Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Meteorologists are Scientists you know

Mark Alexander wrote about the politics and science of global warming, and from that I'd like to director your attention to this article from September 2005 in Discover Magazine. Some people want to kvetch about the scientific consensus in support of global warming. So I present you with this:

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.

The guy answering the questions is somebody you might have heard of; noted hurricane scientist Dr. William Gray from Colorado State University.

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1 Comments:

Blogger David K. Kyle said...

I would like to purpose a wild theory of mine if you don’t mind. I think the cooling period from the mid forties to the seventies was caused by the Cold War. The heating up of the planet had to coincide with the Iran Hostage Situation, Grenada, Panama, Bosnia, Kosovo, and of course Afghanistan and Iraq. They just have to be related because the data corresponds.

9:34 PM  

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