Richard Lindzen, an outspoken climate contrarian and retired Massachusetts Institute
of Technology professor, sent a letter to President Donald Trump urged him to pull the United States out of the United Nations’ climate change regime because global climate action is “not scientifically justified.”
After MIT’s climate researchers and faculty found out,
they wrote their own open letter to the president, setting the record straight.
“As [Lindzen’s] colleagues at MIT in the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate,
all of whom are actively involved in understanding climate, we write to make it clear that this is not a view shared by us, or by the overwhelming majority of other scientists who have devoted their professional lives to careful study of climate science,”
said the March 2 letter, signed by 22 current and retired MIT professors.
The MIT staff addressed specific inaccuracies in Lindzen’s letter,
Including his assertion that “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.”
“The risks to the Earth system associated with increasing levels of carbon dioxide
are almost universally agreed by climate scientists to be real ones,” they wrote.
“These include, but are not limited to, sea level rise, ocean acidification & increases
in extreme flooding and droughts, all with serious consequences for mankind.”
Lindzen has spent years downplaying the significance of man-made climate change through his published research, testimony in lawsuits and appearances before Congress. He has compared “global warming believers” to a “cult,” and called the most recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading climate science body, “a political document.” He served as a meteorology professor from 1983 to 2013. He is now a distinguished senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank.
Lindzen responded to InsideClimate News with a one-page statement that echoed the contrarian points he made in his letter. He also criticized MIT’s climate program.
“Since MIT’s administration has made the climate issue a major focus for the Institute with the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate (PAOC) playing a central role,
it is not surprising that the department would object to any de-emphasis of this issue,” Lindzen wrote. “For far too long, one body of men, establishment climate scientists, has been permitted to be judges and parties on what the ‘risks to the Earth system associated with increasing levels of carbon dioxide’ really are,” he said, referencing something James Madison wrote in 1787.
A petition accompanying Lindzen’s letter was signed by 300 other people.
Lindzen described the signatories as “eminent scientists and other qualified individuals”
in his letter. A review of the names by the Guardian, however, revealed few biology, chemistry, climate, earth and physics scientists.
Many are well-known climate contrarians and deniers.
They include Willie Soon, an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Steve Goreham of the Heartland Institute, an industry backed organization that denies climate science; and William Briggs, a statistician at Cornell University who questions climate models.
“In stark contrast to Lindzen’s letter, ours was signed only by those who know something about the climate system,” said Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor of atmospheric sciences who signed the letter opposing Lindzen. The science advocacy group the Union of Concerned Scientist also annotated the letter to point out its errors.
Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues
Climate Science’s Myth-Buster It’s time to be scientific about global warming, says climatologist Judith Curry. We’ve all come across the images of polar bears drifting on ice floes: emblematic victims of the global warming that’s melting the polar ice caps, symbols of the threat to the earth posed by our ceaseless energy production—above all, the carbon dioxide that factories and automobiles emit.
We hear louder and louder demands to impose limits, to change our wasteful ways, so as to save not only the bears but also the planet and ourselves. If you think climate change is real, just go look at who is backing and funding our lovely Greta Thunberg | Networth.
The Imaginary Climate Crisis (rumble.com)
Greenpeace and WWF, check any one of them then do come back and tell me
how much you trust Royal Dutch Shell, or JPMorgan Morgan chase, how about Rockefeller and black rock Al gore ffs! It’s a massive con that has been decades
in the making: » The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – The Political Economy
of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex [ACT I] (theartofannihilation.com)
In political discourse and in the media:
Major storms and floods typically get presented as signs of impending doom, accompanied by invocations to the environment and calls to respect Mother Nature. Only catastrophes seem to grab our attention, though, and it’s rarely mentioned that warming would bring some benefits, such as expanded production of grains in previously frozen regions of Canada and Russia.
Nor do we hear that people die more often in cold weather than in hot weather.
Isolated voices criticize the alarm over global warming, considering it a pseudoscientific thesis, the true aim of which is to thwart economic modernization and free-market growth and to extend the power of states over individual choices.
Not being a climatologist myself, I’ve always had trouble deciding between these arguments. And then I met Judith Curry at her home in Reno, Nevada. Curry is a true climatologist.
She once headed the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, until she gave up on the academy so that she could express herself independently. “Independence of mind and climatology have become incompatible,” she says. Do you mean that global warming isn’t real? I ask. “There is warming, but we don’t really understand its causes,” she says. “The human factor and carbon dioxide, in particular, contribute to warming, but how much is the subject of intense scientific debate.”
Curry is a scholar, not a pundit. Unlike many political and journalistic oracles, she never opines without proof. And she has data at her command. She tells me, for example, that between 1910 and 1940, the planet warmed during a climatic episode that resembles our own, down to the degree. The warming can’t be blamed on industry, she argues, because back then, most of the carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels were small.
In fact, Curry says, “almost half of the warming observed in the twentieth century came about in the first half of the century, before carbon-dioxide emissions became large.”
Natural factors thus had to be the cause.
None of the climate models used by scientists now working for the United Nations can explain this older trend. Nor can these models explain why the climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread warnings about the onset of a new ice age. I recall magazine covers of the late 1960s or early 1970s depicting the planet in the grip of an annihilating deep freeze. According to a group of scientists, we faced an apocalyptic environmental scenario—but the opposite of the current one.
But aren’t oceans rising today, I counter, eroding shorelines and threatening to flood lower-lying population centers and entire inhabited islands? “Yes,” Curry replies.
“Sea level is rising, but this has been gradually happening since the 1860s; we don’t yet observe any significant acceleration of this process in our time.” Here again, one must consider the possibility that the causes for rising sea levels are partly or mostly natural, which isn’t surprising, says Curry, for “climate change is a complex and poorly understood phenomenon, with so many processes involved.” To blame human-emitted carbon dioxide entirely may not be scientific, she continues, but “some find it reassuring to believe that we have mastered the subject.” She says that “nothing upsets many scientists like uncertainty.”
This brings us to why Curry left the world of the academy and government-funded research. “Climatology has become a political party with totalitarian tendencies,” she charges. “If you don’t support the UN consensus on human-caused global warming, if you express the slightest skepticism, you are a ‘climate-change denier,’ a quasi-fascist who must be banned from the scientific community.” These days, the climatology mainstream accepts only data that reinforce its hypothesis that humanity is behind global warming.
Those daring to take an interest in possible natural causes of climatic variation—such as solar shifts or the earth’s oscillations—aren’t well regarded in the scientific community, to put it mildly. The rhetoric of the alarmists, it’s worth noting, has increasingly moved from “global warming” to “climate change,” which can mean anything. That shift got its start back in 1992, when the UN widened its range of environmental concern to include every change that human activities might be causing in nature, casting a net so wide that few human actions could escape it.
Scientific research should be based on skepticism, on the constant reconsideration of accepted ideas: at least, this is what I learned from my mentor, the ultimate scientific philosopher of our time, Karl Popper. What could lead climate scientists to betray the
very essence of their calling?
The answer, Curry contends: “politics, money, and fame.” Scientists are human beings, with human motives; nowadays, public funding, scientific awards, and academic promotions go to the environmentally correct.
Among climatologists, Curry explains, “a person must not like capitalism or industrial development too much and should favor world government, rather than nations”; think differently, and you’ll find yourself ostracized. “Climatology is becoming an increasingly dubious science, serving a political project,” she complains.
In other words, “the policy cart is leading the scientific horse.”
“Nowadays, public funding, scientific awards, and academic promotions go to the environmentally correct.” This has long been true in environmental science, she points out. The global warming controversy began back in 1973, during the Gulf oil embargo, which unleashed fear, especially in the United States, that the supply of petroleum would run out. The nuclear industry, Curry says, took advantage of the situation to make its case for nuclear energy as the best alternative, and it began to subsidize ecological movements hostile to coal and oil, which it has been doing ever since. The warming narrative was born.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration played a role in the propagation of that narrative. Having ended its lunar expeditions, NASA was looking for a new mission, so it built some provisional climate models that focused primarily on carbon dioxide, because this is an easy factor to single out and “because it is subject to human control,” observes Curry. Even though it is just one among many factors that cause climate variations, carbon dioxide increasingly became the villain.
Bureaucratic forces at the UN that promote global governance—by the UN, needless to say—got behind this line of research. Then the scientists were called upon and given incentives to prove that such a political project was scientifically necessary, recalls Curry. The UN founded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to push this agenda, and ever since, climatologists—an increasingly visible and thriving group—have embraced the faith.
