2006-04-26

A Bill Gray sighting

Last hurricane season, I blogged a few times about Bill Gray, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University. For those of you out of the atmosci loop, CSU is actually a top-notch meteorology/atmspheric dynamics program, and Bill Gray was a pioneer of seasonal forecasting for tropical activity. I emphasize was, as now is mostly a climate change denier. He still does seasonal prediction, and his group is still respected in that area, but he doesn't seem very active in that work any longer. Apparently he's at the AMS meeting on hurricanes and tropical meteorology this week, where he is presenting a paper [LINK]. He seems to think that global warming is due to variations in the thermohaline circulation; I don't think there is any observational evidence for links of decadal scale variability in the THC and global surface temperature (I could be wrong about that). In any case, RealClimate has posted a limited response to the extended abstract by Gray [LINK]. The didn't go looking for it, but it is a response to a CNN article, which undoubtedly has been picked up by other outlets [LINK]. The article doesn't go into depth about Gray, but uses him as the "other side" of the "debate." The RealClimate guys (and girls) have taken Gray to task, pointing out "scientific absurdities" in the argument, and also pointing out that Gray's theory has conveniently changed over the years to account of contrary evidence. It is worth a quick read if you are interested.

No comments: