Orgone Petition

The Cato institute has produced its latest list of over 100 "prominent climate scientists" contesting the theory of AGW. For the most part, it is the same old same old: retired weathermen, and experts from unrelated fields that "went emeritus" two decades ago. However, the good Eli from Rabbett Run has uncovered a particularly nutty nutter among the bunch: James DeMeo, Ph.D, University Of Kansas (retired).

DeMeo has been investigating the work of the late Dr. Wilhelm Reich since 1970, and founded OBRL in 1978. With cooperative assistance from a network of professionals and institutes supportive of Wilhelm Reich's original discoveries, OBRL has grown to become one of the world's primary centers for genuine and uncompromised research and educational programs focused upon Orgonomy, the science of orgone (life) energy functions in nature, as developed by Reich in the first half of the 20th Century.

This doesn't quite give you the flavour of Reich's (and therefore DeMeo's) nuttiness, however. From his wiki page:

In 1940, Reich built boxes called orgone accumulators to concentrate atmospheric orgone energy; some were for lab animals, and some were large enough for a human being to sit inside. Reich said orgone was the “primordial cosmic energy”, blue in color, which he claimed was omnipresent and responsible for such things as weather, the color of the sky, gravity, the formation of galaxies, and the biological expressions of emotion and sexuality. Composed of alternating layers of ferrous metals and organic insulators with a high dielectric constant, his orgone accumulators had the appearance of a large, hollow capacitor. It was the construction of these boxes that caught the attention of the press, leading to wild rumors that they were “sex boxes” which caused uncontrollable erections.[22] Based on experiments with the orgone accumulator, he argued that orgone energy was a negatively-entropic force in nature which was responsible for concentrating and organizing matter.

Not sure how much time Mr. DeMeo has spent crouched inside his accumulator, but he claims to have employed one of Mr. Reich's other contraptions, a "cloudbuster", designed to drain clouds of their orgone, to successfully end droughts "across the USA and overseas as well". Hence his interest in AGW, I would assume.

PS. My knowledge of Reich actually predates Wiki, by the way. Saul Bellow was a huge Reich fan, and I was forced to study Bellow for a whole term many years ago.