An article in The Week Magazine resurrecting Christopher Bretherton’s attack on Richard Lindzen’s “intellectual honesty” prompted this review of some choice Climategate 2.0 moments.
The Week Magazine reports:
Richard Lindzen is a climate change skeptic with a novel theory. The MIT meteorologist concedes that greenhouse gases cause warming, but he believes Earth will be able to regulate its temperature, like a thermostat, thanks to clouds. Lindzen argues that when surface temperature increases, the moist air that rises from the tropics will rain out more of its moisture, leaving less to form the wispy, high clouds known as cirrus. Just like greenhouse gases, those cirrus clouds trap heat in the atmosphere, so a decrease in them would counteract the increase of greenhouse gases. “If I’m right, we’ll have saved money” by not adopting emissions restrictions, says Lindzen, who recently testified before Congress at the request of Republican skeptics. Most climatologists dispute Lindzen’s theory, saying his papers have been riddled with erroneous data and unproven assumptions. Lindzen is “feeding upon an audience that wants to hear a certain message,” says Christopher S. Bretherton, an atmospheric researcher at the University of Washington. “I don’t think it’s intellectually honest at all.” [Emphasis added]
JunkScience first addressed Bretherton’s comments in May 2012, focusing on a $390 million taxpayer grant in which he troughed.
Instead of passing his dubious judgment on the “skeptics favorite scientist,” Christopher Bretherton should first consider where the global warming burden of proof lies — perhaps with the warmists’ favorite scientist, Michael Mann. So let’s take a walk down Climategate 2.0 Avenue — you may recall these gems:
- Climategaters admit Mann’s hokey stick on ‘dodgy ground.’
- Climategater says Mann ‘padded’ data.
- Mann’s statistics are “suspect.”
- Climategater says Mann “lives in a glass house.”
- Climategater suggests phony “audit” of hokey stick.
- Climategater says “errors found” in hokey stick “not especially honest.”
- Wigley accuses “Mike” of being deceptive.