American Thought Leaders - Richard Lindzen: Key Points Climate Alarmists Get Wrong

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2“The minute you hear 'the science is settled,' you know something is wrong. Science is never settled,” says Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences at MIT.“Climate is one of the earliest examples of cancel culture … I don't think the public is quite aware of the pressures that were brought to bear to get rid of opposition to this,” Mr. Lindzen says.In this episode, he breaks down key mistaken assumptions he sees fueling the climate extremism we see today, and explains why many climate policies, from the push to reduce cattle to bans on synthetic fertilizers, have been counterproductive and harmful.“And you see these policies have had no impact on CO2. So they have done nothing to prevent this alleged existential threat, except make people poorer, make society less stable, less resilient. And you can only account for that with either ignorance or sadism,” Mr. Lindzen says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The minute you hear the science is settled, you know something is wrong. Today I sit down with Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and professor emeritus of meteorology at MIT. I mean, CO2, they forget, is essential. We're treating it as a poison. If you could get rid of 60% of the CO2, or roughly, we'd all be dead. What are the so-called climate experts getting wrong? What has been the impact of our climate policies?

You have cattle raisers in Ireland all going under. Starvation in Sri Lanka. And you see, these policies have had no impact on CO2. They have done nothing to prevent this alleged existential threat except make people poorer, make society less stable, less resilient. And you can only account for that with either ignorance or sadism. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the

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Call 855-862-3377, that's 855-862-3377, or text AMERICAN to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377, or text AM or text American to 65532. Professor Richard Linsen, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Well, it's my pleasure as well. Well, let's start with the basic question. You know, we always hear that the science around climate change is settled. Is it settled indeed? Well, of course not. I mean, the minute you hear the science is settled, you know something is wrong.

Science is never settled. And when you claim it's settled, you want to shut off all disagreement because you don't have much to present. You know, you said something very interesting as we were speaking earlier, preparing for this interview. You said that science is one of the few words you know that when you add the word the in front of it, it means the exact opposite. Sure. I mean, science is a mode of inquiry. And the science is science's authority. And of course political figures, people not in science, have often noticed that science has a certain

authority with the public and they want to co-opt it. So they bring in the term the science which is how they view science But that isn't what science is. Science is always open to question. Science depends on questions, depends on being wrong. And, you know, when you say science cannot be wrong, you've choked off science. You know, that's absolutely fascinating. I want to explore this exact kind of realm because I think it might actually be that some of the people that are citing the science really have no idea how science is supposed to work in the first place. But that didn't even occur to me until

somewhat recently that it might be like that. But I want to actually talk about the actual science around climate change and what the current state of that science, as you understand it, is. You're asking for a lot more questions. Now, climate is a complex subject. We treat it in the press as though it's one number, and that's climate. But until this issue, what climate science was,

was primarily to understand the Earth's climate at present. And the reason that's complicated is, you know, something represented by something called the Kerpen classification. We have dozens of climate regimes on the Earth right now, not one. And they all behave somewhat differently. And the notion that there is one number, funny number, temperature of the earth, that they all work in lockstep with is absurd. But that number itself, people don't understand what it is. I mean, you know, I could ask you, what is the temperature of the earth? How do you take it?

Well, my answer is, I would guess that people are taking temperatures in all sorts of different places around the world and pulling an average out of that. That would be my guess. Yeah. So you average Mount Everest and the Dead Sea. What do you get? No, they don't do that. They realize that doesn't work. And so the first thing you get is that they take what's called the temperature anomaly. What they do is at each station, they take a 30 year mean, roughly 1950 to 1980, let's say,

and they then look at the deviation from that mean and they average the deviations at each station. So you're getting the average temperature change and that's what you see in this graph. And you see this graph is it's going up since 1800, certainly 1880, going up by one in a fraction degree, which isn't a heck of a lot. But there's something wrong with that diagram. And what's wrong with that diagram is you don't see the data points. You should always see the data points. Now if you plot that and show the data points, this little thing going up a degree or so is surrounded by dense clouds of data

that are ranging from minus 10 to 10, 20 degrees. And so the mean anomaly on that looks like a horizontal line. Your first estimate is it's constant. Well, you know, a couple of things to be said about that. You take away the data points and then you expand the scale so that one degree or two degrees occupies your whole graph. Now it looks big. People don't look at the numbers. They don't know the data.

