Dr. William Gray is a vocal opponent of the anthropogenic global warming theory and recently took issue with Dr. James Hansen of NASA's GISS.
Last week we wrote about an extremely strongly worded letter from William Gray to the American Meteorological Society (AMS) objecting to their awarding James Hansen their highest award. This letter pits two of the giants in meteorology and climatology against each other in the debate over manmade climate change and global warming.
The letter itself (available here on icecap.us) takes issue with some of the decision making processes within the AMS which is not particularly relevant to us. What is revealing however is Dr. Gray’s arguments against the global warming theory and Dr. Hansen’s research. Today we will take a look at the discussion in the letter about Dr. Hansen himself and his credentials.
For those that aren’t familiar with him, Dr. Gray is a Professor Emeritus of Colorado State University who is best known for his hurricane forecasts. He is a highly trained and respected meteorologist with decades of practical experience in monitoring the earth and its climate.
In the letter he points out that Dr. Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), is not a trained climatologist nor a meteorologist. His formal background is actually in astronomy which does make one wonder how he has become one of the primary mouthpieces for anthropogenic global warming (AGW), or manmade climate change.
Battle of the climate scientists - William Gray versus James Hansen.
Certainly the debate over manmade climate change and global warming can get heated at times (pun intended). Today that went to a new level pitting William (Bill) Gray, Professor Emeritus of Colorado State University who is best known for his hurricane forecasts against James Hansen of NASA’s GISS division and devout climate change advocate.
Bill Gray has long been warning that the threat of manmade climate change is not real. In his own words, “I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people. I’ve been in meteorology over 50 years. I’ve worked damn hard, and I’ve been around. My feeling is some of us older guys who’ve been around have not been asked about this. It’s sort of a baby boomer, yuppie thing.”
On the other side James Hansen has become Al Gore’s best friend thanks to his sometimes outlandish claims about the effects of global warming. He recently warned that President Obama has ‘four years to save the world’ and was quoted as saying, “We cannot afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead.”
The latest battle is over the decision of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) to grant its highest award, the Rossby Research Medal, to Hansen. In a seven page letter to the AMS titled “On The Hijacking of the American Meteorological Society,” Mr. Hansen no longer seems willing to be outshouted in the debate over global warming.
John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, is an outspoken critic of the global warming theory.
John Coleman is the founder of The Weather Channel and an outspoken critic of the global warming theory. In years past he has called global warming “the greatest scam in history” and has called for suing Al Gore and others that hype the theory in order to force a debate on the merits of it.
As he has done in the past, Mr. Coleman advocates that global warming is a hoax and nothing more. He says we have taken a “dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have lead to a rise in public awareness that CO2 is not a pollutant and is not a significant greenhouse gas that is triggering runaway global warming.”
Mr. Coleman provides some interesting background on how former Vice President Al Gore came to become such an advocate for the manmade climate change theory.
A pretty interesting headline isn’t that? I admit that is probably a bit more sensationalistic than what is really called for. However, that would seem to be one of the conclusions from the author and analyst of a recent survey.
3,146 earth scientists from various areas of expertise were surveyed for their opinions and in many ways, the data was not surprising. Two questions were key to the study:
Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels?
Has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?
This illustration depicts the warming that scientists have determined has occurred in West Antarctica during the last 50 years. Image: NASA
In all the talk about global warming and manmade climate change, one thing that was always missing from the discussion was any talk about Antarctica. The continent on the bottom of the world was not fitting the pattern that global warming advocates were seeing – it simply wasn’t getting warmer there. In fact, it seemed to actually be getting cooler.
A new study released in the latest issue of Nature challenges the facts though as we understood them. By going further than previous work and using satellite data, the study claims that Antarctica in fact has been warming – we just didn’t know it. Satellites proved useful in coming to the study’s conclusions and filling in gaps because the continent, which is twice the size of the United States, has few monitoring stations in its interior.
The problem with this claim? It looks like not everyone agrees on the methods the authors used. Even those that are firm believers in the manmade climate change theory aren’t so sure this study is accurate!
The polar bears won't be happy! New UK climate change computer emits as much CO2 as 2,400 homes.
In a bit of an embarrassment for the UK Met Office (the equivalent to our National Weather Service), it was discovered that a new supercomputer they have to calculate the effects of climate change emits 14,400 tons of CO2 a year. As reported by TimesOnline, that is the same amount of CO2 that 2,400 homes emit in an entire year.
The Met Office has justified the use of the super-polluting computer saying that the work done on it saves more CO2 than it uses. The Met Office Director of Science and Technology is quoted as saying, “We recognize that running such massive computers consumes huge amounts of power and that our actions in weather and climate prediction, like all our actions, have an impact on the environment. We will be taking actions to minimize this impact.” At a cost of £33m ($45 million USD), the new computer isn’t cheap either!
