Storm over global-warming sceptic hurricane man - April 29, 2008
Update 30/05/08: Gray calls the uproar a ‘non-story’
Earlier this month we noted the controversy that greeted this year’s hurricane predictions from Colorado State University academic William Gray. Now it seems Gray’s future is in jeopardy.
According to a story in the Houston Chronicle, CSU feels all the media curfuffle around the annual predictions is taking too much staff time. Gray thinks otherwise.
“This is obviously a flimsy excuse and seems to me to be a cover for the Department’s capitulation to the desires of some (in their own interest) who want to reign [sic] in my global warming and global warming-hurricane criticisms,” said Gray in a memo written when he was informed of the decision last year (read the memo).
Wikipedia has a whole section on his climate change position, which he’s also outlined in a BBC opinion piece. And as the Chronicle’s science blog notes, CSU’s excuse is slightly strange:
I contacted a handful of public relations professionals who found that excuse to be, at best, questionable. University media offices exist to get press for their schools. Gray delivered that in spades with his hurricane forecasts.
CSU denies that Gray’s views on global warming have anything to do with it. Most of the forecasting work is currently done by Gray’s former student Phil Klotzbach and CSU says it will continue to support the forecasts as long as is involved.
Still, by the time the story had reached FoxNews, it had become “a pioneering expert on hurricane forecasting may be out of a job due to the debate over global warming”.
Gray has been semi-retired for some time now anyway. Still, here comes the outrage:
Kaos Radio sees parallels with Expelled:
Ben Stein is a genius. Not only that, but liberals can’t help themselves proving him right.
‘Enviro-Nuts attack Hurricane Pioneer’, says the Mark’s Soap Box blog:
They hate people who speak out against their Dogma, and they attack when you don’t bow down at the alter [sic] of “global warming”. Their target now is the founder of Hurricane prediction, Dr William Gray.
The Secondhand Smoke blog also sees it in terms of stifling scientific orthodoxy:
All around the country and the world, scientists who don't fall in line on human cloning, global warming, neo-Darwinism, and other issues in which the Science Establishment demands lockstep thinking, find themselves being pushed aside--ironically, by the very types who vociferously criticize the Catholic Church for its treatment of Galileo.
[Hat tip: Roger Pielke Jr’s Prometheus blog]
Image: NOAA
Comments
Support to Dr. William Gray
Larry Edward Penley, President of Colorado State University
Sir, please go ahead and sack William Gray, it will only serve to confirm how rotten to the core the entire scientific community has become in the face of free money for research into the causes of global warming, provided of course that those causes point towards carbon dioxide as the culprit.
Science is about debate, argument, counter-argument, dissent, verifiable and falsifiable proof, observations - not about following a dogma just so you get a grant for your research.
For your scientific interest, carbon dioxide does not effect the climate and does not influence global warming. It never has, never will and never can. But then you wouldn't want to know about that.
How is it, that after all the research, all the billions of Dollars and all the time that has passed by now, there is still not one single piece of observational evidence that links carbon dioxide to global warming? The only evidence ever presented to the world is based on programmable computers and ridiculous circumstantial events, such as 0.001% of ice falling off Antarctica or 0. 001% of glaciers melting.
But do go ahead, I am sure you are under a lot of peer pressure. Peers who have their careers and livelihoods linked into making us all believe the nonsense about 0.038% of our atmosphere going to fry us beyond sustainability.
I for one will stand firm against the bias of the scientific and bureaucratic establishment and await the day that you will disgracefully fall off your collective perches.
You ought to be deeply ashamed of your actions, your ongoing actions, in pulling the wool over the world's eyes about the effects of carbon dioxide. You do collectively not have the brain power to know what is really causing global warming.
All you have the brain power for is to wallow in your own scientific bias and peer-review processes.
Yours truly,
Posted by: S.E.Hendriksen | April 29, 2008 08:15 PM
There is something poetic to this fight, the great Truth of the age proclaiming the earth is a contained climate system separated from the cosmos and the proud denier claiming the earth's climate revolves around the sun.
Posted by: Mick | April 30, 2008 12:14 AM