Update: One Meteorologist inspired by Dr. Gray’s statement below cancelled his AMS membership (not the only one) . See his note to me and the AMS response here. See in this essay by Richard Lindzen how the professional societies have been infiltrated and are now controlled by environmental extremists and opportunists with a political motive and have abandoned objective science. Earlier, I had posted a story on how the professional societies had strayed towards advocacy here.
By Dr. William Gray
I am appalled at the selection of James Hansen as this year’s recipient of the AMS’s highest award - the Rossby Research Medal. James Hansen has not been trained as a meteorologist. His formal education has been in astronomy. His long records of faulty global climate predictions and alarmist public pronouncements have become increasingly hollow and at odds with reality. Hansen has exploited the general public’s lack of knowledge of how the globe’s climate system functions for his own benefit. His global warming predictions, going back to 1988 are not being verified. Why have we allowed him go on for all these years with his faulty and alarmist prognostications? And why would the AMS give him its highest award?
The American Meteorological Society (AMS) was founded in 1919 as an organization dedicated to advancing scientific knowledge of weather and climate. It has been a wonderful beacon for fostering new understanding of how the atmosphere and oceans function. But this strong positive image is now becoming tarnished as a result of the AMS leadership’s capitulating to the lobby of the climate modelers and to the outside environmental and political pressure groups who wish to use the now AMS position on AGW to help justify the promotion of their own special interests. The effectiveness of the AMS as an objective scientific organization has been greatly compromised.
We AMS members have allowed a small group of AMS administrators, climate modelers, and CO2 warming sympathizers to maneuver the internal workings of our society to support AGW policies irrespective of what our rank-and-file members might think. This small organized group of AGW sympathizers has indeed hijacked our society.
Debate. The AMS is the most relevant of our country’s scientific societies as regards to its members having the most extensive scientific and technical background in meteorology and climate. It should have been a leader in helping to adjudicate the claims of the AGW advocates and their skeptical critics. Our country’s Anglo-Saxon derived legal system is based on the idea that the best way to get to the truth is to have opposite sides of a continuous issue present their differing views in open debate before a non partisan jury. Nothing like this has happened with regards to the AGW issue. Instead of organizing meetings with free and open debates on the basic physics and the likelihood of AGW induced climate changes, the leaders of the society (with the backing of the society’s AGW enthusiasts) have chosen to fully trust the climate models and deliberately avoid open debate on this issue. I know of no AMS sponsored conference where the AGW hypothesis has been given open and free discussion. For a long time I have wanted a forum to express my skepticism of the AGW hypothesis. No such opportunities ever came within the AMS framework. Attempts at publication of my skeptic views have been difficult. One rejection stated that I was too far out of the mainstream thinking. Another that my ideas had already been discredited. A number of AGW skeptics have told me they have had similar experiences.
The climate modelers and their supporters deny the need for open debate of the AGW question on the grounds that the issue has already been settled by their model results. They have taken this view because they know that the physics within their models and the long range of their forecast periods will likely not to be able to withstand knowledgeable and impartial review (see Appendix). They simply will not debate the issue. As a defense against criticism they have resorted to a general denigration of those of us who do not support their AGW hypothesis. AGW skeptics are sometimes tagged (I have been) as no longer being credible scientists. Skeptics are often denounced as tools of the fossil-fuel industry. A type of McCarthyism against AGW skeptics has been in display for a number of years.
Recent AMS Awardees. Since 2000 the AMS has awarded its annual highest award (Rossby Research Medal) to the following AGW advocates or AGW sympathizers; Susan Solomon (00), V. Ramanathan (02), Peter Webster (04), Jagadish Shukla (05), Kerry Emanuel (07), Isaac Held (08) and James Hansen (09). Its second highest award (Charney Award) has gone to AGW warming advocates or sympathizers; Kevin Trenberth (00), Rich Rotunno (04), Robert D. Cess (06), Allan Betts (07), Gerald North (08) and Warren Washington and Gerald Meehl (09). And the other Rossby and Charney awardees during this period are not known to be critics of the AGW warming hypothesis. Read much on this issue here. See his scientific appendix Part A here and Part B here.
Dr. Jim Buckee, PhD Astrophysics, University of Oxford
Dr. Jim Buckee says he feels like a heretic, persecuted for his views and treated like an outcast. His crime? Being a climate change sceptic. Next week the former chief executive of the oil and gas firm Talisman, who has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Oxford, will try to convince others that climate change has nothing to do with human activity.
