Richard Lindzen: limited understanding?

A recent WUWT post by Richard Lindzen is a rather lame attempt to defend an equally lame opinion piece by Freeman Dyson in the Boston Globe. Evidently, Lindzen felt the need to defend Dyson’s piece because it was rather roundly refuted in a response by 8 members of the faculty of MIT.

Nature’s Thermometer

One of the most common designs for a thermometer works by measuring the volume of a fluid — one which expands when it heats and shrinks when it cools. The classic example of such a “thermometric liquid” is mercury, a liquid metal. Usually the fluid is enclosed in a container (often, a glass tube) so that when it expands it climbs to a greater height. By the height of the fluid, we can deduce the temperature.