MIT Professor Richard Lindzen has asserted that calling climate change an existential threat comes from propaganda.
An MIT scientist has said that although the global temperature rise owing to a greenhouse effect is real, the increase is small and does not pose any existential threat.
The greenhouse effect is primarily caused by water vapor and clouds, said Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide are minor constituents of the greenhouse effect, Mr. Lindzen told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” in an interview.
“If all other things are kept constant, and you double CO2, you would get a little under one degree of warming,” Mr. Lindzen said. Some climate models estimate the highest warming at three degrees, but “even three degrees isn’t that much,” he added.
“We’re dealing with changes for a doubling of CO2 on the order of between breakfast and lunch,” he said.
According to NASA, the greenhouse effect is “the process through which heat is trapped near Earth’s surface by substances known as ‘greenhouse gases.’ Greenhouse gases consist of carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and water vapor.”
Politicians, universities, international organizations, and media have called climate warming an existential threat to humanity.
President Joe Biden said at a press conference in Vietnam in September that, “The only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next … 10 years.”
The Climate Change Working Group at Western Michigan University has warned that the “global temperature has risen at least 1°C since mid-20th century” and said that “climate change is an existential threat to the quality of life on this planet.”
Bruce Aylward, assistant director General at the World Health Organization (WHO), said in November that climate change poses an existential threat to all people, in particular pregnant women and children.
Mr. Lindzen asserted that calling climate change an existential threat comes from propaganda.
Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the United Nations body for assessing the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts, and options to mitigate—does not call it an existential threat, Mr. Lindzen said.
In its report, the IPCC talks about a reduction in GDP by 3 percent by 2100 owing to climate change, Mr. Lindzen added. “Assuming the GDP has increased several times by then, that doesn’t sound existential to most people.”
