True on all counts, but that does not necessarily mean that the musician’s views on politics are a result of false authority. It is possible, for example, for one person to have a degree in astrophysics, be a star athlete and an authority on politics - especially one who has been around a while.
(Yeah, I actually knew a guy who fit my example)
Let me try to help you out.
The fact that Mims has studied the atmosphere as a self-taught nerd is irrelevant. He may know something about it but I can assure you that Richard Lindzen, former professor of atmospheric physics at MIT, now retired, knows a great deal more. The didn’t prevent Lindzen from being an unscrupulous liar and shill for the denialist lobby when he wasn’t doing his day job. He did reasonable science when he was publishing in reputable journals, and he bloviated complete bullshit when he was opining in the Wall Street Journal or lecturing to a bunch of denialist yokels at some town hall. Some of the stuff he’s said to lay audiences he would never dare say to fellow scientists or they’d tear him apart. But for some reason he seems to enjoy toying with the yokels.
If Lindzen as a professor emeritus from MIT can have a Jekyll and Hyde personality, I presume that a hobbyist dilettante like Mims can as well, especially in view of the fact that he seems to believe that humanity came into being when God created Adam 6000 years ago and then pulled out a rib and created Eve, and all would have been well except for that talking snake. Or something.
Here’s an example of Mims in action. He’s an illustrious “guest blogger” at one of the most reprehensible, deceptive, lying climate denialist garbage websites in existence. And he’s making the point that a NASA study on atmospheric water vapor called NVAP-M shows no increase over the observation period – my goodness, they even say so themselves! And moreover, to quote the illustrious Mims, now getting really worked up into a denialist lather, "Climate modelers assume that water vapor, the principle greenhouse gas, will increase with carbon dioxide, but the NVAP-M study shows this has not occurred. Carbon dioxide has continued to increase, but global water vapor has not. "
Well, I guess the whole climate change “theory” is pretty much debunked, amirite?
This is all total utter bullshit of absolutely stellar proportions. First of all NVAP was a series of observations designed to study weather from the standpoint of how the distribution of atmospheric water may be changing, not to study climate trends; the 1988-2009 period was too short for significant trends to necessarily be observed; and most importantly, the complex observations had not been sufficiently reanalyzed to identify trends anyway. The team stated that “no robust trends could be identified” at that time in view of those factors, nor were they even particularly looking for any. Meanwhile, lots of other observations are available that are far more robust and appropriate that do show water vapor trends, both in the troposphere and stratosphere.
The claim about water vapor tracking CO2 is deceptive. It obviously doesn’t track CO2 directly, but it equally obviously does track air temperature as a consequence of basic physics (see Clausius-Clapeyron relation). As the IPCC stated in the latest assessment reports, “A warmer world is also a moister one, because warmer air can hold more water vapour. Global analyses show that specific humidity, which measures the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, has increased over both the land and the oceans.” And, just as an aside, Mims’ statement about water vapor being a “greenhouse gas” is kind of true from a modeling standpoint but it’s deceptive because it’s strictly a feedback and not a primary forcing, since it’s just a response to temperature. Also, Mims doesn’t know the difference between “principle” and “principal”.
It has incontrovertibly done so. See Fig. 2.30, Sec 2.54 Surface Humidity, Chapter 2, IPCC AR5 WG1, with four different datasets showing significant rise over the period 1973-2012. Water vapor is a demonstrable and important feedback in the climate change balance of forcings, just like Forrest Mims is a demonstrable shameless liar.
Conga-rats, I think. You may just be the first person I’ve ever ninjaed! 
So what? My point is that Mims’ authority in one subject does not make him an authority in all.
I’ll add another point, touching on this business of being a climate “skeptic”. I object to a word with generally positive connotations being misappropriated in this way by climate change deniers. Genuine skepticism means that one requires appropriate evidence before acknowledging the truth of a proposition, and it’s fundamental to science. Those who continue to deny truths in the face of abundant and overwhelming evidence are not practicing science, they are simply deniers and are more akin to witch doctors. They’re simply dishonest and what they are practicing is willful ignorance, not science. They are doing a disservice to the public by undermining public confidence in a vital area of public policy.
From what I’ve seen of Mims, like the example I previously cited, he is not averse to engaging in deception in order to advance a denialist agenda. The neologism “denialist” has come to denote those who dedicate themselves to persistently undermining the evidence for anthropogenic climate change using dishonest methods, misleading statements, and/or outright lies and deception. Mims certainly appears to be in that category. The fact that he blogs for a dishonest and discredited denialist website tells you everything you need to know about his credibility, and the fact that he’s an ID creationist tells you everything you need to know about his lack of respect for scientific rigor.
And that includes the resulting verbal slap fight with Martin Gardner.
I was already able to suggest it was almost 20 years ago when I mentioned him in this old thread ten years ago. Mims beliefs are indeed very, very old news.
Carefully reading back through, it seems I never said anything of the sort. But thanks for the observation, I suppose.