Climate McCarthyism

Tidbit #1:

William Gray is a climate researcher ... a top one.

For nearly 40 years, he has toiled away at Colorado State University's Atmospheric Science building, and long before he started there, climate change had him hooked. In seventh grade, about 60 years ago, he wrote a book report predicting dust bowls because of temperature increases that had occured between 1910 and 1940.

Gray is not a big fan of the scientific piling on and accompanying media frenzy that's surrounding this global warming scare -- you know, the one that followed the global cooling scare of the 1970s, which followed the warming scare that frightened Gray in his youth.

Considering the imfamous April 3 Time Magazine with the worried looking polar bears on the cover and the headline, "BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED," he told Citizen Magazine (November issue, not yet posted online):

This is unbelievable. The most slanted thing I've ever read.

What paper could write up and say, '110 million Americans went to work today and came home without incident?' Would that make news? No.

For skepticism like this, which is evidenced through his research, Gray has been punished.

He said anyone who expresses skepticism is cut off by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) -- and that includes him.

"The Clinton Administration came in January '93," he recalled. "I had NOAA grants for 30 years before that. I never saw another NOAA grant. I was turned down 13 straight times.

He called it "a mild form of McCarthyism" against those who will not go along.

Tidbit #2

Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT. He's quoted in the same Citizen article:

"The hardest thing to communicate to the public, I think, is that the climate system can wobble without any external reason," he said. "It's always warming and cooling."

Most scientists [and C-SM] now agree it's warmer than it was in 1900, although precisely how much is still up for debate.

"It is on the order of about a degree Fahrenheit," Lindzen said. "That's pretty small. And, in point of fact, it is much smaller than (computer climate) models predict we should have seen for the amount of CO2 that has been added."

What he's saying is when the models used to predict the temperature 100 years from now are applied to today, they say it should be warmer than it is. If they can't predict 2006, what are the odds they'll be right about 2106?

What does a guy like Lindzen know about computer models anway? Oh, let's see ... Gee, he's a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

But of course the global warming debate is over.

Related Tags: Global warming