Dr. Reid A. Bryson - "Father of Scientific Climatology"

[hellokeith]

The Faithful Heretic

The Faithful Heretic
A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions
Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky enough to love it, and then there?s Reid Bryson. At age 86, he?s still hard at it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.

Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology?now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences?in the 1970s he became the first director of what?s now the UW?s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He?s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor?created, the U.N. says, to recognize ?outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.? He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.

Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out from a general?and the general?s apology the next day when he learned they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that?s trained some of the nation?s leading climatologists.

How Little We Know

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he?s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth?s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet?s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

?I was laughed off the platform for saying that,? he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.

In the 1960s, Bryson?s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.

?Climate?s always been changing and it?s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,? he told us in an interview this past winter. ?Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay??

?All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it?s absurd,? Bryson continues. ?Of course it?s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we?re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we?re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.?

Little Ice Age? That?s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they?d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What?s called ?proxy evidence??assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data?helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.

We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it?s second-tier stuff. ?Don?t talk about proxies,? he says. ?We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It?s all written down.?

Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners? instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.

Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. ?What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps??

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

?A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,? he says. ?There used to be less ice than now. It?s just getting back to normal.?

What Leads, What Follows?

What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There?s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it?s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the ?greenhouse effect,? various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.

We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor?

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds?water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models? long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: ?Do you believe a five-day forecast??

Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up?or down?and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

Renaissance Man, Marathon Man

When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate. We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist, about the significance of Bryson?s work in advancing the science he?s now practiced for six decades.

?His contributions are manifold,? Hopkins said. ?He wrote Climates of Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures.?

This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson?s high-school interest in archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology, and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. ?He?s looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on human societies,? Hopkins says. ?He?s one of those people I would say is a Renaissance person.?

The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson?s work today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being outpaced by an octogenarian.

Without addressing?or being asked?that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as ?the father of the science of modern climatology.?

?In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the present state of climatology,? Moran says, adding, ?We?re going to see his legacy with us for many generations to come.?

Holding bachelor?s and master?s degrees from Boston College, Moran became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early ?70s. ?I came to Wisconsin because he was there,? Moran told us.

With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin?s Weather and Climate, a book aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface for the book but Hopkins told us the editors ?couldn?t fathom? certain comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that ?Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.?

Clearly what those editors couldn?t fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what might make them?and consequently us?behave differently. This was immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing up for work at a job he?s no longer paid to do.

?It?s fun!? he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.

?I think that?s one of the reasons for his longevity,? Moran says. ?He?s so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes people don?t react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but that?s how real science takes place.??Dave Hoopman

more info on his degrees, achievements, awards, and research

DR. REID A. BRYSON

Dr. Reid A. Bryson joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in 1946, at the end of his military service as a Major in the Air Weather Service.

His first appointment was in the Department of Geology and in the Department of Geography. In 1948 he started the Department of Meteorology, which is now one of the largest and most prestigious in the United States.

In 1963, he founded the Center for Climatic Research, in which he is currently Senior Scientist. Throughout his career, Dr. Bryson has been interested in interdisciplinary studies and was one of the founders and chairman of the University of Wisconsin?s Interdisciplinary Committee on the Future of Man.

He also served for 15 years as the founding Director of the renowned University of Wisconsin Institute for Environmental Studies. Considered by many to be the ?Father of Scientific Climatology?, Professor Bryson has written five books and more than 240 papers in the fields of limnology, meteorology, climatology, archaeology and geography.

Much of Bryson?s work has dealt with climate in relation to human ecology, and this has lead him into extensive travel, especially to Asia where he worked primarily on anthropogenic changes of climate and landscape in general.

His best-known laboratory works are in the development of new approaches to climatology, such as airstream analysis and quantitative, objective methods of reconstructing past climates. Dr. Bryson is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Meteorological Society, and a charter member of the World Council for the Biosphere.