The data itself is saying that at any given point as many stations almost are cooling as warming. So it's saying it's not telling you about any place which is consistent with the fact that we have many climates. At any rate, you know, you then smooth it because you don't want to show the wiggles each year. But if you don't have the wiggles, you don't know what's called the variance, which is about 0.4 degrees, which means any time the media bloviates about 0.1 degree increase, they're talking about an insignificant increase. They're talking about an insignificant increase. And so, you know, the whole issue

at that level depends on a public that is utterly innumerate and cannot read a graph. And unfortunately, when it comes to most politicians, I think that's correct. I mean, I've occasionally watched a Senate hearing, and somebody comes up, often Al Gore was doing this when he was in the Senate, he shows a graph. And I thought, well, maybe he's trying to point something out because the graph didn't look right. And no, he wasn't doing that at all. He was showing his colleagues, he had a graph. Don't screw around withels. That coupled with the media repeating this. Most people just can't deal with that. They assume this can't happen unless there's something there and there isn't. So there's a general understanding that there has been a temperature increase and there's a general understanding that humans have been involved to some extent.

So how much do we actually know around that? It is true there is a greenhouse effect. It is primarily due to water vapor and clouds. CO2, methane, nitrous oxide are minor, minor constituents. Roughly speaking, if all other things kept constant and you doubled CO2, you would get a little under one degree of warming. Now, underlying that statement is some other material in a sense. For instance, you said all things kept equal. Well, there is something called Le Chatelier's Principle, which says in long-lasting natural systems,

they will resist change, which is to say feedbacks would be negative. Now in most models today, water vapor and clouds are positive feedbacks. There's the underlying assumption that nature will take whatever we do and make it worse. Just a kind of odd assumption. There's no basis for it, but it does give the models more than a little under a degree. It may even bring it to as high as three degrees. Now the next point there would be even three degrees isn't that much. We're dealing with changes for a doubling of CO2 on the order of, you know, between breakfast and lunch. And the thought that people can't handle that is a little bit strange. Where does it come from that that is an existential

threat? Interestingly, it comes from no place except the propaganda. Even the UN's IPCC scientific report doesn't speak about an existential threat. They speak about a reduction of GDP of 3% by 2100, assuming the GDP has increased several times by then. That doesn't sound existential to most people, so that's a little bit weird. But the other thing they point to is if we went to major changes in the past, you know, the last glacial maximum when you had two kilometers of ice over Illinois, or 50 million years ago when you had a warm period with alligator-like critters in Svalbard, north of Norway, the mean temperature change was only five degrees. So they said, you know, three degrees, this could be something serious.

The trouble is, the change in the warming of the last 150 years or so, there's no resemblance to the changes during the major change. What happened during the major changes was the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole. In the case of the last glacial maximum, increased by 20 degrees centigrade. And during the warm period, it decreased by 20 degrees centigrade. And during the warm period, it decreased by 20 degrees. Today it's about 40, it was 20 during the warm, and it was about 60 during the glacial period.

And that, of course, gave a large change in the mean. During those periods, the tropics remained almost constant. On the other hand, the greenhouse change and the observed change since 1880, 1800, doesn't matter, almost all occurred in the tropics and there was no change in the tropics to pole, which is exactly different. Now, why is that important? The tropics to pole temperature difference depends on the dynamics of the heat transport by motion. The equator depends to some extent on the greenhouse effect.

So all we're seeing is something, and it could be due to CO2, about a degree, but it is not changing the tropics to pole. And so three degrees is not something amplified at the pole, it's three degrees or one degree or a half degree every place. And that the thought that that's existential requires massive changes and so on is you know unreasonable, it's absurd. CO2 is of course in a way the dream of a regulator. I mean if you control CO2, you control breathing. If you control breathing, you control everything. So this always is one temptation. The other temptation is the energy sector. No matter how much you clean fossil fuels, they will always produce water vapor and CO2. And so you have the whole energy sector. It's one of the few sectors that is in the many trillions of dollars.

And there are huge opportunities there, even though it makes no sense. I mean, CO2, they forget, is essential. We're treating it as a poison. Most people you say believe the narrative. They also believe CO2 is dangerous. You know for instance I think the concentration of CO2 in your mouth is about 40,000 parts per million as opposed to 400 outside. 5,000 is permitted on space station. It's hardly a poison, but worse than that, it's essential. If you could get rid of 60% of the CO2, or roughly, we'd all be dead. So this is a very strange pollutant. It's essential for

plant life. It's the basis for photosynthesis. And yet, because it is the inevitable product of fossil fuel burning in the energy sector, it's being attacked. Well, something that's very interesting that you mentioned moments ago was that the IPCC projections, they're saying that this increase in temperature will reduce the global GDP. However, it just strikes me that the types of policies that are being advocated all involve a reduction in the energy sector, which of course would mean probably a much a reduction in the energy sector, which of course would mean probably a much greater reduction in GDP, wouldn't they?

