When science is irrelevant

A few days ago, Richard Lindzen published an American Mind piece on the political movement we know as climate change.


Manufacturing Consensus on Climate Change

How a political movement invented its own scientific basis.

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.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder that the climate change movement is as Lindzen says, a purely political movement. Those who do not understand the science have no great need to understand it, there are many other clues to the nature of the beast -


Of course, the attraction of power is not the only thing motivating politicians. The ability to award trillions of dollars to reorient our energy sector means that there are recipients of these trillions of dollars. These recipients must share just a few percentage points of these trillions of dollars to support the campaigns of these politicians for many election cycles and guarantee the support of these politicians for the policies associated with the reorientation.