"Global Warning is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people"

BSR FYI. :)

Washington Post
The Tempest By Joel Achenbach Sunday, May 28, 2006; W08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/23/AR2006052301305.html

"As evidence mounts that humans are causing dangerous changes in
Earth's climate, a handful of skeptics are providing some serious blowback"

IT SHOULD BE GLORIOUS TO BE BILL GRAY, professor emeritus. He is
often called the World's Most Famous Hurricane Expert. He's the guy
who, every year, predicts the number of hurricanes that will form
during the coming tropical storm season. He works on a country road
leading into the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in the
atmospheric science department of Colorado State University. He's
mentored dozens of scientists. By rights, Bill Gray should be in deep
clover, enjoying retirement, pausing only to collect the occasional
lifetime achievement award.

He's a towering figure in his profession and in person. He's 6 feet 5
inches tall, handsome, with blue eyes and white hair combed straight
back. He's still lanky, like the baseball player he used to be back
at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington in the 1940s. When he
wears a suit, a dark shirt and tinted sunglasses, you can imagine him
as a casino owner or a Hollywood mogul. In a room jammed with
scientists, you'd probably notice him first.

He's loud. His laugh is gale force. His personality threatens to
spill into the hallway and onto the chaparral. He can be very charming.

But he's also angry. He's outraged.

He recently had a public shouting match with one of his former
students. It went on for 45 minutes.

He was supposed to debate another scientist at a weather conference,
but the organizer found him to be too obstreperous, and disinvited him.

Much of his government funding has dried up. He has had to put his
own money, more than $100,000, into keeping his research going. He
feels intellectually abandoned. If none of his colleagues comes to
his funeral, he says, that'll be evidence that he had the courage to
say what they were afraid to admit.

Which is this: Global warming is a hoax.

"I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever
perpetrated on the American people," he says when I visit him in his
office on a sunny spring afternoon.

He has testified about this to the United States Senate. He has
written magazine articles, given speeches, done everything he could
to get the message out. His scientific position relies heavily on
what is known as the Argument From Authority. He's the authority.

"I've been in meteorology over 50 years. I've worked damn hard, and
I've been around. My feeling is some of us older guys who've been
around have not been asked about this. It's sort of a baby boomer,
yuppie thing."

Gray believes in the obs. The observations. Direct measurements.
Numerical models can't be trusted. Equation pushers with fancy
computers aren't the equals of scientists who fly into hurricanes.

"Few people know what I know. I've been in the tropics, I've flown in
airplanes into storms. I've done studies of convection, cloud
clusters and how the moist process works. I don't think anybody in
the world understands how the atmosphere functions better than me."

In just three, five, maybe eight years, he says, the world will begin
to cool again.

We sit in his office for 2 1/2 hours, until the sun drops behind the
mountains, and when we're done he offers to keep talking until
midnight. He is almost desperate to be heard. His time is short. He
is 76 years old. He is howling in a maelstrom.

Parallel Earths

[snip] Click link to read the rest of
it:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/23/AR2006052301305.html

~ Janice
Received on Wed May 31 12:51:54 2006