I don’t see why your characterization of Lindzen as “dabbling into conspiracies” is anything but laughable nonsense.

Some scientists issue meaningless remarks in what
I believe to be the full expectation that the media and the environmental movement
will provide the “spin.” Since the societal response to alarm has, so far,
been to generate scientific funding, there has been little reason for scientists to
complain. Should scientists feel any guilt, it is assuaged by two irresistible factors:
the advocates define public virtue, and administrators are delighted with
the growing grant overhead.

Intimidation
has mostly, but not exclusively, been used against those questioning
alarmism. Victims of such intimidation generally remain silent. Congressional
hearings have been used to pressure scientists who question the “consensus.”
These scientists are pitted against carefully selected opponents. The clear intent
is to discredit the “skeptical” scientist from whom a “recantation” is sought.

More recent is a controversy over a thousand-year reconstruction of mean
temperature purporting to show that the half degree (centigrade) rise of the past
century was unprecedented. Because of the extensive use of this work in the
politics of global warming, Representative Joe Barton demanded the analytical
detail since the research was supported by U.S. funds. Both the American Meteorological
Society and the American Geophysical Union protested Barton’s request.
One need not go into the merits of this controversy to see that the response of
professional organizations sends a chilling message. Only the defenders of the
orthodoxy will be defended against intimidation.

Lindzen’s response to Rahmstorf is much more of the same. I’ll just quote the passage that tickled me most:

One might note in passing that the last sentence simply glosses over hundreds of peer reviewed papers that
document the Medieval Warm Period (or Medieval Optimum, as it was referred to before it
became fashionable to fear warmth).

Lindzen is a smart guy, and he has contributed a ton of value to climatology.
But his views on the science are deeply interwoven with his politics, and there is just no unweaving them.

But, then again, in so judging him maybe I’m just being fashionable. Who can tell, with all this intimidation and pressure going on?

Rahmstorf, in contrast, seems to be genuinely interested in figuring out what climate sensitivity really is, and honestly pissed off that Lindzen insists on playing Galileo.

Perhaps you figure it’s all just a postmodern Rashomonian relativist mishmash, and the truth depends on whose Al is gored.

If so, and if you agree with Lindzen that Joe Barton—Joe Barton, for crying out loud!—was right, and it was the AMS and the AGU who were sending “a chilling message”, then I can only wish you a pleasant stay in Bizarro-world.

The criticisms of Lindzen don’t seem to be addressed, and his description of the fragility on the climate change models seems quite right.

I don’t see why your characterization of Lindzen as “dabbling into conspiracies” is anything but laughable nonsense. There are many reasons why a community of scientists would downplay their lack of real knowledge and the poverty of their models—from ego reasons to funding amounts—without any conspiracy being involved.

I still don’t know what this all means completely—but I’m sure it makes all the smug remarks here about the “scientific consensus” rather ridiculous.

Oh noes! There’s no consensus because one climate scientist disagrees!

Well, I don’t know about Lindzen’s climate science, but he really went too far out of his field of expertise when he started dabbling in conspiracy theories.

When it comes to conspiracies, he should really have deferred to the real peer-reviewed experts, such as Myanna Lahsen, Naomi Oreskes, Conway Lyndon LaRouche, Alex Jones, David Icke et al.

 —bi, International Journal of Inactivism

http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/222_Exchange.pdf

The refutation is the last of the three articles in the PDF. Rahmstorf’a paper is the second piece and the PDF starts with a Lindzen paper.

“It is the fourth part: namely that doubling CO2 will warm global climate in equilibrium by 3oC±1.5oC, that is the primary point of debate. Rahmstorf acknowledges this, but makes it sound inconsequential since it is only a small part of a larger edifice based on the three relatively trivial points. He then devotes a couple of pages to describing and claiming justification for current model sensitivities. Some of the justification consists in the logically
strange idea that the models run often enough constitute a test of themselves.”

He then criticizes the studies used by Rahmstorf, including the use of the aerosol parameter—about which there is apparently huge uncertainty—as a fudge factor to make models fit the data.
Much more than that is presented though.

He concludes:

“This finally brings us to Rahmstorf’s absurd, pompous and pretentious association of one the
landmarks in modern intellectual history, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, with the
primitive and crude world of climate modeling. Einstein was pained for much of his life by the
fact that his general theory had a single adjustable parameter (the so-called cosmological
constant). One can only imagine how he might have felt about this theory being compared with
climate models that have almost an uncountable number of adjustable parameters.”

I still don’t know what this all means completely—but I’m sure it makes all the smug remarks here about the “scientific consensus” rather ridiculous.

You’re a whiny bastard, a. If you’re not good enough to play, stay off the court.

I haven’t made any special study of global warming, but I see methane mentioned a lot too, not just CO2. As Bruce Baugh says, there are a range or related problems.

I’d like to remind people the Dyson is a senior physicist; he should be used to scientific debates, including the phase when one side has won, but a few die-hards on the losing side keep going on and on…

When a senior scientist looks at a clearly won scientific debate, and tries to call it a draw, it doesn’t mean that he’s dishonest, but it certainly destroys his credibility on that subject.

Answering Lindzen in the next chapter, “Anthropogenic Climate Change: Revisiting the Facts,” is Stefan Rahmstorf,
professor of physics of the oceans at Potsdam University in Germany. Rahmstorf sums up his opinion of Lindzen’s
arguments in one sentence: “All this seems completely out of touch with the world of climate science as I know it and,
to be frank, simply ludicrous.” These two chapters give the reader a sad picture of climate science. Rahmstorf
represents the majority of scientists who believe fervently that global warming is a grave danger. Lindzen
represents the small minority who are skeptical. Their conversation is a dialogue of the deaf. The majority
responds to the minority with open contempt.

When [I] was confronted with the polemic presented by Lindzen (in this volume),
my first reaction was a sense of disbelief. Does Lindzen really think that current
models overestimate the observed global warming sixfold? Can he really believe
that climate sensitivity is below 0.5°C, despite all the studies on climate sensitivity
concluding the opposite, and that a barely correlating cloud of data from one
station, as he presents in figure 2-3, somehow proves his view? Does he honestly
think that global warming stopped in 1998? Can Lindzen seriously believe that
a vast conspiracy of thousands of climatologists worldwide is misleading the
public for personal gain? All this seems completely out of touch with the world
of climate science as I know it and, to be frank, simply ludicrous.

Context matters, too. Personfromporlock has a lengthy history of always fancying themselves ever so wiser and cleverer than those who know anything about the subject, and always being in the wrong.

GALILEO!!

 —bi, International Journal of Inactivism

…Mowgli could not help laughing when the Bandar-log began, twenty at a time, to tell him how great and wise and strong and gentle they were, and how foolish he was to [disagree with] them. “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true,” they shouted.