MIT Prof Calls Global Warming Alarmists a Cult
This should go over well with the left. Boston radio talker Howie Carr wrote this report for Breitbart.
MIT Climate Scientist: Global Warming Believers a ‘Cult’
An MIT professor of meteorology is dismissing global-warming alarmists as a discredited “cult” whose members are becoming more hysterical as emerging evidence continues to contradict their beliefs.
During an appearance on this writer’s radio show Monday, MIT Professor emeritus Richard Lindzen discussed the religious nature of the movement.
“As with any cult, once the mythology of the cult begins falling apart, instead of saying, oh, we were wrong, they get more and more fanatical. I think that’s what’s happening here. Think about it,” he said. “You’ve led an unpleasant life, you haven’t led a very virtuous life, but now you’re told, you get absolution if you watch your carbon footprint. It’s salvation!”
Lindzen, 74, has issued calm dismissals of warmist apocalypse, reducing his critics to sputtering rage.
Last week, government agencies including NASA announced that 2014 was the “hottest year” in “recorded history,” as The New York Times put it in an early edition. Last year has since been demoted by the Times to the hottest “since record-keeping began in 1880.”
But that may not be true. Now the same agencies have acknowledged that there’s only a 38 percent chance that 2014 was the hottest year on record. And even if it was, it was only by two-100ths of a degree.
Lindzen scoffs at the public-sector-generated hysteria, which included one warmist blogger breathlessly writing that the heat record had been “shattered.”
Comments
Cult is right.
If you want to get a climacatastrophist really sputtering, ask them: how much would global temperatures go down if we completely eliminated all power generation from coal? How many hundreth’s of a degree per Trillion dollars? How much would it cost to get CO2 back to 350 ppm? How many people will die if we double the price of electricity? What will the impact be on the poor?
They don’t have a clue! None have bothered to make the calculation and see if dropping our CO2 country’s output by 40% will make any practical difference whatsoever!
Why? You ask?
The answer is blind zealotry. They don’t want to make engineering calculations because that involves mathy stuff, tradeoffs, comparisons, and hard decisions. Stuff that people who really produce something have to do every single day.
Touchy-feely tree-huggers are not into that kind of practicality. In their feeble minds, a thing is either good or it’s bad. Instead of making rational decision, it’s much easier to support a meme that all CO2 is bad, and it should be reduced at all costs!
Another good way to defuse them when they complain that it’s the greed of big oil/big coal that is destroying the planet is to ask the question: Would big oil and big coal be selling if you were not buying? Maybe you are the real problem!
Of course it’s a cult. Give Al Gore credit where credit is due.