I mean, that's just what occurs to me. Oh, you're making an important point. The projections do not include the policies. In other words, they're just looking, if we continue, quote, business as usual, then they get that. Now you're introducing the element that we're having a great deal of policy change. We've already devoted trillions of dollars to windmills and solar panels and God knows what else. It's interesting in that respect, of course, those are opportunities.

But if you look at the impact of these, they have increased the cost of energy. They have increased poverty rates. In. They have increased poverty rates. In Europe, this is especially noticeable. They're attacking agriculture for methane. They're using logic which makes no sense. I mean, for instance, with methane, CO2 already does very little. Methane does vastly less. But each molecule of methane, because you have so little of it, has more impact.

So the regulators say we must control methane, even though the amount of methane is not enough to do anything. Okay, what's the impact of that? Well, cattle. You get rid of agriculture, you know, cattle. That makes no sense. You have ranchers, you have cattle raisers in Ireland, all going under. Now, already we're seeing the malice of this.

Nitrogen is even less, but that's used to get rid of fertilizer, which has led to starvation in Sri Lanka. is even less. But that's used to get rid of fertilizer, which has led to starvation in Sri Lanka. So already we're seeing massive harm from the policies. Now, you could only impose this harm legitimately if it were an existential threat. But then you look at CO2 versus time and you see

these policies have had no impact on CO2. So they have done nothing to prevent this alleged existential threat except make people poorer, make society less stable, less resilient. And you can only account for that with either ignorance or sadism. And yet people are told, as often has happened in the past, that sadism is virtuous, and they want to be virtuous, and they don't get told that it's sadistic. Well, I think there's a third option. And the third option is that you have a very set idea about how the world is going to look in the future.

You just don't care what it takes to get there. Well, what is the view that you're speaking about? Well, you know, for example, essentially human beings are viewed as a kind of a plague on the earth and just are the effects of human beings on the earth are negative. So we need to reduce that impact at any cost. And that's actually the vision and sort of whatever tools are needed to get there would be fine. I'm not saying that that's exactly what's happening. I'm saying that that's a vision that I've heard about that doesn't assume a kind of, you know, sadism or some other kind of emotion. It's a view. It is the view of someone who was

Obama's science advisor, John Holdren. And that was a prominent view in the 1970s that we were suffering from overpopulation. I've often wondered about that. I mean, it's an interesting view. Malthus had it, of course. It's always proven wrong. I mean, I remember at the time, you know, of independence, India's population was something on the order of two, three hundred thousand. It's now about 1.2 billion.

When it was two, three hundred thousand, India suffered from famine. Now that it is one point something billion, they're a food exporter. I mean, mankind has a certain ingenuity and ability. And so far, we're managing very well. We're now facing a new danger, according to some economists, that the population looks like it's going to stop going up. And there are implications for a decreasing population. I mean, look at the problem with Social Security and such things. But more than that, it would be a problem if demand starts decreasing because there are fewer people. What do you do about interest rates and investment and so on?

So we have a lot of thinking to do about population decrease. Worrying about increase at this stage is probably a mute point. But you're right, there are people who have that view. The view is malicious. It's insane. It's contrary to data. It makes no sense. So it is not a benign view and I don't think it is at present largely considered as virtuous. So I think there have to be other motives. I mean certainly control is one, power is another. And I have this feeling, and that's personally a feeling, I mean, I don't know this, but when I grew up in the 40s and 50s, something marvelous was going on

in the U.S., and actually in much of Europe. And that was ordinary working people were able to buy homes and cars and have dignity. And that, you know, when I moved to Boston from Chicago, we bought our house from a janitor. And across the street was a carpenter. And today these people cannot afford to live in that neighborhood. And so there seemed to have been a general resentment of ordinary people living well. And certainly our climate policy and other policies, deindustrialization, are killing that. I want to talk a little bit about your background. You mentioned moving from Boston to Chicago.

