Rex Fleming is a climate change author and scientist. Formerly a climate researcher for NOAA, he is currently the president of Global Aerospace, a consulting company through which he engages in debates surrounding aerospace and climate change. He is the author of False Alarm: The Rise and Fall of the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change.
When explaining why he left NOAA, Fleming states that “After further reading I decided that was not for me anyway; I just read enough information to realize that I was on the wrong side of the issue back then.” He believes that the current consensus on climate change is driven by researchers’ desires “of getting funds for huge, bigger computer systems to run these massive climate models. And they want their salaries to increase. They don’t want to change.”
As detailed in his book and explained in an interview with the Heartland Institute, Fleming supports the solar theory of climate change, with climate change having “two main causes: sun’s magnetic field and cosmic rays.” Carbon dioxide, however, definitively “does not cause climate change,” as “if you go back through the history of every climate change, over the past billion years, there’s no correlation of a changing climate and temperature with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
In fact, Fleming predicts a “solar minimum” in 2030 that will launch a period of cooling akin to the Little Ice Age.
As a result, Fleming is alarmed at the current trends towards renewable energy. He states that “they’re trying to get rid of fossil fuels for socialist reasons, and we cannot get rid of fossil fuels” and that current politics are “costing everybody a lot of money, all of the subsidies for renewables.” Energy subsidies in the United States, however, have been steadily decreasing in the past decade, while subsidies for green energy have, on average, historically been lower than subsidies for non-renewables.
See also:
Climate of Denial