Richard Lindzen: The Weary Voice of Dissent !

I mentioned British writer, journalist, blogger James Delingpole
(photo) in my last posting on the flooding in England and citing it was neglect, not global warming, that allowed those English fields and towns to flood. Well, I mislaid this report from James that was posted at the end of January I think you should know about. It concerns Dr Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric physics at MIT and his visit to Westminster, where the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee met to ''grill'' him and Canadian feminist, journalist and photographer, Donna Laframboise  (below) on the pros and cons of the IPCC's 5th Assessment Review.

Three things stood out for Mr Delingpole; the bullying, bluster and arrogance of the committee's chairman Tim Yeo; the unnecessary rudeness of John Robertson MP (''I guess you've had your chance to sell your book while here," he told Laframboise); and all the while the wearied patience teetering on the brink of Olympian contempt radiated from the seated Dr Lindzen.

Lindzen, I'm sure, has really had quite enough of trying to explain to idiots why it's perfectly possible to ''believe'' in the existence of anthropogenic global warming without feeling the urge to bomb the global economy back to the dark ages in order to mitigate it. This is -- and always has been -- the position of all the climate sceptics I've ever met. We take the cue from Lindzen because no scientist with expertise in the relevant field makes this point quite so eloquently or persuasively. But a decade or more spent repeating the obvious has begun to tax Lindzen's patience, as became clear after a testy interrogation from Tim Yeo.

Tim ''the Troughter'' was trying to bludgeon Lindzen into proving the point that climate change IS a problem because the decade from 2000 to 2010 was the hottest in history. Lindzen maintained that this proves NOTHING other than that temperatures at the end of a warming period are almost inevitably going to be higher than those in the beginning or the middle. But the Trougher looked well pleased with what he clearly considered a ''gotcha'' exchange.

Then Lindzen was asked what he thought of the ''consensus'' -- at which point he got his manicured claws out:  ''I think the majority of people working in climate science will go with the view that climate science is serious. I don't think that would be surprising to anyone. There are very few people in any scientific field who say 'May field is not serious'. Other than that there is so much penalty for saying that this is not an important problem that I don't think people would go out on that limb either.''  (ouch!)

He went on: I've been asked very frequently at universities, 'Of the brightest people you know, how many people were studying climate [....or meteorology or oceanography...]?  And the answer is usually 'No One.'''  And warming to his theme: ''You look at the credentials of some of these people on the IPCC and you realise that the world doesn't have that many experts, that many 'leading climate scientists.'''

Tim Yeo, at this point asked, ''Dr Lindzen, are you suggesting that scientists in the field of climate were academically inferior?   ''Oh yeah,'' said Lindzen. ''I don't think there's any question that the brightest minds went into physics, math, chemistry....''  (double ouch!)

The Way I See It.....even climate scientist, author and former NASA advisor Dr Roy Spencer has had enough. He says, ''When politicians and scientists started calling people like me ''deniers'', they crossed the line. They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics' view that global warming is not necessarily all man-made nor a serious problem, with (2) the denial that the Nazi's extermination of millions of Jews ever happened.''  He went on to say that many skeptics have, for too long, ignored the repulsive, extremist nature of the comparison and it was time to push back. ''I'm now going to start calling these people ''global warming Nazis.''

My readers have read over the years the pseudo-scientific ramblings by warmist leaders that have falsely warned of mass starvation, ecological collapse, agricultural collapse, overpopulation, killer storms and droughts....all so that the masses would support their radical policies. Policies that would keep the government grants rolling in but would not voluntarily be supported by a majority of freedom-loving people. Like the Nazis, they advocate the supreme authority of the state (fascism). Like the Nazis, they are anti-capitalist. They are willing to sacrifice millions of lives of poor people at the altar of radical environmentalism, advocating expensive energy policies that increase poverty.

Dr Spencer (photo left) sums up by saying, ''So, as long as they continue to call people like me ''deniers'', I will call these warmists what they have become, global warming Nazis!''