Our Hero?

Richard Lindzen of MIT, sometimes described as the most prestigious of global warming dissenters, has a fire-breathing Wall Street Journal Editorial. Most of it is the usual, but there is also this:
But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis...

Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions...

These are serious charges, and very damning if true. I hope the boys from Real Climate are on this one with some kind of response. Punishing legitimate scientific dissents is the sort of authoritarian (psuedo-Marxist!) tactic I find so obnoxious in certain so-called theoretical physicists.

Another good quote is:
In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen.

So did the NRC really recommend against further study of climate sensitivity? If so, that's pretty odd. On the other hand, if they went along with such further study, study of the impacts of warming is not only appropriate but obligatory once the probability of occurence begins to appear high.

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