Extremely high clouds, known as deep convective clouds, are typically associated with severe storms and rainfall. In this AIRS image of Hurricane Katrina, taken August 28, 2005, the day before Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, the eye of the storm was surrounded by a "super cluster" of 528 deep convective clouds (depicted in dark blue). The temperatures of the tops of such clouds are colder than 210 degrees Kelvin (-82 degrees Fahrenheit). Image credit: NASA/JPL
Scientists are NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA recently released the results of a study that determined that global warming is causing an increase in high clouds and a corresponding increase in severe storms and rainfall. This is not unlike previous warnings issued by some scientists, in particular those warnings of an increase in hurricane intensity and frequency in the Atlantic. Thus far those previous warnings have not bore out. Will this one?
PASADENA, Calif. — The frequency of extremely high clouds in Earth’s tropics — the type associated with severe storms and rainfall — is increasing as a result of global warming, according to a study by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
In a presentation today to the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, JPL Senior Research Scientist Hartmut Aumann outlined the results of a study based on five years of data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA’s Aqua spacecraft. The AIRS data were used to observe certain types of tropical clouds linked with severe storms, torrential rain and hail. The instrument typically detects about 6,000 of these clouds each day. Aumann and his team found a strong correlation between the frequency of these clouds and seasonal variations in the average sea surface temperature of the tropical oceans.
For every degree Centigrade (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in average ocean surface temperature, the team observed a 45-percent increase in the frequency of the very high clouds. At the present rate of global warming of 0.13 degrees Celsius (0.23 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade, the team inferred the frequency of these storms can be expected to increase by six percent per decade.
Climate modelers have long speculated that the frequency and intensity of severe storms may or may not increase with global warming. Aumann said results of the study will help improve their models.
“Clouds and rain have been the weakest link in climate prediction,” said Aumann. “The interaction between the daytime warming of the sea surface under clear-sky conditions and increases in the formation of low clouds, high clouds and, ultimately, rain is very complicated. The high clouds in our observations—typically at altitudes of 20 kilometers (12 miles) and higher—present the greatest difficulties for current climate models, which aren’t able to resolve cloud structures smaller than about 250 kilometers (155 miles) in size.”
Aumann said the results of his study, published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, are consistent with another NASA-funded study by Frank Wentz and colleagues in 2005. That study found an increase in the global rain rate of 1.5 percent per decade over 18 years, a value that is about five times higher than the value estimated by climate models that were used in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
JPL manages the AIRS project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For more information on AIRS, visit http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/ .
To think we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant.
– Chad Myers, CNN Meteorologist
Myers continued:
“Mother Nature is so big. The world is so big. The oceans are so big. I think we’re going to die from a lack of fresh water or die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure. But this is like you said, in your career; my career has been 22 years long. That’s a good career in TV. But in talking about climate, it is like having a car for three days and saying this is a great car. Yes, it was for three days, but maybe in day five, six and seven it won’t be so good. That’s what we’re doing here. We have a hundred years worth of data, not millions of years that the world has been around.”
This was a pretty interesting exchange. Check out the video below. You can also find a transcript here.
This article was also posted to the Denver Weather Examiner site. Get more local news and information on Examiner.com.
In this GISS image, incorrect data shows much of Russia under a heat wave in October.
Scientists at NOAA and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) announced last week that October global temperatures were the hottest on record. Naturally this caused quite a bit of hubbub and had the global warming alarmists in quite an uproar. As we wrote about previously, the year has been cooler than normal in North America but this new data showed that Asia experienced record high temperatures last month. Word of the “hottest October on record” quickly spread of course.
In a bit of an embarrassment for NOAA and GISS, their claims were short lived when two blogger meteorologists went through the data and found a number of anomalies. They discovered at least 10 Russian stations that oddly enough reported the exact same temperatures as September. Well, since October is almost always cooler than September in the northern hemisphere they did some checking and found that GISS had used the incorrect data and it influenced the calculations significantly.
Al Gore's infamous "hockey stick" graph that was used in An Inconvenient Truth was quickly debunked as were a number of other "facts" used in the movie.
When GISS and NOAA recalculated October’s temperatures it dropped the month to the 2nd warmest on record and that is significant. However, these types of problems serve only to fuel doubt in the minds of climate change skeptics and highlight the need for more careful analysis and a level-headed approach to studying the subject – from both sides of the discussion.
Al Gore advocates 'emergency rescue of human civilization.'
In an editorial in the New York Times last week, Al Gore made his case with a plan to, “begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.”
Framing his argument with today’s economic uncertaintly, he advocates an extensive jobs program centered around environmental related works. According to Gore, his plan would put millions to work while helping to ensure our ‘survival’ against the spectre of manmade climate change.
“Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.”
– Al Gore, November 9, 2008
Mr. Gore advocates a number of solutions and alternative fuel sources. Interestingly enough, nuclear power is not included in his proposals despite the fact that it is one of the most powerful and environmentally sound solutions available.
