Cults, with their obsession with a person or thing, come in many forms.
Unfortunately, the debasement of actual science goes hand in hand with modern-day cultism. We see this with gender reassignment, Covid and climate change policies. Some continue to speak against the irrationality that has infected our so-called modernism.
Dr Richard Lindzen is a highly acclaimed atmospheric physicist who has authored more than 200 published papers in his career. I came across this most recent one from September 2022.
Dr Lindzen doesn’t subscribe to the idolatry of the global warming/climate change crowd. In fact, the obsession with the narrative assigns a cult-like status to something for which we have only theories and no hard facts.
You can read Lindzen’s paper though it is somewhat technical. Below the heading is his summation. It’s his way of saying that we have gone off the rails.
An Assessment of the Conventional Global Warming Narrative
“This all leaves us with a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the US hobbling its energy system (a process that has played a prominent role in causing current inflation), while lifting sanctions for Russia’s Nordstream 2 pipeline, which was designed to bypass the existing pipeline through the Ukraine used to supply Germany. It has caused much of the European Union to ban exploitation of shale gas and other sources of fossil fuel, thus leaving it with much higher energy costs, increased energy poverty, and dependence on Russia, thus markedly reducing its ability to oppose Mr Putin’s aggressions.
Unless we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, this is likely only to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the current irrational demonization of CO2. Changing course will be far from a simple task. As President Eisenhower noted in his farewell address in 1961:
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
As described in detail in Lindzen (2008, 2012), the US government committed itself to the current narrative by the early 1990s and greatly increased funding as a result. Moreover, given the size of the energy sector, any attempt to rebuild it, however unnecessarily and ineffectively, presents immense opportunities for huge short-term profits – opportunities that are obviously tempting and strongly defended. Atop all of this, has been the constant Goebellian repetition by the media of climate alarm. And, this alarm is accompanied by so-called ‘solutions’ that deal with something, namely decarbonisation, that is, in fact, largely irrelevant to climate change, while imposing great and pointless pain.
It is essential – to western civilization itself – that the harm associated with this totally unwarranted alarm be ended, however difficult the task.”