In a recent entry, I summarized the sentiment’s of the Royal Society’s Lord May. In his valedictory anniversary speech to the Society, he commented on the chief U.S. climate change negotiator. He said this person was a lawyer, and that the only reason the U.S. would have a lawyer in this role is to defend the indefensible.
I did my homework on Mr. Watson, our chief climate change negotiator. You can “find his bio”:http://www.state.gov/g/oes/rls/12218.htm on the web. If you look, you’ll see that he “earned a B.A. in physics from Western Illinois University, a Ph.D. in solid state physics from Iowa State University, and an M.A. in Economics from Georgetown University”. Not only that, but he had a post-doc at Argonne National Labs. Sounds like either Lord May was referring to another person, or was way off the mark on this guy.
That said, it’s even more reprehensible that Mr. Watson confuses the pattern of climate change and the links between human development and this change with specific severe weather events that may or may not be directly caused (but could be part of the wider pattern). A physicist should know better, expecially a solid state physicist, where seeing the pattern is critical to understanding the phenomenon.
