In order to make Pete Ridley's 2150 word long response to my "Discussion with Ridley #3" manageable I went and copied the response from his website and pasted it into a word program, then I eliminated blank lines and the resultant line numbers and word (including links) counts are what I'm using - the #s may not translate with absolute precision - please consider them rough orientation coordinates.
Since about a thousand of Ridley's words have to do with a diversion into dissing John Cook and the SkepticalScience.com team. I've decided to separate this John Cook business into it's own post, though I only quote a few words of Pete's attack. I will get back to Ridley's confusing MODTRAN song and dance in a later post.
I imagine Ridley took umbrage at my calling some of his sources "Wingnuts" because that's when he comes back at me claiming that John Cook was a scoundrel on a par of O'Sullivan.
OK sure, I should learn to use more sterile wording, but you know with all the needling Ridley dishes out, he ought to be man enough to take a little in return.
But then among contrarian types the double-standard is standard. {Incidentally, at the end of this post I offer a look at these characters Ridley puts out there as trustworthy sources - which they most certainly are not.}
In any event, Ridley took my infraction to mean it was open season on John Cook and his SkepticalScience.com team. Oddly I made no mention of John Cook nor did I quote him. What I did was share a portion of an article that was posted at SkepticalScience.com. The article was written by Riccardo who happens to have a PhD, though in materials science - and this from his SkS bio:
"Being a long time sailor, I needed to know at least the basics of meteorology. More recently I developed the interest in climate science and thought that I could take advantage of my background in physics to study and communicate it."
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I'd like to ask Pete Ridley: what's wrong with having someone like that report on the state of knowledge regarding GHGs and their respective convective equilibrium, radiative equilibrium and such?
