Frederick Seitz died earlier this week at age 96. He was a highly honored physicist, the former president of both Rockefeller University and the National Academy of Sciences, and, oh yeah, one of the first modern-day climate change skeptics.

We have no intention to speak ill of the dead, and in fact we find Seitz's life history to be fascinating. While a graduate student in the 1930s, he helped to develop the method for calculating the cohesive energy of a metal. He led NAS from 1962 to 1969, and President Nixon later presented him with the National Medal of Science for his work on modern quantum theory.

It wasn't until the 1990s, as talk of global warming began to gain traction in the science community, that Seitz began to speak out against the growing consensus. He dismissed the chances of major global warming as "inconsequential", and In 1998, he solicited thousands of scientists to sign an eight-page petition against the Kyoto protocol. That petition led to the National Academy of Sciences taking the very unusual step of refuting one of it former presidents.

Seitz also gained notoriety for arguing that scientific evidence did not support the idea that chlorofluorocarbons damage the planet's ozone layer.

The man was obviously brilliant, and probably had more credentials to his name than the combined total of all 19 "scientists" who attended the Heartland Institute's climate change conference this week. But in the end, Seitz probably should have just stuck with physics, leaving the climatology to others.