MIT’s Richard Lindzen, Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus, and Princeton’s William Happer, Professor of Physics, Emeritus, have published a paper titled Physics Demonstrates That Increasing Greenhouse Gases Cannot Cause Dangerous Warming , Extreme Weather or Any Harm.
Wait! How can that be?! We are told by climate change hysterics in government, universities, news organizations and international organizations—and Robert Kennedy, Jr,!—that there is no question that we are doomed if we don’t immediately curtail carbon-based fuels, stop flying, stop using gas-powered cars, stop fighting world government, stop having babies, stop using plastic ARRRRGH! AND we have been assured that this is the consensus of the scientific community, and not to grovel to these apocalyptic prognostications is to “reject science.”
Now, all of this has always been a pack of lies, speculation and hyperbole, but our betters (that is, progressives, artists, academics and Hollywood) have been allowed to pound this junk into the heads of the logically challenged and scientifically ignorant for decades, often harvesting votes and lucre all the while. I don’t know whether the latest paper is wrong just as you don’t know that the scientific opinions behind the “We’re all going to die!” papers are right. However, enacting draconian measures on faith, guesswork and speculation is irresponsible, or in technical terms, really, really stupid.
The point is, and has always been, and was as the late Michael Crichton persuasively wrote in “State of Fear” over 20 years ago, we still don’t have enough data or know enough about what affects world climate to leap into expensive, risky, life-altering grand law-driven policy “solutions.” Never mind, though: we still see regular examples of climate change panic, like the Steve Miller Band, those science mavens, calling off their 28-date tour, which was due to kick off August15, by announcing, “The combination of extreme heat, unpredictable flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes and massive forest fires make these risks for you our audience, the band and the crew unacceptable.”
Profs Lindzen and Happer’s message is rather simple: CO2-driven warming poses no danger to the planet, while the net-zero policies designed to reduce CO2 do more harm than good. Oh! That’s good to know! Except the mainstream media doesn’t want us to know it, suspect it, or even learn that credible authorities have come to such a conclusion. They want as many people as possible to be terrified so they’ll agree to restrictive laws and regulations that will diminish our quality of life while giving them more power to remake society.
Funny, this is ringing a metaphorical bell. Didn’t the Axis try to do this in another sphere fairly recently? Around 2020? Fake science combined with political manipulation? Did I dream this?
Here is how an “expert” with the United Nations, one of the main purveyors of climate change madness, reacted to the new research: she wants dissenters to be criminally prosecuted and imprisoned. Elisa Morgera, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, authored a report, “The imperative of defossilizing our economies,” that was released in June. It calls for the banning of all oil production and infrastructure development by 2030. According to Morgera, fossil fuels, which provide 86% of the energy consumed in 2024 and are the basis for thousands of products people consume every day, cause “significant and pervasive risks and harm to the right to life.” She argues that media companies running ads for carbon-based products or spreading “misinformation” about climate change should face criminal penalties, and that nations need to criminalize “attacks against environmental human rights defenders.”
It’s amazing that the same political party can so consistently line up on the wrong side of so many issues. Climate change “denial” is, as we know, one of the primary justifications for Trump Derangement. The possibility that they could be dead, dead wrong about a central tenet of their obsession must be too bitter to contemplate.
Ethics Alarms 
Okay, so I went and looked at Lindzen’s publications (I focused on him rather than Hopper since Lindzen is a climate scientist) and he does not dismiss climate change or global warming. Both are a focus of his research.
(I DID look at the paper you linked, but I’m not giving it much weight. It is not peer-reviewed, it is couched in the context of a legal dispute between State Farm and Automobile manufacturers rather than climatology, and was “published” as a upload by an advocacy organization that claims [unconvincingly given the funding sources and the uploaded papers] to be nonpartisan.)