Though born in Michigan in 1920, he regards Wisconsin as his home state, his profession as teaching, and his field as interdisciplinary earth science with a strong humanistic component.

So, does anyone want to tell Al Gore the bad news? Or just let Al make more money off morons who paid to see his silly movie and buy "carbon credits" from his company so he can run his giant mansion full steam? :disgust:

 

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: hellokeith
The Faithful Heretic

The Faithful Heretic
A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions
Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky enough to love it, and then there?s Reid Bryson. At age 86, he?s still hard at it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.

Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology?now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences?in the 1970s he became the first director of what?s now the UW?s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He?s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor?created, the U.N. says, to recognize ?outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.? He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.

Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out from a general?and the general?s apology the next day when he learned they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that?s trained some of the nation?s leading climatologists.

How Little We Know

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he?s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth?s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet?s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

?I was laughed off the platform for saying that,? he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.

In the 1960s, Bryson?s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.

?Climate?s always been changing and it?s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,? he told us in an interview this past winter. ?Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay??

?All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it?s absurd,? Bryson continues. ?Of course it?s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we?re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we?re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.?

Little Ice Age? That?s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they?d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What?s called ?proxy evidence??assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data?helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.

We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it?s second-tier stuff. ?Don?t talk about proxies,? he says. ?We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It?s all written down.?

Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners? instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.

Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. ?What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps??

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

?A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,? he says. ?There used to be less ice than now. It?s just getting back to normal.?

What Leads, What Follows?

What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There?s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it?s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the ?greenhouse effect,? various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.

We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor?

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds?water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models? long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: ?Do you believe a five-day forecast??

Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up?or down?and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

Renaissance Man, Marathon Man

When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate. We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist, about the significance of Bryson?s work in advancing the science he?s now practiced for six decades.

?His contributions are manifold,? Hopkins said. ?He wrote Climates of Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures.?

This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson?s high-school interest in archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology, and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. ?He?s looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on human societies,? Hopkins says. ?He?s one of those people I would say is a Renaissance person.?

The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson?s work today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being outpaced by an octogenarian.

Without addressing?or being asked?that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as ?the father of the science of modern climatology.?

?In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the present state of climatology,? Moran says, adding, ?We?re going to see his legacy with us for many generations to come.?

Holding bachelor?s and master?s degrees from Boston College, Moran became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early ?70s. ?I came to Wisconsin because he was there,? Moran told us.

With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin?s Weather and Climate, a book aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface for the book but Hopkins told us the editors ?couldn?t fathom? certain comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that ?Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.?

Clearly what those editors couldn?t fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what might make them?and consequently us?behave differently. This was immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing up for work at a job he?s no longer paid to do.

?It?s fun!? he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.

?I think that?s one of the reasons for his longevity,? Moran says. ?He?s so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes people don?t react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but that?s how real science takes place.??Dave Hoopman

more info on his degrees, achievements, awards, and research

DR. REID A. BRYSON

Dr. Reid A. Bryson joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in 1946, at the end of his military service as a Major in the Air Weather Service.

His first appointment was in the Department of Geology and in the Department of Geography. In 1948 he started the Department of Meteorology, which is now one of the largest and most prestigious in the United States.

In 1963, he founded the Center for Climatic Research, in which he is currently Senior Scientist. Throughout his career, Dr. Bryson has been interested in interdisciplinary studies and was one of the founders and chairman of the University of Wisconsin?s Interdisciplinary Committee on the Future of Man.

He also served for 15 years as the founding Director of the renowned University of Wisconsin Institute for Environmental Studies. Considered by many to be the ?Father of Scientific Climatology?, Professor Bryson has written five books and more than 240 papers in the fields of limnology, meteorology, climatology, archaeology and geography.

Much of Bryson?s work has dealt with climate in relation to human ecology, and this has lead him into extensive travel, especially to Asia where he worked primarily on anthropogenic changes of climate and landscape in general.