Tell me a little bit about your career trajectory, what it was that you have been studying and how this intersects with these questions we're discussing. I grew up in New York, went to Bronx Science, continued in college. I got a degree from Harvard in applied math and then a master's and doctorate at Harvard, so stayed there for a while. I did postdoctoral work at the University of Washington because Harvard didn't provide much in the way of observational work, and Washington did. Then went to Norway for a year, and there was a prominent meteorologist there, Arndt Eliasson, who I enjoyed working with. Then I went to work at a national lab,

National Center for Atmospheric Research. My area was atmospheric dynamics, but also my thesis was the interaction of the motion with chemistry and radiation. And I had, you know, reasonably productive years. You know, we had solved a number of basic problems. One concerned the motion over the equator at about in the stratosphere. It's very peculiar. It goes from east to west for about

a year and then turns around, goes the other way for a year, average period 26 months. And I think we explained how that worked. And there's an old problem in tides that we solved. So I had a bit of a reputation. And I got a tenure offer from the University of Chicago. And so we were there. And I liked Chicago. But my wife was concerned with the safety issues there already. And I got an offer of a chair at Harvard

after a few years. So I accepted that. We moved to Boston and I spent about 12 years as a professor at Harvard. I was the burden chair of atmospheric science. And a close friend and colleague at MIT was a man called Jule Charney. And Jule was considered the preeminent dynamic meteorologist of the post-war period. He died and I had in the meantime been elected to the National Academy in 77, but when he died his chair was offered to me and I accepted it and moved MIT and the usual, I mean, lots of students and something on the order of 250 publications and so on. That also is a bit strange in a way. I mean, Jules Charney, the man I mentioned, his lifetime number of publications was about

60. We had on the faculty Ed Lorenz who is very prominent, father of chaos theory some would say. And again relatively few publications. In my career people started publishing much more and I think this was something because you know grants became more important, harder to get and journals were proliferating and so on. I'm still a little bit concerned about that in science. I mean, when I started, if you published one or two papers a year, that was considered good. And the papers were substantial. What I've noticed now is, you know, the old papers would be broken into 10 papers and published in parts.

Really didn't add to the progress. No, that's very interesting. But you also developed something, you know, directly related to this question of global warming, which is iris theory. Right? Yeah, no, there are a number of things I've done. Now, one, you know, as I mentioned to you, there are two domains, the equator to pole, tropics to pole temperature difference, which depends on hydrodynamics

and the tropical temperature, which depends on greenhouse processes. And I mentioned to you that the models assume feedbacks are positive. They all make things worse. When I was consulting at NASA, which I was at the time with two colleagues, we tried to look at what was happening to the water vapor and clouds. And we noticed that a very important greenhouse substance were the upper level thin clouds, cirrus,

often detrained from cumulonimbus towers. You have these big convective towers and at the end they detrain water vapor and it gives rise to thin clouds. That these thin clouds were extremely important greenhouse substances and in particular they responded to temperature. So, when it got warmer, they contracted. When it got colder, they expanded. And so, they were acting against the greenhouse warming.

And they're acting as negative feedbacks. And, you know, it's interesting. It's typical of this field I should mention. I published this paper with the two co-authors in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. I had 10 years previous to that published a paper presenting some questions about global warming and that was published. presenting some questions about global warming. And that was published.

In both cases, 10 years apart, although it got published and reviewed, the editor was immediately fired for letting them through. The editor of the whole journal? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, the American Mediological Society had gone along with this saying,

yes, we're in favor of the narrative and worked hard. Eventually it became almost totally impossible to publish. You still could publish a little, get it through. But editors were required to use referees, at least include referees, who were gatekeepers, who would be guaranteed to reject.

Or eventually what they did was say, accept with major revisions to keep the author busy for a year and then reject. Climate is one of the earliest examples of cancel culture. I mean, when the issue opened up in the early 90s, 88, most media forecasters thought it was silly. And the American Meteorological Society actually certifies weathermen, not researchers, but weathermen. And they began saying that anyone who questioned warming, they wouldn't certify and they had to go for re-education.

