Nature, not man, is to blame, Gore critic insists
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003946751_nobelgray13.html CHARLOTTE, N.C. — One of the world's foremost meteorologists Friday called the theory that helped Al Gore win a share of the Nobel Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works."
William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, spoke to a packed lecture hall at UNC Charlotte and said humans are not responsible for the warming of the Earth.
His visit, arranged through the meteorology program at the university, came on the same day that Gore was honored for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.
"We're brainwashing our children," said Gray, 78, a professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie ('An Inconvenient Truth') and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."
Gray, whose annual forecasts of the number of tropical storms and hurricanes are widely publicized, said instead that a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures — related to the amount of salt in ocean water — is responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place.
It Looks as though he is yet another paid shill of the EXXON-MOBIL Climate Denialists machine....
http://www.prwatch.org/fakenews2/vnr40<snip>
In June 2006, the broadcast PR firm Medialink Worldwide put out a video news release (VNR) titled, "Global Warming and Hurricanes: All Hot Air?" In accompanying materials, the firm identified "TCS Daily Science Roundtable" as the client behind the segment. But Medialink didn't disclose that TCS Daily is a website published by Tech Central Station and was, at the time, a project of the Republican lobbying and PR firm DCI Group. (In October 2006, DCI sold the TCS Daily website.) Or that DCI Group counts among its clients ExxonMobil. Or that ExxonMobil gave the Tech Central Science Foundation $95,000 in 2003, for "climate change support."
The VNR features Dr. William Gray and Dr. James J. O'Brien, who are identified as "two of the nation's top weather and ocean scientists." Gray denies that there's any link between global warming and the severity of recent hurricane seasons. "We don't think that's the case," he says. "This is the way nature sometimes works." The VNR attributes increased hurricane activity to "the cycle of nature."
In reality, the link between climate change and hurricane severity not been disproved. "No one doubts that since the early 1990s storms have increased in their intensity and no one doubts that average sea temperatures have increased slightly over the past 30 years," explained Andrew Buncombe in an August 2006 article for The Independent. "Whether there is a link between these two phenomena remains unanswered."
Peer-reviewed scientific studies on the issue have reached conflicting conclusions, though an in-depth analysis reported in September 2006 found "a large human influence" on rising sea-surface temperatures, which lead to stronger hurricanes. The same month, Nature magazine reported on a position paper from federal scientists that linked intensified hurricanes to global warming; the document was reportedly quashed by the Bush administration.
The TCS Daily VNR is correct in identifying Drs. Gray and O'Brien as meteorologists with extensive experience predicting hurricanes. However, Gray appears to have an ideological axe to grind with regard to climate change. In June 2006, he told the Denver Post that global warming is a "hoax," something that "they've been brainwashing us
for 20 years."
AND he is known for quoting the psycho Inhofe!..... :crazy:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/04/gray-on-agw/
Gray and Muddy Thinking about Global Warming
Anybody who has followed press reporting on global warming, and particularly on its effects on hurricanes, has surely encountered various contrarian pronouncements by William Gray, of Colorado State University. A meeting paper that Gray provided in advance of the 2006 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology (taking place this week in Monterey California, and covered here by CNN), provides an illuminating window into Gray's thinking on the subject. Our discussion is not a point-by-point rebuttal of Gray's claims; there is far more wrong with the paper than we have the patience to detail. Gray will have plenty of opportunities to hear more about the work's shortcomings if it is ever subjected to the rigors of peer review. Here we will only highlight a few key points which illustrate the fundamental misconceptions on the physics of climate that underlie most of Gray's pronouncements on climate change and its causes.
Gray's paper begins with a quote from Senator Inhofe calling global warming a hoax perpetrated on the American people, and ends with a quote by a representive of the Society of Petroleum Geologists stating that Crichton's State of Fear has "the absolute ring of truth." It is the gaping flaws in the scientific argument sandwiched between these two statements that are our major concern.
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