting aspects. When global warming was first exposed to the American public in a Senate hearing in 1988, Newsweek magazine had a cover showing the Earth on fire with the subtitle "All Scientists Agree".

This was at a time when there were only a handful of institutions dealing with climate, and even those institutions were more concerned with understanding the current climate than with the impact of CO2 on the climate. Nevertheless, a few politicians (notably Al Gore) were already making it their favorite topic. And when the Clinton-Gore administration won the election in 1992, climate funding began to increase rapidly by a factor of about 15. This in effect created a major increase in the number of people who claimed to work on climate and who understood that this support required an agreement on the supposed danger of CO2.

Whenever something was announced that was to be found (e.g., the elimination of the medieval warming period, the attribution of change to CO2, etc.), there were inevitably so-called scientists who claimed to have found what was asked (Ben Santer for the attribution and Michael Mann for the elimination of the medieval warming period) and received remarkable rewards and recognition despite the absurd arguments. This produced a kind of consensus.

It was not a consensus that we were facing an existential threat, but rather, as Steven Koonin noted, that the projected increase in GDP by the end of the 21st century would be reduced from about 200% to 197%, and even that prediction is an exaggeration – especially since it ignores the undeniable benefits of CO2.

So here we are faced with policies that are destroying Western economies, impoverishing the working middle class, condemning billions of the world’s poorest people to continued poverty and increased hunger, leaving our children in despair over the supposed lack of a future, and enriching the enemies of the West who enjoy watching our suicidal march, a march that the energy industry cowardly accepts, being too lazy to make the modest effort to verify what is being claimed. As Voltaire once observed: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Let us hope that we wake up from this nightmare before it is too late.