And so today, you know, you don't hear anyone on the media who will question this. I mean, I don't think the public is quite aware of the pressures that were brought to bear to get rid of opposition to this. I mean, I prepared a list of prominent people in my field who opposed this in the early 90s and even to the present, and they were directors of major labs, head of weather bureaus, head of the World Meteorological Organization. These are really prominent people buried. And a part of the burial was, of course, in the early 90s, especially under Clinton Gore, but also somewhat under Bush, the funding for climate in total went up by about a factor of 15. And you literally created a new community that knew that that community existed only because of the narrative. What you're describing kind of parallels other scenarios, more recent scenarios, notably around COVID. I don't know if you've

made that observation. Yeah, no, people have observed it. I mean, it's amazing with COVID because in a way, medical science is much bigger than climate science. And I was very impressed. I mean, you had the Great Barrington Declaration, and you had, you know, 30,000 people agreed to it, contradicting the narrative on COVID. They were shut down. But, yeah, we were familiar with that. That's been going on for a while in my field. Well, so what strikes me here is that,

I guess it was, I don't know if it's the first example, but it was a very prominent and large-scale example. I mean, I think you're arguing of making kind of a bulletproof narrative that you're saying is based on entirely false pretenses. Yeah. You know, not entirely. There is a greenhouse effect. It depended on people not thinking that a degree was small.

I mean, that's amazing to me. They see a graph, it goes up one degree, they don't look at the scale, and they're told this is huge, and they say it's huge. You have politicians saying, if it goes up another half degree, we're all going to boil.

And you have people believing that. You know, never questioning, would a half degree bring anything to a boil? And if it can, can I patent it? Well, so you actually, I remember you have a paper and tablet a couple of years back, you know, looking at the way that the Chinese Communist Party deals with climate, and how the West deals with China in this respect exposes a certain kind of obvious cynicism around this issue. And this is something that I've been thinking about, just generally, I hadn't realized that someone had kind of codified it so succinctly as you did

in this tablet piece. I want to explore that a little bit. Okay. No, that was a very brief piece and it addressed something that I think we mentioned briefly that no matter what we were doing in the EU or the Anglosphere, it obviously was having no impact on the increase of CO2. One of the obvious reasons for this of course is that China and India and every place other than the EU and the Anglosphere are building coal-fired plants and using fossil fuels and ignoring the whole issue. And they are now major emitters. There are people who are arguing there are natural reasons for this too. I'm no expert in that, but the anthropogenic sources are still there. We're having no impact. It's pretty clear today that if you buried the EU and the Anglosphere, sealed it closed, we're all dead, we're all gone, we have no activity, we have no impact. CO2 would continue to increase. And so the question is, what's this all about?

And I had noticed at the time that a Chinese group was actually organizing meetings of American graduate students and offering prizes for the most alarming contributions. So I think there was an obvious cynicism in the process. But clearly China and India and Southeast Asia are benefiting immensely. And at the same time, places like Africa are suffering and much of South Asia is suffering from these policies. From having policies policies that uh you know prevent them from developing reliable energy sources being forced on them by these large institutions people who don't have access to modern electricity and so on they're being told they're they should be frozen in that state all africa over much of Africa, people are depending on burning dung

and so on for fuel. It's much more polluting. And, you know, I was just shocked when the World Bank, you know, refused financing for a hospital in the Congo unless it used renewable energy. And I was thinking, who of these idiots would want to be operated on in a hospital running on solar or wind? I mean, it's hard to describe, I mean, what's going on. And the West is beginning to feel it in the high prices and the inflation. And hopefully, and I think in England people are waking up when they're told, you know, you have to get rid of your heating plant and put in a heat pump and one that's run on the renewables and so on. And then we have the electric car, you know, they're the typical political thing. I mean, electrical cars only make sense vis-a-vis pollution. Well, they do make

sense for urban pollution. But as a friend of mine who bought a Tesla, put his bumper sticker on, the bumper sticker said, my car runs on coal. And of course, you know, only people who think electricity comes from the tap can imagine that somehow an electric car needing to charge a battery gets it from the tap as opposed to a power plant. fossil fuel. And moreover, it'll be fossil fuel that have been converted twice to reach mechanical energy. So it'll be less efficient in terms of emissions and other things than a gas-powered car. You know, I can't help but think just a couple of days ago, we had a piece about I think the largest Tesla fast charging station out there has a kind of concealed diesel generator right beside it running it, if I recall. Yeah, I mean, of course, something has to generate the electricity. No, I mean, as I've pointed out, I mean, I'm sure history will regard this as one of the

silliest periods in human history where, you know, you have a world in which industrialization and scientific developments were so important fall apart on ignorance and stupidity and cupidity? I shouldn't be laughing this is terrible. You know sometimes you have no choice well let me go back to what i was thinking about earlier right we believe a lot of things that are untrue today um but we're told that they're scientifically proven and i guess it goes back to the science versus science i suppose yeah and. And we have to unravel this somehow. Yeah, that's, I'm sorry, I put above my pay grade. No, I mean, I have neighbors here in Newton.

