Tuesday, September 26, 2006

When an Expert's Not an Expert

Every spring, almost like clockwork, the MSM offers predictions for the upcoming hurricane season, based on the analysis of Dr. William Gray, the emminent climatologist at Colorado State University. Dr. Gray's decades of research have produced some of the more accurate long-range forcecasts for Atlantic hurricane activity, and made him one of the leading authorities in that particular branch of meterology and climate research.

But Dr. Gray's scholarly interests don't end there. Over the past year, he's actually scaled back his involvement in tropical forecasting to study another critical climate issue, global warming. Or, more correctly, the lack of empiracal evidence to support gloom-and-doom predictions of a steadily warming earth, fueled by human activity and an increase in greehouse gases.

Dr. Gray's thoughts on the subject are nicely summarized in this Denver Post article, linked by Drudge. As a counterpoint to Gray's arguments, the Post story also features the assessment of another Colorado-based climate researcher, Kevin Trenberth, who (not surprisingly) believes that global warming not only exists, it represents a grave threat to the planet.

Such hysteria is evident in today's latest warning on global warming, which claims that the earth is at its warmest point in more than a million years. Gray dismisses such warnings as rubbish, claiming that the numerical models used to generate such predictions are heavily flawed. Critics dismiss Gray as a crank who's out of his scientific element ("his knowledge of theory is frustratingly poor"), but oddly enough, most refuse to engage him on the subject. A recent Washington Post profile paints Gray as something of a kook, far outside the scientific mainstream.

And so does the MSM, for the most part. Today's MSNBC report on global warming (cited above) didn't contain a single paragraph that disputed the claims, or raised any doubts regarding their validity. As for Dr. Gray, I'm sure the writer never bothered to ask his views. When it comes to theories and causes that have been fully embraced by the MSM, there is little space or air time for disagreement, no matter how respected the critic might be. As far as the media is concerned, Dr. Gray is the "go-to" guy for hurricanes, but his views on global warming are simply unwelcome.

2 comments:

Purple Avenger said...

With the whole solar system apparently warming up, it seems hard to hang it on humanity.

A.C. McCloud said...

Gray has really done no better than a coin-flip on hurricane predictions in recent years--but for that matter, so has the global warming cabal within NOAA/NCAR. Yet the latter tries to sell us on long range predictions that essentially require our conversion to world socialism based on computer models that cannot possibly be scaled to determine a realistic output 50 years out.