Lindzen goes emeritus

For a fair while now I’ve defended Lindzen {{cn}} on the grounds that he is actually a Real Scientist, albeit edging ever further off onto the sceptical wing. And this has been difficult because whilst his papers have, I think, been reasonable his public pronouncements and his congressional-testimony type stuff has been poor.

But, happily, the recent “peer review gate” nonsense he has been spouting allows me to declare him Emeritus. I was going to say he has jumped the shark but I think that is wrong; this isn’t some Curry-like stupidity, this is more the kind of full blown Black-helicopters-of-peer-review we expect from an incipient fellow of the Breakness Institute.

Eli has the story, as do others: Lindzen writes a paper. It gets rejected. He resubmits it to PNAS and asks for his buddies to review it, including some (like William Happer) who were manifestly unfit to review it. They tell him, quite properly, No. He throws a hissy fit. They keep telling him No, whilst doing their best to accomodate him without destroying the standards of their journal (the way Azen and Wegman managed at CSDA). And all of that could be defended as just a rather strong-armed attempt to get your views published in the teeth of bad reviews. We’ve all wanted to push stuff we “know” is good past review, sometimes; Lindzen is a bit different in that he has (or thought he had) enough clout to lean on PNAS.

What makes him stark staring Emeritus is his belief that publishing this tawdry tale is actually a good idea for him. How mad do you have to be to do that?

Lovelock goes emeritus

Or have I used that one before? It seems only too likely. But perhaps not: I don’t seem to have had a decent go at him for four years.

Anyway, it makes a change from CRU-investigation navel-gazing (I’ll get back to that in a moment). So what has the much-loved but getting-on-a-bit genius of electron capture said now?

It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn’t want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They’re not like that nowadays. They don’t give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: “Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.” That’s no way to do science.

This is crap. It is the std “the skies were bluer, the grass was greener, people tipped their hat to the local bobby and children were seen and not heard” stupid nostalgia for the good ol’ days. He then rants on:

I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.

And I really don’t have a clue what he is on about there. What was faked? What has Lovelock been smoking? I’m going to ask Howard, maybe he knows.