I mean, they're educated people. They're not stupid. And they have lawn posters, lawn signs, saying, we believe in science. Science isn't a belief structure, it isn't a cult, it isn't a religion, but they have that sign and they're totally unaware of how stupid that sign is. I have one fairly eccentric view which is I kind of object to science education in elementary school. And the reason is it is usually facts about science. And it starts kids off with the wrong idea of what science is. You know, you have to be ready for science. Science is, you know, with data, you check things.

The whole notion that a theory could have a hundred correct predictions and if it has one incorrect one, there's something wrong with the theory. It goes against a lot of human thinking and it required a certain discipline. And so to treat it as something simple and obvious and so on may be misleading. One of the International Panel on Climate Change, the UN's outfit, they always have these lengthy reports, thousands of pages. And then they will have summaries for policymakers, and they will then have also general summaries, and then they'll have iconic statements that summarize the 3,000 pages or so in one sentence.

And, of course, only the science reports, or the report, Working Group 1, is science. Everything else is written by government officials and so on. So it's dicey. But then there comes the iconic statement. And the iconic statement at that time was that they're now almost certain that most of the climate change, the warming, since 1960 was due to man.

Okay? Now most, if it were even all of it, you know, you're talking about a fraction of a degree. And if you looked at simple models of climate, this is most consistent with no problem at all. On the other hand, when Senators McCain and Lieberman heard this, what was their response? Their response was, this is the smoking gun and we must do something. Didn't have any such implication. But, you know, as long as it was coupled with funding, certainly the UN and even the science community wasn't going to complain. And so you have this constant triangle of misinterpretation

where, you know, scientists make an innocent statement, politicians misrepresent it as catastrophic, and they provide more funding for the science or for the field, I mean, climate measures. And so the first group doesn't complain. Well, none of this is, not to be glib, but none of this is academic. And We're reorganizing our entire society around carbon credits. In Africa, it's really not academic in that I expect that it it's increasing mortality significantly these kinds of policies. I mean people are dying because of them. Oh yeah. No in fact I'm going to have an interview with the Kenyan TV station in

a couple of days and they're being besieged by the propaganda that this is an existential threat and they must forego development. Horrifying. You know, as I told you with the hospital in the Congo, the World Bank insisted that they run on renewables. And then, of course, you have the rare earths needed for the batteries and so on. These are often mined by children and under extraordinarily unhealthy conditions. No, I mean, I think a few leaders in Africa are recognizing this may be worse than colonialism. A lot of people that are making policy

really don't even understand these basics of how science works or how it's supposed to work. Perhaps, you know, lending some credibility to your eccentric idea about education around science here. But I mean, that obviously is highly problematic because increasingly the science is being cited as the reason for everything, as the bulletproof reason for everything. Well, you had, you know, however you feel about Fauci, when he said, I am the science, you know, he should have been fired on the spot. 50 years ago, 60 years ago. He was a British physicist who was also a science advisor to Churchill during the war, involved with radar and so on. But he was also an author

and he began pushing a theme called two cultures. And he realized that, you know, well-educated people in the humanities were almost totally ignorant of science. And he used the example, I mean, you know, if you ask, if he asked one of his colleagues outside of science, what was the second law of thermodynamics? And the answer was a blank face. And that was equivalent to saying, I've never read Shakespeare. And then he spoke about, can you define acceleration? Can you find this, that? And they also failed that.

And that was equivalent to saying, they didn't know how to read. And so, you know, he was appalled at the degree of isolation from science that most educated people have. And that's dangerous. I don't know how you solve it. But it opens up society to this kind of fraudulence. Well and manipulation. Yes, of course. I mean science is successful. Science has quote given us the smartphone. I mean you should trust it.

But, of course, you should first ascertain whether the person asking you to trust it knew what he was talking about. I mean, you know, again, you never, I never find anyone who checks anything. You know, for instance, when you're told this is an existential threat and all scientists agree, you can check it. You can look at the IPCC report. It's online. And see, it doesn't say that. But people don't do that.

