Dear readers, take yourself over to the Washington Post where Joel Achenbach does a demolition of Bill Gray and bystanders.
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......and much more. Perhaps you need too much background to get it, but you can hear the teeth grinding over at CEI and out to Colorado.
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.....
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.
The story of Bill Gray contains an awful lot of irony. His regular forecasts of active Atlantic hurricane seasons kept presaging the annual data points that make the last 11 years of Atlantic activity unprecedented (in the historic record). Now the evidence is beginning to suggest global warming played a role in making the very active hurricane seasons he predicted!
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I fully expect people will put flowers on his grave, despite the world continuing to warm. I can't help but wonder if they will be flowers that would not have grown on the site when Dr. Gray was a child.
Llewelly, well said. The ability to anticipate a pattern is not the ability to understand its root causes. Both are useful.
ReplyDeleteI love this quote from Fred Smith: Human beings, in his view, are not apart from nature but very much of it, and thus whatever human beings do is natural.
ReplyDeleteSo I take it that taxes and regulation are natural??
John Cross