Amid the bustle and rhetoric leading up to the UN Climate Change Conference to begin November 30 in France, one man has described global warming hysteria most succinctly: “It’s just nonsense.” Climate expert Dr. Richard Lindzen (shown, left) made this remark Friday at a summit hosted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin. An emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT, Lindzen emphasized, “Demonization of CO2 is irrational at best, and even modest warming is mostly beneficial.”
The watchdog website Climate Depot provides Lindzen’s compelling arguments refuting UN claims that mankind is responsible for most of our planet’s warming during the past 50 years.
The most important thing to keep in mind is — when you ask “is it warming, is it cooling,” etc. — is that we are talking about something tiny, and that is the crucial point.
We are speaking of small changes. Twenty-five hundredths (of a degree) Celsius would be about 50 percent of the recent warming, and that strongly suggests a low and inconsequential climate sensitivity — meaning no problem at all.
[Pointing out a graph of temperature records over time:] I urge you when looking at a graph, check the scales! The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree. When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record, what are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period, and they are arguing over hundredths of a degree when it is uncertain in tenths of a degree.
Lindzen criticized politicians and environmentalists such as John Kerry and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy who ignore this uncertainty and instead exploit misinterpreted data to promote their radical climate agenda. They do this despite the fact that even experts from the National Academy of Sciences and the U.K.’s University of East Anglia (UEA) — organizations that wield strong influence over UN climate policies and publications — have admitted that there is no scientific basis for claims about impending global warming catastrophe. Lindzen quoted UEA’s Dr. Mike Hulme, who told the BBC, “The discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device.”
“We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science,” declared ecologist and Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore (shown, center), who also addressed Friday’s climate summit. He maintains that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; rather it is a naturally occurring gas that we literally can’t live without. “We know for absolute certain that carbon dioxide is the stuff of life, the foundation for life on earth,” Moore said. “CO2 has provided the basis of life for at least 3.5 billion years.”
“To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian,” agreed Princeton physicist Dr. William Happer (shown, right), who not only defended carbon dioxide — (“You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually?”) — but also championed that remarkably indispensible and perpetually demonized energy source: coal. “Coal, formed from ancient CO2, is a benefit to the world,” said Happer, who explained that burning it simply returns trapped carbon dioxide to the atmosphere from whence it came. Echoing Lindzen’s pithy comment, Happer summarized his thoughts by saying, “Policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense.”
Photos (from the left): Drs. Richard Lindzen, Patrick Moore, and William Happer