His best-known laboratory works are in the development of new approaches to climatology, such as airstream analysis and quantitative, objective methods of reconstructing past climates. Dr. Bryson is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Meteorological Society, and a charter member of the World Council for the Biosphere.

Though born in Michigan in 1920, he regards Wisconsin as his home state, his profession as teaching, and his field as interdisciplinary earth science with a strong humanistic component.

So, does anyone want to tell Al Gore the bad news? Or just let Al make more money off morons who paid to see his silly movie and buy "carbon credits" from his company so he can run his giant mansion full steam? :disgust:

So one guy is all it takes to convince you? This is science, Jethro, nothing is black and white...and almost all scientific viewpoints are contested by someone in the community, maybe even a pretty intelligent guy with a lot of paper hanging on his walls. That doesn't make the viewpoint wrong.

 

[LegendKiller]

Originally posted by: Rainsford

Originally posted by: hellokeith
The Faithful Heretic

The Faithful Heretic
A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions
Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky enough to love it, and then there?s Reid Bryson. At age 86, he?s still hard at it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.

Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology?now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences?in the 1970s he became the first director of what?s now the UW?s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He?s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor?created, the U.N. says, to recognize ?outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.? He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.

Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out from a general?and the general?s apology the next day when he learned they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that?s trained some of the nation?s leading climatologists.

How Little We Know

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he?s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth?s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet?s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

?I was laughed off the platform for saying that,? he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.

In the 1960s, Bryson?s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.

?Climate?s always been changing and it?s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,? he told us in an interview this past winter. ?Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay??

?All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it?s absurd,? Bryson continues. ?Of course it?s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we?re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we?re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.?

Little Ice Age? That?s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they?d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What?s called ?proxy evidence??assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data?helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.

We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it?s second-tier stuff. ?Don?t talk about proxies,? he says. ?We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It?s all written down.?

Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners? instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.

Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. ?What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps??

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

?A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,? he says. ?There used to be less ice than now. It?s just getting back to normal.?

What Leads, What Follows?

What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There?s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it?s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the ?greenhouse effect,? various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.

We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor?

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds?water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models? long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: ?Do you believe a five-day forecast??

Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up?or down?and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

Renaissance Man, Marathon Man

When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate. We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist, about the significance of Bryson?s work in advancing the science he?s now practiced for six decades.

?His contributions are manifold,? Hopkins said. ?He wrote Climates of Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures.?

This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson?s high-school interest in archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology, and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. ?He?s looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on human societies,? Hopkins says. ?He?s one of those people I would say is a Renaissance person.?

The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson?s work today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being outpaced by an octogenarian.

Without addressing?or being asked?that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as ?the father of the science of modern climatology.?

?In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the present state of climatology,? Moran says, adding, ?We?re going to see his legacy with us for many generations to come.?

Holding bachelor?s and master?s degrees from Boston College, Moran became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early ?70s. ?I came to Wisconsin because he was there,? Moran told us.

With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin?s Weather and Climate, a book aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface for the book but Hopkins told us the editors ?couldn?t fathom? certain comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that ?Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.?

Clearly what those editors couldn?t fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what might make them?and consequently us?behave differently. This was immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing up for work at a job he?s no longer paid to do.

?It?s fun!? he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.

?I think that?s one of the reasons for his longevity,? Moran says. ?He?s so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes people don?t react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but that?s how real science takes place.??Dave Hoopman

more info on his degrees, achievements, awards, and research

DR. REID A. BRYSON

Dr. Reid A. Bryson joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in 1946, at the end of his military service as a Major in the Air Weather Service.

His first appointment was in the Department of Geology and in the Department of Geography. In 1948 he started the Department of Meteorology, which is now one of the largest and most prestigious in the United States.

In 1963, he founded the Center for Climatic Research, in which he is currently Senior Scientist. Throughout his career, Dr. Bryson has been interested in interdisciplinary studies and was one of the founders and chairman of the University of Wisconsin?s Interdisciplinary Committee on the Future of Man.

