Climate Contrarian Gets Fact-Checked by MIT Colleagues in Open Letter to Trump - Inside Climate News
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A petition accompanying Lindzen’s letter was signed by 300 other people. Lindzen described the signatories as “eminent scientists and other qualified individuals” in his letter. A review of the names by the Guardian, however, revealed few biology, chemistry, climate, earth and physics scientists. Many are well-known climate contrarians and deniers. They include Willie Soon, an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Steve Goreham of the Heartland Institute, an industry backed organization that denies climate science; and William Briggs, a statistician at Cornell University who questions climate models.
“In stark contrast to Lindzen’s letter, ours was signed only by those who know something about the climate system,” said Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor of atmospheric sciences who signed the letter opposing Lindzen.”
“He served as a meteorology professor from 1983 to 2013. He is now a distinguished senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank.”
(Underlines - mine)
On some personal points…
1. The term “toxin” is interesting. Oxygen will kill you if you get too much of it. Water will kill you (without drowning) if you swallow too much of it.
2. Nobody claims CO2 is poisoning the plants, or that Earth has never endured these levels of CO2 or heat before. But, it is a matter of
speed. No ice caps on Earth is old hat, and plants and animals did just fine in those ancient ages. But none of them had billions of their number living in immobile coastal cities, reliant upon shipping and airplanes in and out of those cities for international trade (unless you’re also claiming that dinosaurs had advanced tech that has here-to-fore never been realized
). Humanity will get through this….but what about the biodiversity of our world? Trees can’t migrate in a decade, nor “get by” with less or more rain in their area. Crops can’t become immune to new (warmer weather) viral and parasite species overnight (while said pathogens can in fact travel as fast as the wind will carry them). Nor can humans.
3.
Everything you and retired meteorology Professor Lindzen bring up here has been debunked as weak-sauce garbage, over and over, dozens of times on this forum alone, never mind many thousands of times in the scientific communities and press.