Professor Richard Lindzen recently spoke in Brussels, at the invitation of the Hungarian political think tank MCC, about the role of consensus in political movements claiming a scientific basis (as is the case nowadays with climate). Below is the full text of his speech. “Hopefully, we will awaken from this nightmare before it is too late.”

Photo’s MCC

By Richard S. Lindzen, Professor Emeritus, MIT

In modern history there are several examples of political movements claiming a scientific basis. From immigration restriction and eugenics (in the US after WW1) to antisemitism and race ideology (in Hitler’s Germany) and communism and Lysenkoism (under Stalin). Each of these claimed a scientific consensus that allowed highly educated citizens, who were nonetheless ignorant of science, to have the anxieties associated with their ignorance alleviated. Since all scientists supposedly agreed, there was no need for them to understand the science. Indeed, ‘the science’ is the opposite of science itself. Science is a mode of inquiry rather than a source of authority. However, the success that science achieves has earned it a measure of authority in the public’s mind, and this is what politicians frequently envy and attempt to appropriate.

The exploitation of climate fits into the preceding pattern, and as with all its predecessors, science is, in fact, irrelevant. At best, it is a distraction which led many of us to focus on the numerous misrepresentations of science in what was purely a political movement.

The following focusses on the situation in the United States, though a similar dynamic occurred throughout the developed world, with meetings at the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation’s Bellagio Center and at Villach in the 1980’s playing an important role. Most of this talk will concern the origin of the obsession with decarbonization in the US. I will return briefly to the matter of the consensus at the end of this talk.

I would suggest that the obsession with decarbonization (i.e., Net Zero) had its roots in the reaction to the amazing post WW2 period when ordinary workers were able to own a house and a car. I was a student in the 50’s and early 60’s. The mockery of the poor taste and materialism of these so-called ordinary people was endemic. With the Vietnam War, things got amplified as the working class got drafted while students sought draft deferments. Students, during this period, were still a relative elite; the massive expansion of higher education was only beginning. Students justified their behavior by insisting that the Vietnam War was illegitimate while ignoring the obvious fact that Vietnamese people were fleeing south rather than north. It was fashionable to regard the US as evil and deserving of overthrow. Opposition often turned to violence with groups like the Weather Underground and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). In 1968, I was teaching at the University of Chicago. We were spending the summer in Colorado, and we had a student taking care of our apartment. When we returned, we found a police car monitoring our apartment. The house-sitter had apparently turned our apartment into a crash pad for the SDS during the Democrat Party Convention. Our apartment was littered with their literature which included instructions for poisoning Chicago’s water supply. This period seemed to end with Nixon’s election, but we now know that this was just the beginning of the long march through the institutions: a march being conducted by avowed revolutionaries intent on destroying Western society. For the new revolutionaries, however, the enemy was not the capitalists, but, rather, the working middle class. The capitalists, they realized, could easily be bought off.

Photo’s MCC

Currently, there is great emphasis on the march through the educational institutions: first the schools of education and then higher education in the humanities and the social sciences and now STEM. What is usually ignored is that the first institutions to be captured were professional societies. My wife attended a meeting of the Modern Language Association in the late 60’s, and it was already fully ‘woke.’

While there is currently a focus on the capture of education, DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, a movement emphasizing racial differences and encouraging conflict) was not the only goal of the march through the institutions. I think it would be a mistake to ignore the traditional focus of revolutionary movements on the means of production. The vehicle for this was the capture of the environmental movement. Prior to 1970, the focus of this movement was on things like whales, endangered species, landscape, clean air and water, and population. However, with the first Earth Day in April of 1970, the focus turned to the energy sector which, after all, is fundamental to all production, and relatedly, involves trillions of dollars.

As we will see, this last item was fundamental. This new focus was accompanied by the creation of new environmental organizations like Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council. It was also accompanied by new governmental organizations like the EPA and the Department of Transportation. Once again, professional societies were easy pickings: the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and even the honorary societies like the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, etc. The capture of the Royal Society in the UK was an obvious European example. There was a bit of floundering to begin with. The movement initially attempted to focus on global cooling due to the reflection of sunlight by sulfate aerosols emitted by coal fired generators. Afterall, there seemed to have been global cooling between the 1930’s and the 1970’s.

However, the cooling ended in the 1970’s. There was an additional effort to tie the sulfates to acid rain which was allegedly killing forests. This also turned out to be a dud. In the 70’s, attention turned to CO2 and its contribution to warming via the greenhouse effect. The attraction of controlling CO2 to political control freaks was obvious. It was the inevitable product of all burning of carbon based fuels. It was also the product of breathing. However, there was a problem: CO2 was a minor greenhouse gas compared to the naturally produced water vapor. Doubling CO2 would only lead to warming of less than 1 degree C. A paper in the early 70’s 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 provide a positive feedback that would amplify the impact of CO2 by a factor of 2. This violated Le Chatelier’s Principle that held that natural systems tended to oppose change, but to be fair, the principle was not something that had been rigorously proven. Positive feedbacks now became the stock in trade of all climate models which now were producing responses to doubling CO2 of 3 degrees C and even 4 degrees C rather than a paltry 1 degree C or less.

Photo’s MCC

The enthusiasm of politicians became boundless. Virtue signaling elites promised to achieve net zero emissions within a decade or 2 or 3 with no idea of how to achieve this without destroying their society (and, with off-shore wind, killing marine mammals). Ordinary people, confronted with impossible demands on their own well-being, have not found warming of a few degrees to be very impressive since the warming projected was what everyone successfully negotiates every day. By contrast, most educated elites learned how to rationalize anything in order to please their professors – a skill that leaves them particularly vulnerable to propaganda. Few ordinary people, by contrast, contemplate retiring to the arctic rather than Florida. Excited politicians, confronted by this resistance, have frantically changed their story. Rather than emphasizing miniscule changes in their temperature metric (which, itself, is a false measure of climate), they now point to weather extremes which occur almost daily some place on earth, as proof not only of climate change but of climate change due to increasing CO2 (and now also to the even more negligible contributors to the greenhouse effect like methane and nitrous oxide) even though such extremes show no significant correlation with the emissions. From the political point of view, extremes provide convenient visuals that have more emotional impact than small temperature changes. The desperation of political figures often goes beyond this to claiming that climate change is an existential threat (associated with alleged ‘tipping points’) even though the official documents (for example, the Working Group 1 reports of the IPCC) produced to support climate concerns never come close to claiming this, and where there is no theoretical or observational basis for tipping points.

I should note that there was one exception to the focus on warming, and that was the ozone depletion issue. However, even this issue served a purpose. When Richard Benedick, the American negotiator of the Montreal Convention which banned Freon passed through MIT on his way back from Montreal, he gloated over his success, but assured us that we hadn’t seen anything yet; we should wait to see what they would do with CO2. In brief the ozone issue constituted a dry run for global warming. To be sure, the EPA’s activities still include conventional pollution control, but energy dominates.

Of course, the attraction of power is not the only thing motivating politicians. The ability to award trillions of dollars to reorient our energy sector means that there are recipients of these trillions of dollars, and these recipients must only share a few percent of these trillions of dollars to support the campaigns of these politicians for many election cycles and guarantee the support of these politicians for the policies associated with the reorientation.

Photo’s MCC

That the claim of consensus was always propagandistic should be obvious, but the claim of consensus has its own 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 these institutions were more concerned with understanding the present climate rather than the impact of CO2 on climate. Nonetheless, a few politicians (most notably Al Gore) were already making this their signature issue. And, when the Clinton-Gore administration won the election in 1992, there began a rapid increase by a factor of about 15 in funding related to climate. This, indeed, created a major increase in individuals claiming to work on climate, and who understood that the support demanded agreement with the alleged danger of CO2. Whenever, there was an announcement of something that needed to be found (i.e., the elimination of the medieval warm period, the attribution of change to CO2, etc.), there were, inevitably, so-called scientists who would claim to have found what was asked for (Ben Santer for attribution and Michael Mann for the elimination of the medieval warm period) and received remarkable rewards and recognition despite the absurd arguments. This did produce a consensus of sorts. It was not a consensus that we were facing an existential threat, but rather, as noted by Steven Koonin, that the projected increase in GDP by the end of the 21st century would be decreased from about 200% to 197% and even this prediction is an exaggeration – especially since it ignores the undeniable benefits of CO2.

So here we are, confronted with policies that destroy western economies, impoverish the working middle class, condemn billions of the world’s poorest to continued poverty and increased starvation, leave our children despairing over the alleged absence of a future, and will enrich the enemies of the West who are enjoying the spectacle of our suicide march, a march that the energy sector cowardly accepts, being too lazy to exert the modest effort needed to check what is being claimed. As Voltaire once noted, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities”. Hopefully, we will awaken from this nightmare before it is too late.

You can also see the presentation by Lindzen in Brussels here (beginning at 09.59):