Incredible that Richard Lindzen was quoted as saying this:

Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT and a member of the National Academy of Sciences who has long questioned climate change orthodoxy, is skeptical that a sunnier outlook is upon us.

“I actually doubt that,” he said. Even if some of the roughly $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars currently spent on climate research across 13 different federal agencies now shifts to scientists less invested in the calamitous narrative, Lindzen believes groupthink has so corrupted the field that funding should be sharply curtailed rather than redirected.

“They should probably cut the funding by 80 to 90 percent until the field cleans up,” he said. “Climate science has been set back two generations, and they have destroyed its intellectual foundations.”

Consider the psychological projection aspect of what Lindzen is asserting. The particularly galling part is this:

“Climate science has been set back two generations, and they have destroyed its intellectual foundations.”

It may actually be Lindzen that has set back generations of atmospheric science research with his deeply flawed model of the quasi-biennial oscillation of equatorial stratospheric winds — see my recent QBO presentation for this month’s AGU meeting.   He missed a very simple derivation that he easily could have derived back in the 1960’s, and that could have set a nice “intellectual foundation” for the next 40+ years. Instead he has essentially “corrupted the field” of atmospheric sciences that could have been solved with the right application of Laplace’s tidal equations — equations known since 1776 !

The “groupthink” that Lindzen set in motion on the causes behind QBO is still present in the current research papers, with many scientists trying to explain the main QBO cycle of 28 months via a relationship to an average pressure. See for example this paper I reviewed earlier this year.

To top it all off, he was probably within an eyelash of figuring out the nature of the forcing, given that he actually considered the real physics momentarily:

Alas, all those millions of taxpayer funds that Lindzen presumably received over the years didn’t help, and he has been reduced to whining over what other climate scientists may receive in funding as he enters into retirement.

Methinks it’s usually the case that the one that “doth protest too much” is the guilty party.

Added: here is a weird graphic of Lindzen I found on the cliscep blog. The guy missed the simple while focussing on the complex.