Says Emeritus Professor Gray:
“We’re brainwashing our children. They’re going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.”
“The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures.”
“It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong but they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out. I don’t care about grants.”
Imagine that. One of the world’s foremost atmospheric scientists saying that scientists are afraid to say what they believe because of the personal financial consequences of going against the popular, fashionable, politically correct “scientific consensus”. Sound familiar? Atmospheric scientists are the newest victims, joining scientists who openly question evolutionary dogma, in the war against open scientific inquiry. I fear science may be a long time recovering from these shameful political agenda driven displays. It’s a good thing engineers don’t try to base technological innovation on hare-brained just-so stories like these that escape from academia to the main stream media.
(b. 1931), Ph.D., is a pioneer in the science of forecasting hurricanes. In 1952 he got a BS degree in Geography from George Washington University, in 1959 he got a MS in Meteorology from the University of Chicago, where he went on to get a PhD in Geophysical Sciences in 1964.
Gray pioneered the concept of “seasonal” hurricane forecasting — predicting months in advance the severity of the coming hurricane season. Gray’s prognostications, issued since 1983, are used by insurance companies to calculate premiums. [1]
Gray is Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU), and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences. Gray is noted for his forecasts of Atlantic hurricane season activity.
Professor Gray served as a weather forecaster for the United States Air Force, and as a research assistant in the University of Chicago Department of Meteorology. He joined Colorado State University in 1961. He has been advisor of over 70 Ph. D. and M. Sc. students. His team has been issuing seasonal hurricane forecasts since 1984.
Steve Lytte, for The Sydney Morning Herald
October 14, 2007ONE of the world’s foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize “ridiculous” and the product of “people who don’t understand how the atmosphere works”.
Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.
His comments came on the same day that the Nobel committee honoured Mr Gore for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.
“We’re brainwashing our children,” said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. “They’re going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.”
At his first appearance since the award was announced in Oslo, Mr Gore said: “We have to quickly find a way to change the world’s consciousness about exactly what we’re facing.”
Mr Gore shared the Nobel prize with the United Nations climate panel for their work in helping to galvanise international action against global warming.
But Dr Gray, whose annual forecasts of the number of tropical storms and hurricanes are widely publicised, said a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures – related to the amount of salt in ocean water – was responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place.
However, he said, that same cycle meant a period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.
“We’ll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was,” Dr Gray said.
During his speech to a crowd of about 300 that included meteorology students and a host of professional meteorologists, Dr Gray also said those who had linked global warming to the increased number of hurricanes in recent years were in error.
He cited statistics showing there were 101 hurricanes from 1900 to 1949, in a period of cooler global temperatures, compared to 83 from 1957 to 2006 when the earth warmed.
“The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures,” Dr Gray said.
He said his beliefs had made him an outsider in popular science.
“It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong,” he said. “But they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out. I don’t care about grants.”
People sometimes ask me why I encourage posts on global warming here at UD, whose focus is ID. The reason is that global warming exhibits many of the same abuses of science that we see in the ID debate. Science has become a wonderful tool for social control. This role of science in modern secular culture is destructive and needs to be broken.
The authorities have spoken. Al Gore and the IPCC have won the Nobel Peace Prize, what else is there to discuss ?
/sarc
PLAN A: Ignore him.
It’s no accident, even though the event occurred in the US, that the story was reported by a foreign newspaper. Has anyone found a link to it on a major news site outside of Drudge?
PLAN B: Character assassination.
“Credentials-credsmintzals. We’ve brought down bigger game than he. I’m mean the guy’s obviously in the pocket of Big Insurance…”
Blah-blah-blah. Cough-gag-wretch.
Bill,
A preemptive strike on complaints that we shouldn’t talk about intelligent design and global warming on the same page? Maybe we should go beyond the similarties in dirty tactics used to cram “settled science” down the throats of honest skeptics and examine the earth’s climate control for evidence of design. I mean it’s nothing short of miraculous that the earth’s climate has self-adjusted for billions of years to maintain a suitable environment for the biosphere. Even more miraculous is that global warming and a boost in atomospheric CO2 is coming along just in time to feed the growing human population by thawing out vast tracts of arable land and giving the botanical primary producers more CO2 so they grow faster while using water more efficiently. It’s almost like it was meant to happen this way.
