The John Locke Foundation’s Mitch Kokai recently spoke with Dr. Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT, about global warming and climate change. Dr. Lindzen spoke recently in Charlotte. (Go to http://carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.
Kokai: You called your recent speech, “Global Warming: Hype and Consensus.” There does seem to be an awful lot of hype about this topic, doesn’t there?
Lindzen: It has become an issue tied to agendas. People have energy policies, people have this policy, that policy. And the last year has just been insane. Every event, from Katrina to icebergs forming, becomes an issue of the world coming to an end. And that has nothing to do with scientific consensus. In each instance you are picking up phenomena that we really don’t understand. It has to be understood — meteorology, climate sciences are what are called immature sciences. We don’t understand most of what we see. We are learning about it. It is at the early stages, and in any science at the early stage, you fumble and make mistakes. You have hypotheses. It is often that a complicated field like this will take generations to get our understanding better. In many ways, global warming set it back a generation by substituting for a deepening understanding, a vastly more simplistic understanding that climate change is due to CO2. Climate changes without anything at all. We’ve always lived in a world where things are always changing. And then when you promote the natural dynamic behavior of the world as a source of panic, that is not entirely fair, it is not proper, but it is tempting and people have been doing it for a long time.
Kokai: If people are relying on newspapers, magazines and TV for their information on this topic, how accurate is the picture they get?
Lindzen: Totally inaccurate. But I mean, that’s true for anyone who deals with the media. You always know that you have to check a little deeper to find out what they’re talking about. I’m not sure you can blame that on anyone. You know, there is the old newspaper — if it doesn’t bleed it doesn’t lead — so naturally the media pick up the most dramatic pictures, and the reporters are not in a position to give meaning to it. And most of them, I would suggest, don’t have a strong experience base, and so they are not aware that things change all the time. Somebody did a nice job in The New York Times reporting of climate over the next 100-odd years, that there have been at least four periods when they were claiming the earth is cooling or warming, and it is doing so disastrously, beginning in the 19th century. And of course, in the ‘70s, there was the global cooling issue. I think what happened is the warming issue came at a time when the environmental movement had grown immensely. And when pollution — air quality, water quality — were improving, and then had to have an issue to carry it forward. One of the things that you know about organizations is, whatever their purpose, eventually their purpose is to stay in business.
Kokai: So what role has Al Gore played with his movie An Inconvenient Truth?
Lindzen: Of course it is designed to panic people and that’s an obvious chain that goes on. You get people panicked, they then scream, “We must do something!” And then the politicians get stampeded into doing something. Unfortunately, one of the things they do, and I do mean unfortunately, is pump more money into the science, which means the science develops a more vested interest in keeping this issue going rather than solving the problem. Because the reward for solving the problem is the funding cut.
Kokai: North Carolina now has formed its legislative commission on global climate change. Do you think this group can have any positive benefits on this situation?
Lindzen: No, I don’t think so, to be honest. The reason is, it is sometimes argued even if the science is wrong we’re suggesting policies that are worth doing. The trouble with that is, “If it were worth doing, why aren’t you doing it?” And if you are depending on global warming hype to do it, what are you trying to sneak past the public? But the thing that should be always understood with these state solutions — this is a global issue. Even if every country in the world did what North Carolina is planning to do, we’re going to have no impact on climate. So you would have pure cost, no benefit. And as far as I’m concerned, that is symbolism. The idea is that somebody has said there is a problem, and you are going to do something. You’ll do something painful because that is the nature of sacrifice since time in memoriam. But given it is purely symbolic, as I said at the Science Café, you could just as well promote having an alter in the downtown area and sacrificing cows and deal with PETA, but it has about as much impact on climate.
Kokai: Given what you’ve just said, will this group do more harm than good?
Lindzen: Sure. They are proposing to do something that they can’t do. It is going to cost something. That something could have been used for something better.
Kokai: What questions should people ask about this commission and its work?
Lindzen: There is the problem of laymen understanding science. Ideally, you’d like people to dig into the issue a little bit more on their own, and that is not always easy. There is something a little bit quixotic about it, but I suppose they could ask the legislators how much warming has there been, how much has their model said there should have been? Have the models shown any evidence of inaccuracy or exaggeration? And finally, the proposed measures — what impact will they have on global mean temperature — which is the issue. And you know, the legislators that are honest will have to say 1/1000th of a degree. And people will say, “Why are we supposed to do anything about that? We can’t sense it.”