By Craig James, AMS Fellow in the NYT DotEarth blog

I am a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and have just recently retired after a 40 year career as a television meteorologist. For the last two years of my career, I wrote a blog from the skeptics point of view in regards to AGW.

I came to this position largely through the writings of Dr. Richard Lindzen from MIT, Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. from Colorado State, Dr. Roy Spencer from UAH and yes, Joe D’Aleo. I believe Dr. Hansen would label these people as “court jesters” as he does anyone who criticizes his work, although doesn’t science progress through critical evaluation of another’s work by such excellent scientists as those mentioned?

I agree with Joe D’Aleo that it is indeed a sad day for the AMS when the society awards a man whose work has been shown to contain errors (such as proclaiming this past October the warmest October of record when September data was used). I believe Dr. Hansen’s political ideology has taken over his science and renders him no longer qualified to be the keeper of the global temperature data.

I have found it interesting that in my experience, many (if not a majority) of meteorologists involved in day to day operational forecasting question the catastrophic scenarios put forth by people like Dr. Hansen, whose educational background by the way is in physics and astronomy, not meteorology or climatology. Perhaps because the operational people live and die by the forecasts they make there has been a great distrust of computer models develop over the years. We need models that work and shun the climate models that we know don’t incorporate many of the driving forces behind the weather and ultimately climate, such as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecal Oscillation. Those climate models have certainly missed the cooling of this decade and Dr. Hansen’s forecast of a super El Nino for the 2006-07 winter turned out to be as wrong as if I had made of forecast of snow and it turned out to be sunny. But yet he never seems to be held accountable, unlike those of us who live and die daily by those wretched models.

Craig Woods, Grand Rapids See comment here.

Icecap Note: I assure you Craig represents a large percentage of real meteorologosts and climatologists within or no longer members of the AMS. Hansen has become a charicature of himself and has done more harm to the science and through that the world’s people than any other single individual allegedly in the field with the possible exception of Michael Mann. Actually there are others, whose names could fill this page who deserve dishonorable mention but that is a story for another day. Look for a story coming today addressing Gavin Schmidt’s (Hansen’s GISS pitbull) on Real Climate (should be renamed Reinventing Climate) disappointment that the Tuesday Lou Dobbs show dared to feature skeptics and specifically on his criticisms of my comments on global temperature assessments which I will show why I stand fully by. See also Jennifer Marohasy’s blog on the Hansen award here.