IT's why Al Gore fit right in. A man elevated beyond his capabilities

Climate science is for second-raters says world's greatest atmospheric physicist

Popcorn time in Westminster this week, where the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee met to grill two sets of witnesses on the pros and cons of the IPCC's 5th Assessment review. (Watch the video here) H/t Bishop Hill.

Three things stood out for me: the bullying, bluster and arrogance of the committee's chairman Tim Yeo; the unnecessary rudeness of John Robertson MP ("Not a lot of people agree with you. You've had your chance to sell your book," he told Donna Laframboise who had flown over from Canada especially to testify); and the wearied patience teetering on the brink of Olympian contempt of Dr Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric physics at MIT.

Lindzen, you rather felt, has really had quite enough of trying explain to idiots why it's perfectly possible to "believe" in the existence of  anthropogenic global warming without feeling the urge to bomb the global economy back to the dark ages in order to mitigate it.

This is – and always has been – the position of all the climate sceptics I've ever met. We take our cue from Lindzen because no scientist with expertise in the relevant field makes this point quite so eloquently or persuasively. But a decade or more spent repeating the obvious has begun to tax Lindzen's patience, as became clear after a testy interrogation from Tim "Trougher" Yeo.

The Trougher was trying to bludgeon Lindzen into proving the point that climate change IS a problem because the decade from 2000 to 2010 was the hottest in history. Lindzen maintained that this proves nothing other than that temperatures at the end of a warming period are almost inevitably going to be higher than those in the beginning or middle. But the Trougher looked well pleased with what he clearly considered a "gotcha" exchange.

Then Lindzen was asked what he thought of the "consensus" – at which point he got his manicured claws out:

"I think the majority of people working in climate science will go with the view that climate science is serious. I don't think that would be surprising to anyone. There are very few people in any scientific field who say 'My field is not serious'. Other than that there is so much penalty for saying that this is not an important problem that I don't think people would go out on that limb, either."

(Ouch!)

He went on:

"I've asked very frequently at universities: 'Of the brightest people you know, how many people were studying climate [...or meteorology or oceanography...]?' And the answer is usually 'No one.'"

And – warming to his theme:

"You look at the credentials of some of these people [on the IPCC] and you realise that the world doesn't have that many experts, that many 'leading climate scientists'".

Was Lindzen suggesting, asked Tim Yeo at this point, that scientists in the field of climate were academically inferior.

"Oh yeah," said Lindzen. "I don't think there's any question that the brightest minds went into physics, math, chemistry…"