Quote of the Day

A top hurricane forecaster called Al Gore “a gross alarmist” Friday for making an Oscar-winning documentary about global warming.

“He’s one of these guys that preaches the end of the world type of things. I think he’s doing a great disservice and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Dr. William Gray said in an interview with The Associated Press at the National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans, where he delivered the closing speech.

...

Over the past 24 years, Gray, 77, has become known as America’s most reliable hurricane forecaster; recently, his mentee, Philip Klotzbach, has begun doing the bulk of the forecasting work.

AP

The IPCC released another “report” today with the usual gloom and doom predictions. They deliberately release these over the year to keep the press engaged, but it’s nothig more than the same claptrap as before.

I think Gore has probably done skeptics a huge favor by releasing his film, because skeptic scientists are starting to come out of the woodwork now. 

1. Gray has been skeptical of GW for a long time. I read an interview with him in Discover magazine a few years ago and kept it because he was right on. Link: http://discovermagazine.com/2005/sep/discover-dialogue/?searchterm=william gray

   Here is the best excerpt. Note the interesting comment on Gore at the end of it:

   You don’t believe global warming is causing climate change?

   G: No. If it is, it is causing such a small part that it is negligible. I’m not disputing that there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and ’40s, and then there was a slight global cooling from the middle ’40s to the early ’70s. And there has been warming since the middle ’70s, especially in the last 10 years. But this is natural, due to ocean circulation changes and other factors. It is not human induced.

   That must be a controversial position among hurricane researchers.

   G: Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical as hell about this whole global-warming thing. But no one asks us. If you don’t know anything about how the atmosphere functions, you will of course say, “Look, greenhouse gases are going up, the globe is warming, they must be related.” Well, just because there are two associations, changing with the same sign, doesn’t mean that one is causing the other.

   With last year’s hurricane season so active, and this year’s looking like it will be, won’t people say it’s evidence of global warming?

   G: The Atlantic has had more of these storms in the least 10 years or so, but in other ocean basins, activity is slightly down. Why would that be so if this is climate change? The Atlantic is a special basin? The number of major storms in the Atlantic also went way down from the middle 1960s to the middle ’90s, when greenhouse gases were going up.

   Why is there scientific support for the idea?

   G: So many people have a vested interest in this global-warming thing—all these big labs and research and stuff. The idea is to frighten the public, to get money to study it more. Now that the cold war is over, we have to generate a common enemy to support science, and what better common enemy for the globe than greenhouse gases?

   Are your funding problems due in part to your views?

   G: I can’t be sure, but I think that’s a lot of the reason. I have been around 50 years, so my views on this are well known. I had NOAA money for 30 some years, and then when the Clinton administration came in and Gore started directing some of the environmental stuff, I was cut off. I couldn’t get any NOAA money. They turned down 13 straight proposals from me.

   Posted by Paul T  on  04/07  at  02:46 PM
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