MIT President’s “Scientific Consensus” Demolished by Realists
On June 2, 2017, Dr. L. Rafael Reif (shown), the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sent a letter to the entire MIT community strongly disagreeing with President Donald Trump’s decision of the day before to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. Reif said that “at MIT we take great care to get the science right,” and then added, “The scientific consensus is overwhelming: As human activity emits more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the global average surface temperature will continue to rise, driving rising sea levels and extreme weather.”
But Reif should have known better than to claim an “overwhelming” consensus among his fellow scientists in support of his own beliefs. For example, the claimed “consensus” does not include (among many others) atmospheric scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, a veteran member of the same MIT community Reif was addressing. On February 23, less than four months before Reif’s letter, Lindzen, who is now professor emeritus at MIT, sent a letter to Trump pointing to an attached petition signed by “more than 300 eminent scientists and other qualified individuals from around the world … urging you to withdraw from the ill-advised United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).” The petition stated, “carbon dioxide, the target of the UNFCCC is not a pollutant but a major benefit to agriculture and other life on Earth.” When 300 “eminent scientists” go on record in opposition to UNFCCC claims — the same claims undergirding the Paris Agreement — their very numbers demonstrate that there is no “consensus” among scientists regarding these important matters.
One of the signers of Lindzen’s petition to Trump is Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, whom this writer had the pleasure of meeting this summer. Soon is an astrophysicist associated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He earned his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering (with distinction) from the University of Southern California in 1991. In 2004, Doctors for Disaster Preparedness awarded him the “Petr Beckmann Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Defense of Scientific Truth.” In 2014, he received the “Courage in Defense of Science” award from the George C. Marshall Foundation.
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