A top climate scientist calls the theory that won Al Gore an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous." Others would speak out, he says, if they didn't fear retribution from those who put ideology over science.
Dr. William Gray, professor emeritus of the atmospheric department at Colorado State University, who has become known as America's most reliable hurricane forecaster, made that assessment at the University of North Carolina over the weekend.
"We'll look back at this in 10 or 15 years and realize how foolish it was," he said.
Meantime, said Gray, "We're brainwashing our children. They're going to the Gore movie and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."
Not schooled as a politician or showman like Gore, he told the group of 300, including meteorology students, that "the human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major impact on global temperatures."
Gray said that a natural cycle of ocean temperatures related to the amount of salt in ocean water was responsible for global warming, which he acknowledges has taken place. As part of this natural cycle, global temperatures will eventually cool again.
He says that fluctuations in hurricane intensity and frequency, Exhibit A in Gore's inquisition, have nothing to do with carbon dioxide levels or human activity, but with changing ocean currents.
He noted that there were 101 hurricanes from 1900 to 1949, in a period of cooler global temperatures, compared with 83 from 1957 to 2006, when the earth warmed.
At a National Hurricane Conference held earlier this year in, appropriately enough, New Orleans, Gray said that this phenomenon "goes back thousands of years. These are natural processes. We shouldn't blame them on humans or CO2."
At 78, Gray stands on his record as a pioneer in seasonal hurricane forecasts and no longer fears the career death that many of his like-minded peers risk if they dare to stray from the politically popular climate orthodoxy that gave Gore his Nobel Prize for activities that have nothing to do with world peace.
"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," Gray said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."
Gore says he will give his $1.5 million prize to a green charity, the Alliance for Climate Change in Palo Alto, Calif. But as a group of economists, including four Nobel Prize winners, reported in 2004, there are better ways to help the planet.
They found that one dollar spent fighting HIV/AIDS produced $40 in social benefits, and that one dollar spent on fighting malnutrition yielded about $30 in social benefits, but that one dollar fighting to lower CO2 emissions yielded between 2 and 25 cents in benefits.
And, as we've said before, what greenies propose stunts economic growth and is a recipe for global poverty.
In an Associated Press interview at the hurricane conference, Gray said of Gore: "He's one of those guys that preaches the end-of-the-world type of things. I think he's doing a great disservice and he doesn't know what he's talking about."
Neither, apparently, does the Nobel Prize committee.