MIT’s Inconvenient Scientist
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 4:28 pm by Neal(Hat tip: powerline)
It is heresy for a scientist to question politician Al Gore’s inquisition known as “Global Warming”, yet many scientists refuse to be silenced despite the name-calling and lawsuits (yes, lawsuits). These facts make today’s Boston Globe article, “MIT’s inconvenient scientist”, a very important read for those rare individuals and scientists who still understand that science is not consensus, and politicians are not scientists.
Speech codes are rare in the industrialized, Western democracies. In Germany and Austria, for instance, it is forbidden to proselytize Nazi ideology or trivialize the Holocaust. Given those countries’ recent histories, that is a restraint on free expression we can live with.
More curious are our own taboos on the subject of global warming. I sat in a roomful of journalists 10 years ago while Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider lectured us on a big problem in our profession: soliciting opposing points of view. In the debate over climate change, Schneider said, there simply was no legitimate opposing view to the scientific consensus that man – made carbon emissions drive global warming. To suggest or report otherwise, he said, was irresponsible.
Indeed. I attended a week’s worth of lectures on global warming at the Chautauqua Institution last month. Al Gore delivered the kickoff lecture, and, 10 years later, he reiterated Schneider’s directive. There is no science on the other side, Gore inveighed, more than once. Again, the same message: If you hear tales of doubt, ignore them. They are simply untrue.
I ask you: Are these convincing arguments? And directed at journalists, who are natural questioners and skeptics, of all people? What happens when you are told not to eat the apple, not to read that book, not to date that girl? Your interest is piqued, of course. What am I not supposed to know?
Here’s the kind of information the “scientific consensus” types don’t want you to read. MIT’s Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen recently complained about the “shrill alarmism” of Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” Lindzen acknowledges that global warming is real, and he acknowledges that increased carbon emissions might be causing the warming — but they also might not.
“We do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change” is one of Lindzen’s many heresies, along with such zingers as “the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940,” “the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average,” and “Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don’t know why.”
When Lindzen published similar views in The Wall Street Journal this spring, environmentalist Laurie David, the wife of comedian Larry David, immediately branded him a “shill.” She resurrected a shopworn slur first directed against Lindzen by former Globe writer Ross Gelbspan, who called Lindzen a “hood ornament” for the fossil fuels industry in a 1995 article in Harper’s Magazine.
There’s more including details on a California lawsuit against certain scientists who dare oppose the religion of “Global Warming”. Give it a read.
A well-documented, thorough treatise on the innumerable fallacies of “Global Warming” can be found in Michael Crighton’s speech, “Aliens Cause Global Warming.”