And that's a problem. And in my view, it's an insoluble problem. At some level, one requires integrity, and that's been in short supply. Well, and there's also been this rise of a technocratic, bureaucratic class with the assumption that very smart people, I say that with a little TM trademark, should be able to interpret those issues for the rest of society, because the rest of society, how can you know if you're not an expert, right? And that these people should actually be doing effectively the governance. And of course, if you take COVID as a particular example, we can see the abject failure of that model.

So we need to kind of retool here to be looking at it as at least trying to get at the truth. No, that's a big problem. I mean, this was the basis for the whole creation of the civil service in the US. That we needed objective experts who could provide guidance. And it's not a plausible notion, but we have seen time and again how it can be abused. I mean, you know, I wrote a piece some years ago doing the comparison of climate change hysteria

with the eugenics movement. And there are close analogies to that as well. You know, you're bringing up something that's very difficult. I mean, how do you change something where, you know, science has been valuable, it has revolutionized the world, people do trust it, but the funding of science is a monopoly of the government, and the government occasionally feels motivated to use the authority of science. So in the case of eugenics, I mean, they had a lot of characteristics that

were very informative. One of them was, you know, the issue for people who don't know it, eugenics was, you know, can you literally control breeding of people to produce superior or better types. It was started in the 1880s by the founders of modern statistics. Never caught on that it was mathematical. But then when they rediscovered Mendelian genetics, and someone could say that feeblemindedness was a single recessive gene. And then they went to town, and that was crucial. I mean, you know, people want to understand. And so even if you're given something that's wrong but simple, there's a relief for the non-scientist that he now understands. A similar thing was when Al Gore said, you know,

greenhouse gases are like a blanket and they cause warming. He said, ah, now I understand. This is simple enough for me. And John Kerry carried it one step further. I mean, he gave a talk, I think, in Indonesia when he acknowledged that chemistry and physics, we all know, are very difficult. But climate science is so simple, any child can understand it. So, you know, you have to appeal to people's insecurity about science and make them feel they understand it. The single gene was one, the blanket is another. And then of course, America had an immigration issue at that time. And there were statistics based on IQ tests given by the army in English that immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were feeble-minded. And so we needed restrictions

to prevent an epidemic of feeble-mindedness in the U.S. As ridiculous as that sounds, some of the best, you know, Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger, Vincent Peale, the famous preacher, George Bernard Shaw, all endorsed this. So we've been through this kind of thing before. What Congress did in promoting the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 and basing it on, quote, the science, was to pick its own scientist, a man called Laughlin,

who endorsed this and ignore all the scientists who were rather quietly objecting. You know, the whole concept of eugenics, right? The underlying assumption is that you have a right to control this, right? That it's the right thing to do to try to engineer humanity. That's a fair point. Yeah. I mean, on the other hand, you had Supreme Court judges supporting it, saying two generations of idiots were enough.

I want to jump to something. I just remembered something again from that wonderful little piece on China and climate change that you wrote a couple of years back. You talk about how the correct policy needs to be around basically creating resilience in society against, I suppose, disasters and problems. That's the correct approach. Well, yeah, this is the issue of adaptation and so on. I mean, with COVID, a lot of people complained, I think legitimately, at the lack of emphasis in treatment as just the vaccine or the ventilator. If you were rational and honest about the policy, and if you'd see that your policies are having no impact on what you're claiming is the cause of climate disruption.

And of course the the decent policy, decent moral policy, would be to prepare your society in such a manner that it was most resilient against whatever changes you think were coming. And we know that's important. I mean, you know, when a hurricane or an earthquake hits Haiti, you have many thousands dead. It's a poor country. It doesn't have resilience. The same earthquake hits Los Angeles and you have less than a handful of deaths because we're a richer society. We can build structures that are earthquake resistant and so on. We know this. We know that wealth helps resilience. Poverty hurts it.

So you wouldn't face a situation where you're saying climate change is due to CO2, if you believe that, and that it's existential, that you would work to reduce the resilience of your society. And that's what we're doing. And I think when people realize that, I mean, we've got a great many people, as you point out, who have been told that, you know, putting solar panels on their roof is a sign of virtue. And at least I think for the educated middle class, there seems to be a desperation to

be perceived as virtuous. I'm not sure what underlies that. Maybe it's guilt about being prosperous, but it's certainly obvious in any wealthy suburb. So, you know, what do you do? You know, maybe we're not really being taught at the core about how important it is to be virtuous and how to be virtuous. And so it's being kind of taught to us from a place where it has no business being taught. No, I don't know. That's a very serious question. There is an organization starting in the UK but it's global the Alliance for responsible citizenship which is really what you're talking about and it's obvious we don't

have a good idea of that because one part of virtue is to accept the responsibility to check what you're being virtuous about. And instead, we clasp at anything somebody tells us is virtuous. Grabbing, you know, something to proclaim your virtue, putting up a poster that you believe in science or something like that, is pretty simple. Checking is harder, but it's not that hard. I mean, and I think virtue should ultimately involve some effort.

