Richard Lindzen, the famously discredited global warming skeptic, surfaced again yesterday on the Opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, the preeminent "safety school" of choice among industry-funded mouthpieces looking to bash the hard facts and real science on global warming. The Journal's editorial pages have long denounced global warming (even when its news pages have run great stories about its real effects), so it's not surprising that they would give Lindzen ample column inches to strut his tired, old stuff again. In today's long-winded and convoluted attack on what he calls "the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers" who are addressing global warming, Lindzen moans and groans about how hard it is for shills like him to find funding these days. Now that even President Bush has accepted that global warming is real (although doing nothing about it), Lindzen whines that those of his ilk "have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse." (Duh!)
Lindzen's clunky "I am not a shill!" defense quickly evaporates upon closer look. According to Ross Gelbspan's Boiling Point book, Lindzen received $2,500 a day to consult with coal and oil interests here and abroad in the 1990s, a fact Lindzen does not refute.
It's a sure sign of progress when skeptics like Lindzen publicly admit that their funding is drying up. The debate is over....global warming is real and humans are causing it. By the sound of Lindzen's whining, the polluters seem to have caught on that their efforts at clouding the facts have failed, miserably. The American public is smarter than they thought.