He also served for 15 years as the founding Director of the renowned University of Wisconsin Institute for Environmental Studies. Considered by many to be the ?Father of Scientific Climatology?, Professor Bryson has written five books and more than 240 papers in the fields of limnology, meteorology, climatology, archaeology and geography.

Much of Bryson?s work has dealt with climate in relation to human ecology, and this has lead him into extensive travel, especially to Asia where he worked primarily on anthropogenic changes of climate and landscape in general.

His best-known laboratory works are in the development of new approaches to climatology, such as airstream analysis and quantitative, objective methods of reconstructing past climates. Dr. Bryson is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Meteorological Society, and a charter member of the World Council for the Biosphere.

Though born in Michigan in 1920, he regards Wisconsin as his home state, his profession as teaching, and his field as interdisciplinary earth science with a strong humanistic component.

So, does anyone want to tell Al Gore the bad news? Or just let Al make more money off morons who paid to see his silly movie and buy "carbon credits" from his company so he can run his giant mansion full steam? :disgust:

So one guy is all it takes to convince you? This is science, Jethro, nothing is black and white...and almost all scientific viewpoints are contested by someone in the community, maybe even a pretty intelligent guy with a lot of paper hanging on his walls. That doesn't make the viewpoint wrong.

There's one word for this situation. Groupthink. I firmly believe that in 20 years we are all going to look at this and wonder how science failed so miserably. We'll have to rethink the scientific method.

Another one would apply, at least an acronym. GIGO. No matter what type of assumptions you put into a model, if they are garbage in, you'll get garbage out. Period.

People are so focused on a limited set of variables that they want those variables to succeed, thus they only input them. They have such massive groupthink that everybody else agrees with GIGO data.

 

[Termagant]

I for one, hope that you are right. When hysterical people around me try to "save the Earth" in some ridiculous fashion, I will flout all laws and regulations and live a carbon rich lifestyle. :sun:

 

[DealMonkey]

Originally posted by: hellokeith
So, does anyone want to tell Al Gore the bad news? Or just let Al make more money off morons who paid to see his silly movie and buy "carbon credits" from his company so he can run his giant mansion full steam? :disgust:

Well, at least you started this thread with an open mind! :roll:

 

[feralkid]

Originally posted by: DealMonkey

Originally posted by: hellokeith
So, does anyone want to tell Al Gore the bad news? Or just let Al make more money off morons who paid to see his silly movie and buy "carbon credits" from his company so he can run his giant mansion full steam? :disgust:

Well, at least you started this thread with an open mind! :roll:

(chuckle) You'd think people could hide their hand for at least one round.

 

[Lemon law]

To a certain extent the guy is right---not only earth but other planets are warming up---and other planets are not man made---but to assume that super high CO2 levels on earth have nothing to do with global warming is also a giant mistake.

Science is full of fools who were right once and wrong the second time. Two or more factors are acting at the same time and pushing in the same direction---get over it.---and quit assuming there is only one factor. And if we ever reform, there is the minor detail of global dimming that will kick in also.

 

[DaveSimmons]

It's groupthink if you want to deny something, consensus if you want to accept it.

Neocons are quick to rely on groupthink as their justification for having invaded Iraq, yet condemn it as unreliable support for the fact of climate change.

So far the evidence is more credible for the climatologists than for the WMD.

One difference is that Colin Powell hasn't addressed the UN about CO2 sources that must be stopped . . . yet.

 

[Jaskalas]

?A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,? he says. ?There used to be less ice than now. It?s just getting back to normal.?

Thank god he wasn't paid off to espouse the required belief to be considered a scientist. Major kudos to him for pointing out such very OBVIOUS errors in the current alarmist theories.

:thumbsup:

I'll add onto this.

six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them.

