A new YouTube video by Richard Lindzen has appeared, called

Climate Change: What Do Scientists Say?

It’s only 5 minutes long, which I think is about the right length for this kind of thing, and has some quite professional-looking graphics. Despite only being up since Monday, it seems to have had over 270,000 views and 2000 comments. It’s also at the Prager website, where it’s had over a million views, and there’s a transcript available there.

Lindzen talks about three groups of people: firstly the IPCC scientists; secondly sceptical scientists, such as himself, “who don’t see this as an especially serious problem”, saying that there are many influences and that these are poorly understood. He also highlights areas of agreement between these two groups of scientists, such as the difficulty of making long-term predictions.

His third group consists of the politicians, environmentalists and the media, who are responsible for the fact that so many people are “worried, indeed panic-stricken”. Global warming alarmism provides these people with what they want, he says, such as confirmation of the “near-religious devotion” of the environmentalists, and the doomsday scenario headlines for the media.

He also talks of how scientists (here I would say academics generally) have “jumped on the bandwagon” publishing papers blaming global warming for everything, and the “crony capitalists” who are cashing in on government subsidies.

(HT Radical Rodent and Josh)

Updates:



* Geoff points out in a comment below that there is a more detailed paper by Lindzen, Global warming and the irrelevance of science, that gives more detail on these points. It’s based on a talk he gave last August. It ends with “If we do nothing to stop this insanity, science will rightly be regarded as just another racket”, which is interesting in the light of all the recent articles about the problems with science.

* There are several more videos at the Prager site, by Alex Epstein, Patrick Moore and Bjorn Lomborg.