What Climate Alarmists Get Wrong

Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences at MIT. Cato Institute

In a recent episode of American Thought Leaders, host Jan Jekielek and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discuss the real meaning of science, the scientific ignorance of so many of our policy makers, the false assumptions fueling today’s climate extremism, and the horrific damage done worldwide by misguided policies.

Jan Jekielek: You said that science is one of the few words that when you add “the” in front of it, it means the exact opposite.

Richard Lindzen: Science is a mode of inquiry. “The science” is science as authority. Political figures have noticed that science has a certain authority with the public, and they want to co-opt it, so they bring in the term “the science.” But that isn’t science. Science depends on questions and on being wrong.

Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk about the current state of science around climate change, as you understand it.

Mr. Lindzen: Before this issue [of climate change], climate science was primarily to understand the Earth’s climate at present, which is represented by the Köppen climate classification system. That system recognizes dozens of climate regimes on the earth, not one, and they all behave differently. The notion that there is one number as a temperature of the earth is absurd.

You can average Mount Everest and the Dead Sea, but that doesn’t work. Instead, scientists take what’s called the temperature anomaly. At each station, they take a 30-year mean, let’s say 1950 to 1980, and they look at the deviation from that mean and average the deviations at each station. You’re getting the average temperature change.

It’s been rising since 1800, and since 1880, it’s gone up by one and a fraction degree, which isn’t a heck of a lot. But the data points are missing from that picture. If you show the data points on a graph, this thing going up a degree or so is surrounded by dense clouds of data ranging from minus 10 to plus 10, 20 degrees.

Take away the data points, and you expand the scale so that one or two degrees occupies your whole graph. Now, it looks big. People don’t see the data, which shows that at any given point, almost as many stations are cooling as they are warming.

The whole issue at that level depends on a public that cannot read a graph. When Al Gore was in the Senate, he often showed a graph as if to say, “Don’t screw around with me.” It wasn’t information. With ad infinitum repetition, most people assume something’s there, but there really isn’t.

Mr. Jekielek: There is a general understanding that there has been a temperature increase and that humans have been involved to some extent. How much do we know about that?

Mr. Lindzen: It’s true there is a greenhouse effect. It’s due primarily to water vapor and clouds. CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide are minor, minor constituents. Roughly speaking, if all other things are kept constant and you double CO2, you would get a little under one degree of warming.

Then there’s this assumption that nature will make whatever we do worse. There’s no basis for it, but it does give the models more than a little under a degree. It may even bring it to as high as three degrees.

But even three degrees isn’t that much. Where does it come from that this is an existential threat?

It comes from no place except propaganda. Even the U.N.’s IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report doesn’t speak about an existential threat. So the thought that this requires massive change is absurd. CO2 is essential, and we’re treating it as a poison. If you got rid of 60 percent of the CO2, we’d all be dead. It’s essential for plant life and the basis for photosynthesis. Yet, because it’s the product of fossil fuel burning and the energy sector, it’s being attacked.

Mr. Jekielek: You published a paper in Tablet looking at the way the Chinese Communist Party deals with climate and how the West deals with China in this respect. It exposes a certain cynicism around this issue.

Mr. Lindzen: At this point, no matter what we do in the [West], it will have little impact on CO2. China and India are building coal-fired plants and ignoring the whole issue. They’re now major emitters. If you took away the EU and the Anglosphere, CO2 would continue to increase. China, India, and Southeast Asia are benefiting immensely while Africa and much of South Asia are suffering.

Mr. Jekielek: Are they suffering from policies that prevent the development of reliable energy sources?

Mr. Lindzen: Sure, the people who don’t have access to modern electricity are told they should be frozen in that state. I was shocked, for example, when the World Bank refused financing for a hospital in the Congo unless it used renewable energy. I was thinking, “Who of these idiots would want to be operated on in a hospital running on solar or wind?”

Mr. Jekielek: So, people making policy don’t even understand the basics of how science works?

Mr. Lindzen: C.P. Snow was a British physicist and author who was an advisor to [Winston] Churchill during the war. He began pushing a theme called “Two Cultures” when he realized that well-educated people in the humanities were almost totally ignorant of science. He used the example of asking one of his colleagues outside of science to identify the second law of thermodynamics. The answer he got was a blank face. That was the equivalent of scientists saying, “I’ve never read Shakespeare.”

Then he asked, “Can you define acceleration?” They failed again, which was the equivalent of them saying, “I don’t know how to read.” He was appalled at the degree of isolation from science that most educated people have.

That’s dangerous. I don’t know how you solve it, but [ignorance of science] opens society to this kind of fraudulence.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.