RIGHT THERE. As I have repeatedly been telling you the ice core charts Al'Gore uses, shows the CO2 following BEHIND 800 years. The assumed CAUSE of an effect doesn't occur until 800 years AFTER the effect. So much for your self asserted claims on scientific evidence.

 

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: LegendKiller

Originally posted by: Rainsford
...
So one guy is all it takes to convince you? This is science, Jethro, nothing is black and white...and almost all scientific viewpoints are contested by someone in the community, maybe even a pretty intelligent guy with a lot of paper hanging on his walls. That doesn't make the viewpoint wrong.

There's one word for this situation. Groupthink. I firmly believe that in 20 years we are all going to look at this and wonder how science failed so miserably. We'll have to rethink the scientific method.

Another one would apply, at least an acronym. GIGO. No matter what type of assumptions you put into a model, if they are garbage in, you'll get garbage out. Period.

People are so focused on a limited set of variables that they want those variables to succeed, thus they only input them. They have such massive groupthink that everybody else agrees with GIGO data.

The groupthink argument is a very attractive one, but when it comes to science, it's almost certainly wrong. "Groupthink" applies when individuals are themselves incapable of thinking, and thus must rely on the group to do it for them. The masses (on both sides) of the climate debate almost certainly fall into this category, as very few people are actually scientists of any kind, much less climate scientists, and thus must rely on the group for their direction. But I'm not talking about your average 'C' student, I'm talking about expert scientists who have studied the issue for years. And while not EVERYONE of their number agrees, the vast majority of them have come to the same conclusion, that humans have a measurable and significant impact on global climate change.

Of course even scientists can turn off their brains every once in a while, but I see no evidence of that here. The opposition argument is circular, the man-made global climate change theorists must be engaging in groupthink because most of them agree, and we all know that agreement is a sign of groupthink. Or sound science...and the only way to really tell is to be a scientist yourself, which most people engaging in this debate are decidedly NOT.

 

[ProfJohn]

Oh look another crazy scientist questioning Global Warming...
Dr William Gray famous for hus hurricane forecasts.

link

Hurricane forecaster William Gray said Friday that global ocean currents, not human-produced carbon dioxide, are responsible for global warming, and the Earth may begin to cool on its own in five to 10 years.

Gray, a Colorado State University researcher best known for his annual forecasts of hurricanes along the U.S. Atlantic coast, also said increasing levels of carbon dioxide won't produce more or stronger hurricanes.

He said that over the past 40 years the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined even though carbon dioxide levels have risen.

Gray, speaking to a group of Republican state lawmakers, had harsh words for researchers and politicians who say man-made greenhouse gases are responsible for global warming.

"They're blaming it all on humans, which is crazy," he said. "We're not the cause of it."

Many researchers believe warming is causing hurricanes to get stronger, while others aren't sure.

Gray complained that politics and research into global warming have created "almost an industry" that has unfairly frightened the public and overwhelmed dissenting voices.

He said research arguing that humans are causing global warming is "mush" based on unreliable computer models that cannot possibly take into account the hundreds of factors that influence the weather.

Gray said little-understood ocean currents are behind a decades-long warming cycle and disputed assertions that greenhouse gases could raise global temperatures as much as some scientists predict.

"There's no way that doubling CO2 is going to cause that amount of warming," he said.

Gray also said warming and cooling trends cannot go on indefinitely and believes temperatures are beginning to level out after a very warm year in 1998.

"We're going to begin to see some cooling," he said.

I so hope he is right about the cooling. It will be classic to see Gore and all the other liberals proven to be wrong. Wonder how they'll spin it? "Oh we saved the earth, and the cooling is proof."

 

[imported_Shivetya]

I've seen him before.

I think what is occuring is that many "REAL" scientist are coming out of the woodwork as they see their field of expertise being polluted by showman and politicians.

 

[DealMonkey]

Originally posted by: Jaskalas
Thank god he wasn't paid off to espouse the required belief to be considered a scientist. Major kudos to him for pointing out such very OBVIOUS errors in the current alarmist theories.

