THE Ave Awards MIT ‘s Professor Richard Lindzen the Knowsitall Award for Academic Arrogance
Drudge gleefully reports that Professor Richard Lindzen is urging caution in response to a proposal to spend $40,000,000 Massachusetts dollars ameliorating climate change. In their view, Richard Lindzen is a heroic warrior for truth standing uo to the legions of scientists that support global warming as a threat to the world.
“Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. The opportunities for taxation, for policies, for control, for crony capitalism are just immense, you can see their eyes bulge. …. Even many of the people who are supportive of sounding the global warning alarm, back off from catastophism. It’s the politicians and the green movement that like to portray catastrophe.”
The TA Award recognizes Richard Lindzen stature as a prominent scientist but suggests that it is arrogant to use that stature to oppose a rather tiny amount of money that even he agrees is needed to protect Massachusetts from climate change regardless of the relative role of CO2. Richard Lindzen has made himself the kept scientist of the Fauxist Alternative Reality Cult, giving them tools to oppose even the simplest measures while even he agrees that the current warming is attributable to man made CO2.
Lindzen’s value, if he were not guilty of arrogance, would be offering a moderate and objective alternative to Al Gore or others who take an extreme point of view. Readers of TA may want to search TA for the comments of Halstead, a prominent if sometimes ponderous meteorological prof from the Udub. In Lindzen’s case, is credibility is lost by siding with science denial at Faux, by his becoming a Republican apparently to tout Professor Lindzen , and by opposing the very real need to deal with Massachusetts’ coastal issue.