Locke Foundation promotes yet another fossil-fuel-funded climate skeptic

Temperatures are climbing, the international scientific consensus on manmade global warming keeps getting stronger, but Raleigh's John Locke Foundation is still continuing its campaign to cast doubt on the phenomenon's reality and urgency by trotting out yet another climate skeptic with ties to fossil-fuel interests.

This time it's Dr. Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and professor of meteorology at MIT. In an online interview with staff at the conservative think tank's Carolina Journal, Lindzen says he doesn't believe North Carolina's legislative commission on global climate change can have any positive benefits on the situation and in fact will do more harm than good:

...[T]he thing that should be always understood with these state solutions — this is a global issue. Even if every country in the world did what North Carolina is planning to do, we’re going to have no impact on climate. So you would have pure cost, no benefit.

Of course, the irony is that Lindzen and his ilk have also argued vehemently against approaching climate change as a national or global issue, thus leaving it up to states to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to prepare for the climate effects related to warming, such as sea-level rise and intensified flooding.

During the course of the interview, Lindzen says global warming has "become an issue tied to agendas" -- yet he fails to mention his own. At one time the professor charged oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services, his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by the Western Fuels Association, and he once wrote a speech titled "Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus" that was underwritten by OPEC, according to a 1995 article by journalist Ross Gelbspan in Harper's Magazine.