Climate scientist just admits it
Posted on October 14, 2015 by Ben Bullard
One of the world’s most esteemed physicists has offered a startling admission about the facts behind the politics of climate change, saying he’s disappointed in President Obama for falsely believing in the power of government to shape planetary forces.
Freeman Dyson, the 91-year-old physicist and peer of Albert Einstein, said in a far-ranging interview with the U.K.’s The Register that the climate change policy machine is “a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public,” and that an eschatological fascination with doomsday culture plays a huge role in keeping climate change in the news.
“It is true that there’s a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don’t think that’s the full explanation,” Dyson said.
“It’s like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way, helped cause World War I. People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the dullness of modern life. [There was] the feeling we’d gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for us all. That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it’s in the air today.”
Dyson was blunt about Obama’s role in promoting the anthropogenic climate change myth: The president’s flat wrong.
“It’s very sad that in this country, political opinion parted [people’s views on climate change]. I’m 100 percent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans took the right side.”
Even if, in theory, the government could do anything to alter long-term climate trends, it ultimately wouldn’t make any difference, because the U.S. simply doesn’t contribute enough greenhouse gases to the planet’s atmosphere, Dyson said.
In addition, there’s a massive public misunderstanding about how climate change and mere pollution differ, he added. While humans are essentially powerless over the epochal forces that dictate climate cycles, they can do much to clean up pollution of their own making — it’s just difficult to get policymakers and the public to understand that crucial distinction.
As if to illustrate his point, all but one of the Democratic presidential candidates in Tuesday’s televised debate went out of his or her way to mention how great a menace climate change is, along with America’s obligation to do something about it.
Dyson’s view is quite different.
“China and India rely on coal to keep growing, so they’ll clearly be burning coal in huge amounts,” Dyson explained. “They need that to get rich. Whatever the rest of the world agrees to, China and India will continue to burn coal, so the discussion is quite pointless.
“At the same time, coal is very unpleasant stuff, and there are problems with coal quite apart from climate. I remember in England when we burned coal, everything was filthy. It was really bad, and that’s the way it is now in China, but you can clean that up as we did in England. It takes a certain amount of political willpower, and that takes time. Pollution is quite separate to the climate problem: one can be solved, and the other cannot, and the public doesn’t understand that.”
http://personalliberty.com/climate-scientist-just-admits-it/
