MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen speaks in Europe: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities’
By Marc Morano
August 21, 2024
Professor Richard Lindzen recently spoke in Brussels, at the invitation of the Hungarian political think tank MCC, about the role of consensus in political movements claiming a scientific basis (as is the case nowadays with climate). Below is the full text of his speech. “Hopefully, we will awaken from this nightmare before it is too late.”
Photo’s MCC
By Richard S. Lindzen, Professor Emeritus, MIT
In modern history there are several examples of political movements claiming a scientific basis. From immigration restriction and eugenics (in the US after WW1) to antisemitism and race ideology (in Hitler’s Germany) and communism and Lysenkoism (under Stalin). Each of these claimed a scientific consensus that allowed highly educated citizens, who were nonetheless ignorant of science, to have the anxieties associated with their ignorance alleviated. Since all scientists supposedly agreed, there was no need for them to understand the science. Indeed, ‘the science’ is the opposite of science itself. Science is a mode of inquiry rather than a source of authority. However, the success that science achieves has earned it a measure of authority in the public’s mind, and this is what politicians frequently envy and attempt to appropriate.
The exploitation of climate fits into the preceding pattern, and as with all its predecessors, science is, in fact, irrelevant. At best, it is a distraction which led many of us to focus on the numerous misrepresentations of science in what was purely a political movement.
The following focusses on the situation in the United States, though a similar dynamic occurred throughout the developed world, with meetings at the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation’s Bellagio Center and at Villach in the 1980’s playing an important role. Most of this talk will concern the origin of the obsession with decarbonization in the US. I will return briefly to the matter of the consensus at the end of this talk.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2024/08/21/mit-climate-scientist-dr-richard-lindzen-speaks-in-europe-those-who-can-make-you-believe-absurdities-can-make-you-commit-atrocities/
