If Richard Lindzen shows up at your door, slam it.

Richard Lindzen is looking to up the ante. In an interview with the Canadian National Post, our Dick said

Q Some suggest that Roger Revelle, Gore's scientific mentor, would not have agreed with the movie?

A Well, he's dead.

Q Yes. So that makes it harder for him to speak out.

A It's a horrible story. Before he died, Roger Revelle co-authored a popular paper saying, 'We know too little to take any action based on global warming. If we take any action it should be an action that we can justify completely without global warming.' And Gore's staffers tried to have his name posthumously removed from that paper claiming he had been senile. And one of the other authors took it to court and won. It's funny how little coverage that got.

This is one of those strange little stories that you find Richard Lindzen crawling about at the bottom of the toilet in. The popular paper is an article in the magazine of the Cosmos Club (a club for movers and shakers in DC) written by Fred Singer and Chauncey Starr that had Roger Revelle's name on it. How Revelle's name got there beyond the fact that Fred Singer put it there is a matter of interest that is explained by Justin Lancaster, Revelle's student and last assistant.

According to Revelle's widow, Revelle and Singer met at a 1990 AAAS meeting and Singer asked Revelle to co-author a paper with him. In 1990, when Revelle was gravely ill, just before his death, Singer kept sending him drafts of an article, which Revelle kept shoving to the bottom of the pile on his desk so he would not have to look at them. We know that because we have the sworn testimony of Revelle's secretary, Christa Beran. Singer also sent drafts to Richard Lindzen and Lindzen communicated with Singer about them according to Singer's sworn testimony as evidently did Balling and Ellsasser. On Feb 16 1991, Singer showed up at Revelle's office, invited himself in and spent ~ four hours going over galley proofs he had brought with him. Revelle at the time was very ill, and 20 min of work tired him out. Singer stayed for four hours. Again, you don't have to depend on Lancaster for this, but you can look at the secretary's testimony, and information from others.

The moral of the story is when a Richard Lindzen or S. Fred show up, throw them out the door. They are only their own friends. They are users.

After that it gets interesting. After Revelle died, Lancaster was asked to serve on an editorial board for a CRC Press volume on Global Warming as well as submit a chapter. It turned out that Singer had submitted the Cosmos paper for publication in the same volume. Reference to the Cosmos article kept turning up, pushed by such characters as Greg Easterbrook and George Will (might be interesting to talk to Easterbrook now about this about who fed him).

Political opponents were using the article as a stick to beat Gore (nothing changes, all die). Gore called Lancaster and asked if Revelle's opinions had changed, Lancaster told Gore that shortly before Revelle's death, Revelle and he had talked about the paper, that Revelle was unhappy about the situation, and hoped that the paper would sink without a trace. From this Lancaster concluded that Revelle was not active in the writing of the paper, although his name appeared as co-author and he had met with Singer at Singer's insistence.

Lancaster reviewed the Cosmos paper in detail with C.D. Keeling, both being at Scripps.

Keeling and I agreed that there were too many misleading and inaccurate statements in the Cosmos article for Roger to have been carefully, attentively and enthusiastically "writing" or "authoring the Cosmos paper

At about the same time another colleague of Revelle at Scripps, Walter Munk and Ed Frieman wrote to the Cosmos Journal that

"S. Fred Singer wrote the paper, and as a courtesy added Roger as a co-author based upon his willingness to review the manuscript and advise on aspects relating to sea level rise."

This was published also in Oceanography 5 (1992) 125. Keeling and Lancaster also wrote the the New Republic, but that letter was not published. Still the Cosmos article continued to be pushed by the denialists. George Will stuck his oar in (easy enough to guess the slime who showed up to this party) trying to show that Revelle had had a deathbed conversion on the issue of global warming. Revelle's daughter wrote back for the family that George should stop smoking those funny cigarettes.

The third party candidate in the 1992 US presidential election, William Stockdale, raised the issue again to Al Gore. Gore replied that the article did not represent Revelle's opinion and that Revelle's family was very disturbed about its use.

At about that time, Lancaster recommended to the CRC press that the article not be reprinted, or if reprinted it should carry some warning language. It was printed anyhow. Singer was disinvited from the Revelle Memorial Symposium. In addition, Lancaster had expressed his opinion about the authorship of the papers in his Revelle Memorial Symposium article. Singer sued. It was a classic SLAPP suit. Lancaster did not have the resources to contest it, serving as his own lawyer. Finally, under the entreaties of his wife, he caved. However, he is still around, and occasionally comments on the matter on various blogs.

Anyone perplexed by this Balling/Revelle/Gore story might want to examine the sworn testimony of one S. Fred Singer at the following site: http://home.att.net/~espi/Cosmos_myth.htmlBalling didn't cherrypick Revelle's old views, because Revelle didn't write that Cosmos article to which Balling refers. And Balling knows that Revelle didn't write it, because Balling himself was a participant in S. Fred Singer's ploy to hoodwink Revelle shortly before Revelle's death. It was a nasty, disgusting and secret business. Its purpose was to undermine Gore. It has been incredibly effective, as Singer, Michaels and Balling have successfully fed this story to a plethora of secondary bloggers who are happy to add their echo to the rant.Crandall and Singer's chapter in the Hoover volume, published online is a mass of misinformation. I encourage anyone interested to examine the primary evidence and draw their own conclusions.

and

This shameful manipulation and exploitation of the life and teaching of a great scientist and humanitarian cannot stand. For my friend and colleague, for all those who have been misled by this Cosmos myth, and for the honor of a courageous and committed politician and journalist, it is important that I hereby fully rescind and repudiate my 1994 retraction and make available the evidence that supports my statements.

UPDATE: Eli found this all too depressing. He went and read a tribute to Roger Revelle, by one of his closest friends and collaborators, Walter Munk. Things are a bit better.