I expect Craig Venter to succeed in engineering an artifical organism that takes sunlight, air, and water to manufacture alternatives to fossil fuels before the latter runs out. We’ll need all the sunlight, unfrozen land, and atmospheric CO2 we can get for that. In 50 years or less we’ll be wishing we had more carbon available in the atmosphere, not less, as carbon is a critical raw material in limited supply. I think Venter is within a decade of success.
jstanley
Good point about the visibility (or lack thereof) of Gray’s talk in media outlets. I really admire Matt Drudge’s commitment to balanced, non-partisan reporting. I usually read the Drudge Report several times a day.
DaveScot
Actually, I’ve googled up a Denver Post report on Dr. Gray’s views on global warming late last year, along with the views of another climatologist, from the University of Colorado, Roger Pielke Sr. (Gray, as you know, is from Colorado State). And about the same time their columnist, David Harsanyi, weighed in on Gray and Pielke’s contrarian views.
Harsanyi’s observations are well-worth a read:
Meanwhile, some months earlier, a Washington Post blurb, titled The Tempest, had already begun laying the groundwork for the aforementioned character assassination of Dr. Gray.
Also, Pielke’s final observations on his blog (which has been discontinued) about the IPCC are worth a careful read:
Better not hold our breaths.
People sometimes ask me why I encourage posts on global warming here at UD, whose focus is ID. The reason is that global warming exhibits many of the same abuses of science that we see in the ID debate. Science has become a wonderful tool for social control. This role of science in modern secular culture is destructive and needs to be broken.
Exactly!
Well, it’s not like the Nobel committee has Judge Jones on it. Otherwise, the issue would be completely settled for all time. Tag, You’re it, No tag-backs.
Gary Taubes’ recent article in the “Times” about the collapse of the mythic connection between fat and heart disease is also instructive. For 50 years it made no difference what the actual evidence said, seen again and again in clincal studies. There was an enticing theory, and there was massive cultural investment in the theory; nothing else mattered. The modern addiction to theory has now been shown to be bad for one’s health–literally. Theory is too vulnerable to human vanity to be reliable. The end of Modernism will come, then, with the insistence that theory be substanitated by experience.
“the mythic connection between fat and heart disease ”
Aye. Let’s explode those other myths while we’re at it, all of them based on a conflation of correlation and causation. The scientific blood will flow, but oh, the bright dawn that awaits. Bring it on.
DaveScot,
the global weather system is what I pointed out in an earlier post regarding the South Pole ice cap growing at record size in balance to the North Pole, but several ignored in favor of snarking…
The Southpole ice cap growth this year broke all records going back to 1979 when first measurements were taken. Is this not “peculiar” that it corresponds to North record changes?
Changes are taking place. But what? What are all the “correlations” involved to climate.
Snark aside, this it not merely about human causation and there is great evidence here of a wonderful balancing act heretofore unseen I think at these levels.
I think that the Chinese and Russian level of pollution especially soot as you’ve pointed out previously is overlooked. But, what is interesting is a balance in the South.
“They’ve been brainwashing us for 20 years,” Gray says. “Starting with the nuclear winter and now with the global warming. This scare will also run its course. In 15-20 years, we’ll look back and see what a hoax this was.”
I sure hope we look back on it as a hoax, but the history of environmental alarmism says otherwise. How much mainsteam press do you read that “looks back” at the global cooling scare of the ’70’s, the giant ever-growing antarctic ozone hole that was going to wipe us out, and Paul Erlich’s 60’s predictions of global starvation? Are they all routinely laughed off as Chicken Little stories? No, they are simply erased from history.
When the global warming scare loses its steam won’t there just be a new enviro-panic to take its place?
Dr. Dembski said re: allowing comparisons of science fields…
“The reason is that global warming exhibits many of the same abuses of science that we see in the ID debate. Science has become a wonderful tool for social control. This role of science in modern secular culture is destructive and needs to be broken.”
Exhibit 1)
scientist should “censor themselves” in favor of “orthodoxy?”
Are scientist opinions ever free of political pressures? From either side? In Global Warming or ID/evo debates?
According to Nick Matzke one should “censor themselves…” in favor of the Darwinian party line as he chastizes Dr Koonin recently in his use of words. Nothing to do with science at all, just words.
Nick Matzke says…
“Until this week I worked at the National Center for Science Education, where we oppose the ID/creationists and develop a finely-tuned sense of the sorts of things they will pluck from the literature and desperately portray as evidence that they aren’t completely nuts. However, I am well aware that telling scientists to censor themselves to avoid giving creationists talking points is a non-starter, so hopefully my comments came out as being substantive rather than just the boring voice of orthodoxy.”