I would recommend instead the following recent peer-reviewed publication:
Lindzen, R.S., Christy, J.R. Reassessing the Climate Change Narrative. Asia-Pac J Atmos Sci 60, 319–327 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13143-024-00353-9
To get a better sense of Lindzen’s views and critique of current climate models relevant to the most recent era of climate change (since 1880).
TLDR summary: The simplification of climate change and global warming to a single-minded focus on greenhouse gases fails to capture key features of the most recent era of climate change. Most current models of climate change fail to capture the fact that “current warming is almost entirely due to tropical warming” (end of section 4).
For more detail (again for those not planning to read the full paper!) here is a fuller summary, i.e. the full conclusion.
__________________
5 Concluding Remarks
We noted that major changes in the Earth’s paleoclimate were characterized by large changes in the tropics-to-pole temperature difference and relatively small changes in tropical temperature. In contrast to this, warming since 1880 is almost entirely due to changes in tropical temperature, with insignificant changes in the tropics-to-pole surface temperature difference. This has profound implications since the small tropical warming is not indicative of larger warming in the extratropics. However, all the models we examined not only displayed greater tropical warming than has been observed for the period 1880–2022, but also, in distinct contrast to the observations, all the models displayed significant increases in the tropics-to-pole temperature difference. The greater tropical warming is likely associated with the radiative feedbacks associated with the greenhouse impact of water vapor and clouds and the reflectivity of clouds. These are all associated with major sources of uncertainty. This was noted in Sect. 7.2.2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 3rd Assessment report (https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/WGI_TAR_full_report.pdf) and remains so to the present (Mauritsen and Stevens 2015; Trenberth and Fasullo 2009; Lindzen and Choi 2021). The anomalous change in tropics-to-pole temperature difference points to model problems with meridional hydrodynamic heat flux. For models to be useful, these problems need to be identified and corrected. In fact, the results in this paper suggest that an eventual model for climate would be characterized by a relatively insensitive tropics including those extratropical isentropes originating in the tropics (as in Fig. 1)Footnote 11 with major climate changes associated with behavior at the surface in the extratropics which is determined by a variety of influences including orbital variations in high latitude insolation (i.e., the Milankovitch mechanism: Milankovitch 1941, Roe 2006, and Edvardsson et al 2002) and the variety of ocean circulations which carry heat to and from the surface with time scales ranging from years to millenia.
Thanks for doing the deep dive. The ethics bottom line remains the same. There is not any “consensus.” The data is inconclusive. The hysteria is manipulated and politically motivated. Spending large amounts of treasure to alleviate a problem that is not well-understood is irresponsible. The news media has no interest in informing the public, and the people and politicians talking most loudly about climate change literally don’t know what they are talking about.
Fair?
Completely fair.
The climate-alarmist community’s settling on CO2 as its primary bogey-man was mistake #1. People who have a very basic understanding of 1) the light spectrum, 2) the greenhouse effect, and 3) what light-wave frequencies are absorbed by which greenhouse gases…those people understand that they are being fed a load of drivel by climate alarmists.
Is climate changing?…yes…just as it’s been doing since climate began. But the people bleating about CO2 for the last several decades (I’m looking at you Gore…and Mann…and Hayhoe…and Cullen…and others too numerous to count) are rapidly losing their credibility. Even if they were to come up with a different theory, who would (or should?!?) believe them now? Their mischaracterizations, distortions, and outright lies have cost taxpayers money in numbers too gargantuan to contemplate. It’s over for them…at least, it should be over.
We need a new group of people – real scientists, real physicists, real geologists, real oceanographers, real meteorologists – to step up and give us real information that’s truly been peer-reviewed and is grounded in real data and verifiable analysis.
The mantra of “trust the science!” has been – in the recent past – used as a cudgel to force an awful lot of non-scientific nonsense down our throats…and into our shoulders (if you get my drift).
The only knock on the talented Lindzen & Happer is that they prefer evidence-based policy making rather than policy-based evidence making.
It gets worse.