It does. Maybe that's what it is. Maybe it's just we've kind of in the West, we've reached this point where everything just has to be incredibly convenient. And if it's too difficult, well, we'll pass on that. I don't know. I mean, these are all these questions that are coming up. It's astonishing that in almost every discipline that I'm exploring, it's these same kinds of questions that keep coming up, frankly. Oh, yeah. No, these are ubiquitous questions. I mean, we're talking about something that specifically involves science, but there are other issues. I mean, but you know, COVID, climate, eugenics, or, you know, or the Soviet

Union, Lysenkoism, were all issues where a government had a view about what science, they wanted science to say, and successfully imposed it on the public. I mean, you know, how should I put it? I mean, my family, my parents fled Europe. Most of the family was killed during the war, the Holocaust. Holocaust, but Hitler managed to convince a large part of his nation that it was virtuous to follow him.

I mean, that's how far it can go. The government always has the power to strongly influence how you view what is good. I mean, in many cases, Soviet Union or National Socialism, the power was the army. You literally had control over violence. Unfortunately, you know,

this is also a characteristic of banana republics. And one has to be wary of that. I think we're not sufficiently wary. We're not sufficiently wary when we're forced to be frightened. Almost any scam tries to frighten people so that they no longer respond rationally. And we're seeing that time and again. No, absolutely. Well, you know, as we finish up, why up, I'm going to ask you something, maybe a practical question. Okay. Let's say you have a young daughter, she's in school, she comes home and she's just learned

that basically because of global warming, we only have a few years left. She's incredibly distraught. You're a parent or a friend of the family. What do you say to her? You have to tell her that this is nonsensical, but of course children are taught to believe their teachers. And so if the parents feel up to it, you know, they could try complaining to the teacher. But it's a difficult issue. And, yeah, I mean, I'm not the only person who suggests that teaching children this is child abuse. The parents should understand that even the UN doesn't say anything like that, that this is just designed to frighten the children and frightening children is child abuse.

You know, this business of taking away hope from children. It's criminal. Okay, so again, as we actually finish up, I think COVID and the whole, it's almost like it was kind of an accelerated version of the way climate change has been dealt with over the last, what is it, 40 years or something like that. And I think that exposed to a whole lot of people

that just something isn't right. Information that we're being given with absolute, near absolute certainty just doesn't add up. And I have to be more skeptical. And I think there's a heck of a lot more people today that are more skeptical and more open to, you know, actually this term was criminalized. I mean,

I'm exaggerating a bit, of course. Do your own research, right? That was something that was actually, that was looked down on by the status quo, the status quo people. You know, there are clues, as I say, when somebody speaks of the science, speaks of the authority, speaks about science being settled. These should be red flags. You know there are certain things that are always danger signals. Promotion of fear, promotion of hate, declaration of settled science. I've never seen them used benignly. Opening up discussion of these things, getting through on this, is helpful. I think people have to start thinking about it.

But it's just much easier to go with the flow. And at universities, for instance, how should I put it? You know, now, universities are dominated by administrators. They are more numerous than students at some places. And their concern is, you know, raising money. And so the government, if it says, we're going to give a lot of money for this, that's what they're in favor of. Universities become, it's always amazed me

that they're almost the first group to succumb to any such issue. I'm biased in that in some respects. You know, again, having a background, family background in Germany, my father was a bootmaker. And I noticed in Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power, the universities, before he even asked, got rid of all their Jews, including converts to Lutheranism who had been born Jewish. Fritz Haber was a Nobel laureate and a German patriot who had converted. He was fired. On the other hand, when my father died, I looked at his papers and he was an observant Jew and he had been admitted to the guild, I think, in 1936 after Hitler was in power. seem to have more integrity than academics.

In a sense, their value was concrete. You make a good boot, you're a bootmaker. Something is missing in academia in that respect. Well, Dr. Richard Lindzen, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Okay. Good meeting you, Jan. Bye-bye. Thank you all for joining Professor Richard Lindzen and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.