One had only to look at Lindzen’s long publication history, his endowed professorship at MIT, and his list of grad students, to raise an eyebrow when people claimed the iris hypothesis was ‘discredited’ and began discussing his analysis of second-hand smoke effects. Poor Lindzen made the mistake of assuming he worked in a normal scientific field, where the goal is always to advance understanding.
Starting with the Charney report, and probably before that, the field was morphing into something very different from normal science. 30+ years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the Charney estimates of sensitivity remain unchanged, trapped by the field’s political (rather than scientific) nature. The lack of scientific progress on the single most important question for public policy is easy to understand; after all, many don’t think of the field as primarily focused on science. But that doesn’t make the complete lack of scientific progress any less tragic and wasteful.