‘Uncertain’ Science: Judith Curry’s Take On Climate Change | WRKF
In 2005, I had a conversation with Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian railway engineer, who remade himself into a climatologist and became director of the IPCC, which received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize under his tenure. Pachauri told me, without embarrassment, that, at the UN, he recruited only climatologists convinced of the carbon-dioxide warming explanation, excluding all others. This extraordinary collusion today allows politicians and commentators to declare that “science says that” carbon dioxide is to blame for global warming, or that a “scientific consensus” exists on warming, implying that no further study is needed—something that makes zero sense on its face, as scientific research is not based on consensus but on contradictory views.
Curry is skeptical about any positive results that might follow from environmental treaties—above all, the 2016 Paris Climate Accord. By the accord’s terms, the signatory nations—not including the United States, which has withdrawn from the pact—have committed themselves to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in order to stabilize the planet’s temperature at roughly its present level. Yet as Curry elaborates, even if all the states respected this commitment—an unlikely prospect—the temperature reduction in 2100 would be an insignificant two-tenths of a degree. And this assumes that climate-model predictions are correct. If there is less future warming than projected, the temperature reductions from limiting emissions would be even smaller.
Since the Paris Climate Accord was concluded, no government has followed through
with any serious action. The U.S. pullout is hardly the only problem; India is effectively ignoring the agreement, and France “misses its goals of greenhouse-gas reduction every year,” admits Nicolas Hulot, the French environmental activist and former minister for President Emmanuel Macron. The accord is unenforceable and carries no sanctions—a condition insisted upon by many governments that wouldn’t have signed on otherwise.
We continue to live in a contradictory reality: on the one hand, we hear that nothing threatens humanity as much as rising atmospheric carbon dioxide; on the other hand, nothing much happens practically to address this allegedly dire threat. Most economists suggest that the only effective incentive to reduce greenhouse-gas levels would be to impose a global carbon tax. No government seems willing to accept such a levy.
Is there an apocalyptic warming crisis, or not? “We’re always being told that we are reaching a point of no return—that, for instance, the melting of the Arctic ice pack is the beginning of the apocalypse,” Curry says. “But this melting, which started decades ago, is not leading to catastrophe.” Polar bears themselves adapt and move elsewhere and have never been more numerous; they’re less threatened by the melting, she says, than by urbanization and economic development in the polar region.
Over the last year or so, moreover, the planet has started cooling, though “no one knows whether it will last or not, or whether it will put all the global-warming hypotheses in question.” According to Curry, the truly dramatic rupture of the ice pack would come not from global-warming-induced melting but from “volcanic eruptions in the Antarctic region that would break up the ice, and these cannot be predicted.” Climatologists don’t talk about such eruptions because their theoretical models can’t account for the unpredictable.
Does Curry recommend passivity, then? Not at all. In her view, research should be diversified to encompass study of the natural causes of climate change and not focus so obsessively on the human factor. She also believes that, instead of wasting time on futile treaties and in sterile quarrels, we would do better to prepare ourselves for the consequences of climate change, whether it’s warming or something else. Despite outcries about the proliferation of extreme weather incidents, she points out, hurricanes usually do less damage today than in the past because warning systems and evacuation planning have improved. That suggests the right approach.
Curry’s pragmatism may not win acclaim in environmentalist circles or among liberal pundits, though no one effectively contests the validity of her research or rebuts the data that she cites about an exceedingly complex reality. But, neither reality nor complexity mobilizes passions as much as myths do, which is why Judith Curry’s work is so important today. She is a myth-buster.
Climate Misinformation by Source: Judith Curry
Quotes | Articles | Blogs | Search | Links
Favorite climate myths by Judith Curry
Below are many of the climate myths used by Judith Curry
plus, how often each myth has been used.
What the Science Says:
“Global warming stopped in 1998, 1995, 2002, 2007, 2010, ????”
1
Global temperature is still rising and 2010 was the hottest recorded.
“Scientists tried to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperature”
The ‘decline’ refers to a decline in northern tree-rings, not global temperature,
and is openly discussed in papers and the IPCC reports.
2
“IPCC is alarmist”
Numerous papers have documented how IPCC predictions are more likely to underestimate the climate response.
3
“There is no consensus”
97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.
4
Back to Climate Misinformation by Source
Top Scientists Slam and Ridicule UN IPCC Climate Report
https://thenewamerican.com/top-scientists-slam-and...