RIGHT THERE. As I have repeatedly been telling you the ice core charts Al'Gore uses, shows the CO2 following BEHIND 800 years. The assumed CAUSE of an effect doesn't occur until 800 years AFTER the effect. So much for your self asserted claims on scientific evidence.

Good thing we have professional climatologists like you to set us straight! Whew, nearly averted a global catastrophe until you showed up! Thanks, man. We all owe you one.

 

[DealMonkey]

Originally posted by: Jaskalas
I've seen him before.

I think what is occuring is that many "REAL" scientist are coming out of the woodwork as they see their field of expertise being polluted by showman and politicians

Yes, it's quite clear that the more than 2,000 IPCC scientists that have been working on climate change and producing reports for nearly two decades are clearly all a bunch of showman and politicians! What a fraud they're perpetrating! This one guy, this "REAL" scientist (how ironic) MUST have all the answers 'cause he's saying what I believe in!

 

[umbrella39]

Originally posted by: hellokeith
So, does anyone want to tell Al Gore the bad news? Or just let Al make more money off morons who paid to see his silly movie and buy "carbon credits" from his company so he can run his giant mansion full steam? :disgust:

LMAO!

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: hellokeith
[Topic Title: Dr. Reid A. Bryson - "Father of Scientific Climatology"
Topic Summary: The earth is warming and man has nothing to do with it.

Who cares?

We certainly aren't helping matters.

We should expect better.

I cut my energy consumption down significantly and should expect my energy bill to go down not up.

It's all about money, period.

 

[fskimospy]

Yay! More scientists who disagree with global warming giving interviews and making unsubstantiated claims instead of writing papers for legitimate peer review!

You would think if someone had found out so obviously that one of the largest threats in the history of mankind was a hoax, they would write a paper about it and submit it for peer review. Strangely enough, this has not happened. I'm sure there are a lot of really valid reasons for that though... hahahaha. Thank god we have some "real scientists" who are willing to take the courageous step of claiming things they never even try to prove.

Looks like we have a lot of scientific "groupthink" about evolution too. Thank god those "real scientists" (who are now calling themselves creation scientists) are here to break out of that dangerous groupthink and tell us that dinosaurs and man coexisted.

EDIT: Oh, and before anyone says anything it's nice that he submitted peer reviewed work on ice cores... but of course I was talking about peer review of the claims he's making that anyone cares about.

 

[DealMonkey]

Someone should poll the willfully ignorant who reject evolution to see if they also reject GW or MMGW. I'd bet you'd find a correlation between the two! As Stephen Colbert once said: ?Anyone who knows me knows I am no fan of scientists. Anybody who dedicates their life to searching for an answer other than ?God did it? is no friend of mine?

 

[jman19]

Originally posted by: ProfJohn
Oh look another crazy scientist questioning Global Warming...
Dr William Gray famous for hus hurricane forecasts.

link

Hurricane forecaster William Gray said Friday that global ocean currents, not human-produced carbon dioxide, are responsible for global warming, and the Earth may begin to cool on its own in five to 10 years.

Gray, a Colorado State University researcher best known for his annual forecasts of hurricanes along the U.S. Atlantic coast, also said increasing levels of carbon dioxide won't produce more or stronger hurricanes.

He said that over the past 40 years the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined even though carbon dioxide levels have risen.

Gray, speaking to a group of Republican state lawmakers, had harsh words for researchers and politicians who say man-made greenhouse gases are responsible for global warming.

"They're blaming it all on humans, which is crazy," he said. "We're not the cause of it."

Many researchers believe warming is causing hurricanes to get stronger, while others aren't sure.

Gray complained that politics and research into global warming have created "almost an industry" that has unfairly frightened the public and overwhelmed dissenting voices.

He said research arguing that humans are causing global warming is "mush" based on unreliable computer models that cannot possibly take into account the hundreds of factors that influence the weather.

