Who do you believe?

Bill Gray when last Eli met him was spewing at Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post. Achenbach just lay back and let Gray punch himself out

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.

This is not a guy to go quiet into the night.

Bill Gray says he takes no fossil-fuel money. He's simply sick and tired of squishy-minded hand-wringing equation-pushing computer jocks who've never flown into a hurricane!
Gray has his own conspiracy theory. He has made a list of 15 reasons for the global warming hysteria. The list includes the need to come up with an enemy after the end of the Cold War, and the desire among scientists, government leaders and environmentalists to find a political cause that would enable them to "organize, propagandize, force conformity and exercise political influence. Big world government could best lead (and control) us to a better world!"

and needless to say the Old Bill was not happy when the American Meteorological Society gave the Rossby Medal to Jim Hansen. None were shocked when he let loose on Jim Hansen on a mailing list. OTOH, like the ravings of your beloved but unbalanced uncle, no one is exactly spreading the news.

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?

Why you ask dear bunnies, because..... because, according to Gray

Hansen and his legion of environmental political supporters (with no meteorological climate background) have done monumental damage to an open and honest discussion of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) question. He and his fellow collaborators (and their media sycophantic followers) are responsible for the brainwashing of a large segment of the American public about a grossly exaggerated human induced warming threat that does not exist. Most of the global warming we have observed is of natural origin and due to multidecadal and multicentury changes in the globe’s deep ocean circulation resulting from salinity variations (see the Appendix for scientific discussion). These changes are not associated with CO2 increases. Hansen has little experience in practical meteorology. He apparently does not realize that the strongly chaotic nature of the atmosphere ocean climate system does not allow for skillful initial value numerical climate prediction.

On the one hand Gray is saying that the climate system is so chaotic that no model can predict its behavior, on the other hand he is saying that he can do so on the back of an envelope. As Eli has noted, climate change denialism is incoherent. But Eli is not the only one to say this, from Achenbach's article, we have this gem from Richard Lindzen on why he and Gray never collaborated on a paper

"His knowledge of theory is frustratingly poor, but he knows more about hurricanes than anyone in the world. I regard him in his own peculiar way as a national resource."

In other words, Gray has made his way by pattern recognition. He is lost when the pattern changes, but he does have a long list of the usual suspects of why the climate is changing or not. High among them is that meteorologists ain't getting no respect, well at least his kind of "practical" meteorologist. Eli met this same sort of "real" vs. "theoretician" argument when he wandered into chemistry in the 1970s. Suffice it to say that it is hard to publish anything today in large areas of chemistry lacking some sort of theoretical calculation. Without theory, science is stamp collecting. Yet, according to Gray the AMS has been hijacked by 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.

And, dear bunnies, you would not be surprised that the AMS is a bunch of commies subversives

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.

completely ignoring the scientific interchange that has gone on for fifty years to bring us to this point. If the slain belong to Gray we must slay them again and again. It is our duty to the Anglo Saxon legal system that denial deserves endless appeals

Instead of organizing meetings with free and open debates on the basic physics

Given Lindzen's comment on Gray and theory that is a knee slapper

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

Well, yes. Let us see, they laughed at Einstein, but dear Bill, they also laughed at Bozo. Ideas already discredited, again yes (we will get to that), but the best is

To obtain any kind of a balanced back and forth discussion on AGW one has to consult the many web blogs that are both advocates and skeptics of AGW. These blogs are the only source for real open debate on the validity of the AGW hypothesis.

Eli has it on good authority that Rabett Run will soon receive an impact factor rating from Web of Science (More to follow)

Update: John Mashey points out that the letter is posted at Heartland

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