The following are direct quotes from the Rock Stars of Climate Science discussing fun, purely scientific principles like hiding data, deleting/holding up skeptical comments, redefining the peer review process, attempting to silence skeptical research, ignoring/evading FoI requests, deleting tax-payer-funded damning emails; might any of this be defined as felony conspiracy?
All come under a basic heading: WHERE’S THE EFFIN’ WARMING???
(bolds/caps mine throughout)
*Dr. Phil Jones: ”I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
*Dr. Phil Jones: “I HOPE YOU’RE NOT RIGHT ABOUT THE LACK OF WARMING LASTING TILL ABOUT 2020. I’d rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office press release with Doug’s paper that said something like – half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998!”
*Dr. Phil Jones: Bottom line – there is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years … this is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and variability.”
*Dr. Phil Jones: ”If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone … We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”
*Dr. Phil Jones: ”PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. DON’T ANY OF YOU THREE TELL ANYBODY THAT THE UK HAS A FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT.”
*Dr. Phil Jones: “I did get an email from the FoI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails – unless this was normal deleting to keep emails manageable!”
*Dr. Phil Jones: ”Can you delete any emails you may have had with (Dr.) Keith (Briffa) re AR4? Keith will do likewise … Can you also email (Dr.) Gene (Wahl) and get him to do the same?”
*Dr. Phil Jones: – ”try and change the Received date! Don’t give those sceptic something to amuse themselves with.”
*Dr. Phil Jones: ”I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
*Dr. Michael Mann: ”How to deal with this is unclear, since here are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that anti-greenhouse science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on).”
*Dr. Michael Mann: ”We can hold (realclimate.com) comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not …”
*Dr. Kevin Trenberth: ”WHERE THE HECK IS THE GLOBAL WARMING?” We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. … ”
*Dr. Kevin Trenberth: “THE FACT IS THAT WE CAN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE LACK OF WARMING AT THE MOMENT AND IT IS A TRAVESTY THAT WE CAN’T”
“THE IMPROVER OF NATURAL KNOWLEDGE ABSOLUTELY REFUSES TO ACKNOWLEDGE AUTHORITY AS SUCH. FOR HIM, SKEPTICISM IS THE HIGHEST OF DUTIES; BLIND FAITH THE ONE UNPARDONABLE SIN.” Thomas H. Huxley
PWS
Paul,
I love these quotes you find. They all add up to quite an indictment. Here are two favorite quotes of mine, both from Richard Feynman:
“If you thought that science was certain – well, that is just an error on your part.”
“Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.”
I would say mostly fair.
As a scientist, here are things I definitely agree with:
1. Lots of problems with peer review AND I also treat peer-reviewed work differently than papers uploaded to the interwebs with zero peer review. Reviewers don’t catch all problems AND they are human and hence vulnerable to bias AND scientists, like all humans, have blind spots once they decide something is “settled science.”
2. Scientific consensus IS actually a thing AND it does not mean what it means in decision making (i.e., that EVERYBODY agrees). So, for example, there IS scientific consensus that evolution by natural selection occurred in the past and continues today, there IS scientific consensus that the climate has changed in the past century. This does not mean 100% agreement (which is actually a good thing, because contrary views keep prodding people to take another look and refine theories etc. in light of data that doesn’t quite fit — see Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, on normal science versus paradigm shifts. There is ALWAYS more to discover, more to understand, new ways of looking at data.
3. Science and policy are different realms with different imperatives. Scientists are trained to conclude articles by considering how they could be wrong, why more research is needed, ways in which their interpretations might be incomplete. Policy makers need to act, and their desire to act “based on science” creates a compelling motive to simplify and distort, and to broadcast to their audience a sense of certainty that most scientists would not endorse, and to NOT couch their pronouncements in qualifying language such as “based on our current understanding, which is likely to change as more data comes in and we refine — or even upend — the presently most popular interpretations.” They want a level of certainty that is a lot easier to find in religious dogma than sound science.
I was going to make your earlier comment a Comment of the Day, but this one is even better. Going up now.