Posted on April 9th, 2007 by Gavin M.
Timmy the Global Warming Tugboat discovers Richard Lindzen, the lonely MIT professor who disputes anthropogenic global warming:
The Global Warming Non-Crisis
By Mark Noonan at 12:11 AM
First, lets get the authors credentials up:
Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability. His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of…
It goes on like that for several hundred words. Executive summary: Lindzen is a for-reals scientist.
According to the article I’m quoting, Lindzen has never received any funding from any energy company. That said:
Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we’ve seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth’s climate history, it’s apparent that there’s no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman’s forecast for next week.
Huh. Something seems wrong here. If only there were some way to look things up on the Internet.
[Zeerp!] Hello, dum-dums.
Oh hi, Great Gazoogle. Say, what’s this?
The Heat Is On:
The warming of the world’s climate sparks a blaze of denial
by Ross Gelbspan.
HARPER’S MAGAZINE December, 1995
[…]
The people who run the world’s oil and coal companies know that the march of science, and of political action, may be slowed by disinformation. In the last year and a half, one of the leading oil industry public relations outlets, the Global Climate Coalition, has spent more than a million dollars to downplay the threat of climate change. It expects to spend another $850,000 on the issue next year. Similarly, the National Coal Association spent more than $700,000 on the global climate issue in 1992 and 1993. In 1993 alone, the American Petroleum Institute, just one of fifty-four industry members of the GCC, paid $1.8 million to the public relations firm of Burson-Marsteller partly in an effort to defeat a proposed tax on fossil fuels. For perspective, this is only slightly less than the combined yearly expenditures on global warming of the five major environmental groups that focus on climate issues—about $2.1 million, according to officials of the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the World Wildlife Fund.
For the most part the industry has relied on a small band of skeptics—Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Dr. Pat Michaels, Dr. Robert Balling, Dr. Sherwood Idso, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, among others—who have proven extraordinarily adept at draining the issue of all sense of crisis.
[…]
Lindzen, for his part, charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled “Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,” was underwritten by OPEC.
Was Noonan played for a fool again? We’re running out of ways to say so! According to the article he quotes, Lindzen’s ‘research’ has always been funded by the U.S. Government — as opposed to, oh, well, his ‘consulting services,’ for instance — and he ‘receives’ no funding from any energy companies. As of, like, right at this exact moment. Because these days, his wingnut welfare comes pre-laundered through ‘pro-business’ foundations such as the Cato Institute. Oh, that bawdy hand of the dial!