Sep 30, 2013 · Moments after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) released a summary of its latest global-warming report on September 27, top climate scientists and experts were …
Climate “Consensus” Con Game: Desperate Effort … – The New …
https://thenewamerican.com/climate-consensus-con...
May 22, 2013 · The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is in trouble, and climate alarmists are hoping the much-ballyhooed report by Australian activist John Cook,
The 97% consensus on global warming – Skeptical Science
https://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus-intermediate.htm
Jan 22, 2012 · Multiple studies find between 90 to 100% of climate scientists agree humans are causing global warming, with multiple studies converging on 97 percent consensus. This position is also endorsed by the Academies of Science from 80 countries plus many scientific organizations that study climate science.
The Great Climate Change Bamboozle Industry – Town Hall
https://townhall.com/columnists/Calvin Beisner/2014/...
Dec 22, 2014 · Since 1988 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said “climate sensitivity” (warming from doubled CO 2 after all feedback) is 2–4.5°C with a best estimate of 3°C …
John Coleman’s Blog – Global Warming/Climate Change is not a …
https://colemanscornerdotcomdotbr.wordpress.com
The new report says that climate change is driven almost entirely by human action, warns of a worst-case scenario where seas could rise as high as eight feet by the year 2100, and details climate-related damage across the United States as a result of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming.
6 Claims Made by Climate Change Skeptics—and How to Respond | Rainforest Alliance (rainforest-alliance.org)
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘The climate is going to change independent of what we do with emissions’ –
‘Thinking that we can control the climate is misguided hubris’ | Climate Depot
It’s Over 120 Degrees in Death Valley, America’s Hottest Place; Here’s A Brief History of Its Legendary
Extreme Heat | The Weather Channel – Articles from The Weather Channel | weather.com
Environmental group urges Biden to wean nation’s biofuel program off liquid fuels.
In Green Deal, Climate Committee, Dems Hit Climate on Two Fronts (ecosystemmarketplace.com)
When Trump’s EPA needed a climate scientist, they called on Alabama’s John Christy – al.com
Michael Mann House Testimony on Climate Change: Embarrassing, Rude | National Review
Climatologist Dr Judith Curry testifies that the man-made climate change theory is a hoax
The IPCC May Have Outlived its Usefulness – An Interview with Judith Curry | OilPrice.com
Leaked Email Reveals Who’s Who List of Climate Denialists – Inside Climate News
Climate Change without Catastrophe: Interview with Anthony Watts | OilPrice.com
Obama admin scientist says climate ’emergency’ is based on fallacy (nypost.com)
New Detailed Global Climate Change Projections from NASA (scitechdaily.com)
Record gas prices have nearly doubled since Biden took office (msn.com)
The 10 Most-Respected Global Warming Skeptics (businessinsider.com)
Sky high: Carbon dioxide levels in air spike past milestone (msn.com)
Anti-global warming documentary “Climate Hustle,” – Bing video
Climate Hustle (2016) – Bing video
Seven Victims of the Climate Witch Hunt (townhall.com)
1976. The Incredible Heatwave. – Search (bing.com)
The Great Yellowstone Fire (1988) – Bing video
The Imaginary Climate Crisis (rumble.com)
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry – Bing video
Here’s an extreme analysis between one of the coldest summers of the last 50 years, 1972 and the hottest summer on record, 1976. Summer 1972 had a CET of 14.2, whilst Summer 1976 had a CET of 17.8
Plymouth
Summer 1972 Mean Max: 17.3C (-1.4)
Summer 1976 Mean Max: 21.8C (+3.1)
Belfast
Summer 1972 Mean Max: 16.8C (-1.3)
Summer 1976 Mean Max: 20.5C (+2.4)
Glasgow
Summer 1972 Mean Max: 17.4C (-1.3)
Summer 1976 Mean Max: 20.7C (+2.0)
Dyce
Summer 1972 Mean Max: 16.8C (-0.6)
Summer 1976 Mean Max: 20.2C (+2.6)
Elmdon
Summer 1972 Mean Max: 17.8C (-1.9)
Summer 1976 Mean Max: 23.2C (+3.5)
Durham
Summer 1972 Mean Max: 17.7C (-1.3)
Summer 1976 Mean Max: 21.4C (+2.4)