MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: ‘Manufacturing Consensus on Climate Change’ – ‘How a political movement invented its own scientific basis’
By Admin
August 25, 2025
1:52 pm
Manufacturing Consensus on Climate Change
By Dr. Richard Lindzen
Modern political movements have not infrequently laid claim to being based in science, from immigration restriction and eugenics (in the U.S. after WWI), to antisemitism and race ideology (in Hitler’s Germany), to Communism and Lysenkoism (under Stalin). Each of these falsely invoked a scientific consensus that convinced highly educated citizens, who were nonetheless ignorant of science, to set aside the anxieties associated with their ignorance. Since all scientists supposedly agreed, there was no need for them to understand the science.
Of course, this version of “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. This is what politicians frequently envy and exploit.
The climate panic fits into this same pattern and, as in all the preceding cases, science is in fact irrelevant. At best, it is a distraction which has led many of us to focus on the numerous misrepresentations of science entailed in what was purely a political movement.
In the United States, the obsession with decarbonization (i.e., Net Zero) originates in the reaction to the amazing post-WWII period, when ordinary workers were able for the first time to own a house and a car. I was a student in the ’50s and early ’60s. It was commonplace to mock the poor taste and materialism of these so-called ordinary people. With the Vietnam War, things got amplified as the working class got drafted while students sought draft deferments.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/08/25/mit-climate-scientist-dr-richard-lindzen-manufacturing-consensus-on-climate-change-how-a-political-movement-invented-its-own-scientific-basis/