During a lecture at the University of Aberdeen he will argue that, far from warming, the Earth is set to enter a 20-year cooling period. Dr Buckee believes human behaviour has no effect on the climate and the vast sums spent by governments trying to promote renewable energy to cut greenhouse gas emissions are being wasted. Far from being a key cause of climate change, he says, carbon dioxide emissions have little or no impact. His views are contrary to those held by governments, the Royal Society - an independent science body - the Met Office and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Instead of human activities being responsible for the warming climate over the past 100 years, Dr Buckee insists there is a natural explanation, based on the activity of the Sun. Solar activity can affect the cosmic rays that reach the Earth’s atmosphere, and this in turn affects the climate, he says.
The “solar explanation” is one shared by many climate change sceptics. Dr Buckee says he is arguing against a tide of popular opinion which verges on the religious. “Any dissension is like a heresy,” he says. “People are stamped on so they can’t be heard. That has religious overtones.”
Dr Buckee believes his views are widespread although not always voiced. “I think it is the dominant view in professional science circles,” he says. “I know lots of people in universities and so on and quite often they have to retire before they can say what they want because it’s so frowned upon.”
Although he spent his career in the oil and gas industry, he denies having any vested interest. “A vested interest would make me shut up because it would drag up controversy,” he says. He adds that, while he was chief executive of Talisman, he did not make his views known, although he would explain them if asked. Dr Buckee’s belief in a solar explanation, a view expounded on a vast array of websites, is familiar to those in the climate change movement, who argue it has been discounted.
In the lecture, Dr Jim Buckee will put forward the idea that solar activity is responsible for changes to the climate. He will say the climate of the past few hundred years is a continuation of a normal process of gradual warming since the ice age 10,000 years ago. During that time, he argues, there have been constant fluctuations. He believes those fluctuations are caused by varying solar activity. When the sun is strong, it deflects cosmic rays from within and outside our galaxy. When the sun is weak, the rays enter the Earth’s atmosphere and cause low cloud, which has a cooling effect. He believes that, after a period of warming, the Earth is now entering a period of cooling that will last until 2030 or beyond. It is just one of the many theories put forward by sceptics, who argue that humans are not responsible for climate change. Read more here.
BBC News
A Northern Ireland minister’s decision to block a government advertisement campaign on climate change has led to a call for his removal from office. The advertisements urged people to reduce energy consumption and cut carbon dioxide output. But Environment Minister Sammy Wilson claimed the adverts were part of an “insidious propaganda campaign”.
Calling for his removal, the Green Party said Mr Wilson made “a laughing stock out of Northern Ireland.” Sammy Wilson argued that the Scottish executive had objected and stopped the adverts being broadcast. However, the Scottish executive told the BBC the reason it did not run these adverts was because they are already running their own climate change adverts.
He argued that they were “giving people the impression that by turning off the standby light on their TV they could save the world from melting glaciers and being submerged in 40ft of water”. He said that was “patent nonsense”.
Mr Wilson said he had written to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to say that the advertising campaign Act on CO2 “was not welcome”. He explained that he did not believe in its message that “man-made greenhouse gas emissions are the main cause of climate change” and that the campaign was contrary to his personal views.
He told DECC: “I do not wish for climate change messages to be promoted by other Whitehall departments here”. But Brian Wilson, of the Green Party, said the environment minister should be removed from office for refusing to recognise climate change. “He is a climate change sceptic. We have got to take all measures we can to reduce our carbon footprint. Mr Wilson does not agree with that. “This is totally incompatible with him being minister for the environment,” he said. Friends of the Earth NI director John Woods said: “It’s bad enough that we have an environment minister who doesn’t accept that human activity is driving climate change, but trying to block advice to people on how they can help tackle it is completely irresponsible.
“The reality is that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe that our activities are causing global warming and that urgent action is needed to tackle it.” The Alliance Party and the SDLP have also criticised Mr Wilson’s decision. Alliance leader David Ford said: “The simple fact is that there is scientific evidence, accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists, that manmade climate change will affect our environment if it is not brought under control,” he said. The DUP’s Sammy Wilson has objected to the government campaign. Tommy Gallagher, SDLP, accused Mr Wilson of “political sabotage of an important public awareness campaign”. Read more here.