Certainly, all Heil…
Science is not apolitical.
The “boring voice” insist all komrades adhere to the priestly doctrine of Darwin.
A Darwin Thoughtminder poisons the legitimate debate and the opposition with name-calling as “nuts” and reminds those of weak minds giving in to tempation not to stray from Master Darwin or materialist principles.
HT: evolutionnews.org
———————————-
Censorship there, Censorship here
The movie by Al Gore was about another example of “boring orthodoxy” censoring information that might be miscontrued by the “nuts” as weak points in the global warming hypothesis.
Liberal news outlets as well employ such censoring of information. Howard Kutz did this on CNN in his thrashing of Ann Coulter recently at the conniving of Donny Deutsch. If you watched the presentation by CNN, you’d think her the villain. When in fact, important facts were not played for the audience.
Very few people are objective these days. By omitting key words, key data, key ideas, and parsing half truths, then “lies by omission” are told. The reader or viewer is left to draw conclusions upon watered down talking points that omit crucial truths cut in favorable bias of the presenter(s) on any subject or field.
Since majority of todays media is liberal left, the majority of talking points are in their favor and omission of truth left out in favor of opposition on most all subjects today. This is true in academia, follywood, tv and print.
Even with with internet blogging and talk radio the overwhelming amount of airspace is still in the hands of left “orthodoxy” with an agenda to push.
Evolutionary ideas of RM & NS is so entrenched in our society, so indoctrinated in our youth, it is difficult to get fair time.
It is good to see some fighting back in global climate variation causes and questioning consensus thinking. It is also good to see attempts at honest science by Dr. Koonin, even if thinks ID crazy himself, he knows the evidence leads to “ready-made”(oops, slash that out because of thought-minder Nick Matzke) and replace with the word “abrupt.”
If more scientist like Mr. Koonin are allowed to speak honestly(no, not about ID) in terms that are truthful without fearing censorship from Darwin Thought-Minders, the debate and discussions turn out better for science, for students and for future discoveries and creative approaches by all sides.
Eliminate neo-nazi like Darwinian thought-minding political dogmatic assertions from the orthodoxy and allow good scientist to have legitimate discussions.
so much for preview… correction,
replace
“allowed to speak honestly(no, not about ID)…”
with
“allowed to speak honestly(no, not favorably about ID)…”
My point is he can bash ID all he wants, but to act like Thought Police and edit his word was shameful and oppressive actions.
We are living in America, da? da?
😉
I find it interesting that ID critics don’t make more use of the anti-AGW views of many ID proponents to try to discredit ID.
One would suspect that even they are not entirely convinced by Al Gore et al.
Disclaimer: I am endorsing neither a low fat diet nor a low-carb diet, but something another person posted above caught my eye. Something about “myths . . . based on a conflation of correlation and causation.”
Let’s see what Taubes’ article in the Times states:
He states that some researchers believe “we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic that started around the early 1980’s, and that this was coincident with the rise of the low-fat dogma.”
Yep. It also happens to be coincident with personal computers, Atari, Nintendo and, later, xBox. Not to mention 50-channel, 24-hour cable TV. Schools cutting back on physical education. Microwave ovens and quick, pre-prepared meals. Fast Food Nation. The rise of the VCR and the subsequent DVD player. Blockbuster stores in each town, and later, NetFlix — you don’t even need to leave home now to get a movie. Pay-per-View and TIVO — no need to even step up from the couch.
There are plenty of well-documented and obvious changes in our collective lifestyle over the past 25-30 years. To suggest that obesity in America has been caused by the small handful of self-disciplined folks who have managed to start and stick with a low-fat diet stretches credulity. As far as reasons for an obesity epidemic, it doesn’t even make the top 10.
—————-
Now, in the spirit of staying on topic and bringing this comment back to global warming:
I’m not much of a linker, but I did run across a parody last night that I thought was just too precious not to share.
Seems Al Gore is going to start parlaying his new-found Nobel Peace Prize celebrity into combatting the other great global catastrophe confronting mankind: obesity. They’re going to set up what is termed the “Haagen-Dazs offsetting scheme.” Apparently, for every quart of ice cream you buy, some guy in India runs a lap in the forest.
ROFLMAO!
What I love most is how every “denier” is eventually linked, somehow, to ExxonMobil. I think in this case the Video News Reel that went out with this report was put together by a group that once received money from Exxon.
You can always find a link–it would be fun to track down all the connections IPCC scientists have to Exxon, too.