Gray said little-understood ocean currents are behind a decades-long warming cycle and disputed assertions that greenhouse gases could raise global temperatures as much as some scientists predict.

"There's no way that doubling CO2 is going to cause that amount of warming," he said.

Gray also said warming and cooling trends cannot go on indefinitely and believes temperatures are beginning to level out after a very warm year in 1998.

"We're going to begin to see some cooling," he said.

I so hope he is right about the cooling. It will be classic to see Gore and all the other liberals proven to be wrong. Wonder how they'll spin it? "Oh we saved the earth, and the cooling is proof."

How about hoping he is right for the benefit of humanity? :roll:

 

[LegendKiller]

Originally posted by: DealMonkey
Someone should poll the willfully ignorant who reject evolution to see if they also reject GW or MMGW. I'd bet you'd find a correlation between the two! As Stephen Colbert once said: ?Anyone who knows me knows I am no fan of scientists. Anybody who dedicates their life to searching for an answer other than ?God did it? is no friend of mine?

I fully accept evolution but I deny a 1:1 link between GW and man-made emissions. I think the ratio is far less than 25%. Even still, I support the dramatic reduction in C02 emissions and pollution, just for the fact that you shouldn't sh!t where you eat.

 

[CPA]

Originally posted by: dmcowen674

Originally posted by: hellokeith
[Topic Title: Dr. Reid A. Bryson - "Father of Scientific Climatology"
Topic Summary: The earth is warming and man has nothing to do with it.

Who cares?

We certainly aren't helping matters.

We should expect better.

I cut my energy consumption down significantly and should expect my energy bill to go down not up.

It's all about money, period.

What? You sold your boat? Or maybe your truck? Or your mansion in Oklahoma?

 

[CPA]

Originally posted by: DealMonkey
Someone should poll the willfully ignorant who reject evolution to see if they also reject GW or MMGW. I'd bet you'd find a correlation between the two! As Stephen Colbert once said: ?Anyone who knows me knows I am no fan of scientists. Anybody who dedicates their life to searching for an answer other than ?God did it? is no friend of mine?

I don't reject evolutional theory, but I reject GW as it is currently presented.

 

[DealMonkey]

On what evidence are you basing your decision? That's the crux of the problem for the MMGW-rejectionists, they have very little peer-reviewed evidence to cling to. And what little they have has since been shot down in flames by more recent studies.

 

[Enig101]

Originally posted by: DealMonkey
On what evidence are you basing your decision? That's the crux of the problem for the MMGW-rejectionists, they have very little peer-reviewed evidence to cling to. And what little they have has since been shot down in flames by more recent studies.

I can understand why some people are opposed to MMGW stuff. Many scientists are trying hard to disprove it. Well that's what scientists are supposed to do. As far as I know there isn't anything conclusive and well supported to contradict it.

It surprises me that so many people are quick to knock it down for very little reason. Denial can be an easy reaction.

 

[Jaskalas]

Originally posted by: DealMonkey

Originally posted by: Jaskalas
Thank god he wasn't paid off to espouse the required belief to be considered a scientist. Major kudos to him for pointing out such very OBVIOUS errors in the current alarmist theories.

RIGHT THERE. As I have repeatedly been telling you the ice core charts Al'Gore uses, shows the CO2 following BEHIND 800 years. The assumed CAUSE of an effect doesn't occur until 800 years AFTER the effect. So much for your self asserted claims on scientific evidence.

Good thing we have professional climatologists like you to set us straight! Whew, nearly averted a global catastrophe until you showed up! Thanks, man. We all owe you one.

Yeah, obviously it takes a degree in rocket science to be smart enough for YOU to understand the effect cannot happen 800 years before its cause. I however, have some common sense.

Besides, we?re not talking about what I am saying. We?re talking about Reid A. Bryson, who I?m quoting, who he himself quotes multiple scientific studies. We all have it wrong, cause I ? quoting them- am obviously not qualified to quote.

Take your elitist c*** and s***** it.