Heartland conference follow up — Part I — VOICES for REASON

I promised I would report back from the Heartland Institute’s Third International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC.

The highlight of the conference, for me, was the keynote address by Dr. Richard Lindzen, a leading M.I.T. climate scientist who has long been the most prominent scientific critic of global warming alarmism. (The full text of his talk is available here, along with the rest of the conference proceedings.)

At one point, Lindzen dissected the central argument that the proponents of climate alarm use in attributing the global temperature changes over the past few decades to human activities:

What was done, was to take a large number of models that could not reasonably simulate known patterns of natural behavior (such as ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation), claim that such models nonetheless accurately depicted natural internal climate variability, and use the fact that these models could not replicate the warming episode from the mid seventies through the mid nineties, to argue that forcing was necessary and that the forcing must have been due to man. The argument makes arguments in support of intelligent design sound rigorous by comparison.

And yet, on the basis of such arguments, Congress has just passed an unprecedented expansion of government control over the production and use of energy.

When I introduced myself to Dr. Lindzen, I handed him my business card from the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. I don’t know if he’s familiar with Ayn Rand’s ideas, or if he was just responding to the mention of individual rights, but he looked at my card and then looked up at me and said: “Who would ever have thought that climate science would be the basis for a coup d’etat?”