Lest readers think I’m the only TV meteorologist to speak my mind on climate issues, there are others, such as Jym Ganahl in Columbus Ohio.
The Daily Kos posted an article here calling for this:
Columbus Weatherman is a Kooky Global Warming Denier
Contact NBC4 and urge them to send weatherman Jym Ganahl to some climate change conferences with peer-reviewed climatologists. Let NBC4 know that they have a responsibility to have expert climatologists on-air to debunk Ganahl’s misinformation and the climate change deniers don’t deserve an opportunity to spread their propaganda:
NBC 4 phone # 614-263-4444
NBC 4 VP/GM Rick Rogala email: rrogala(ATSIGN)wcmh.com
And it was all over this story in a minor weekly newspaper in Columbus, OH., reprinted below. Jym could probably use a little support right now. His email: jganahl [at] wcmh dot com
From “The Other Paper” MEDIA MORSELS: Ganahl debunks the global warming
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| Be afraid of the sun, not carbon: Ganahl, seen here with what appears to be some sort of glacier, doesn’t buy the hype |
Just when you thought it was safe to assume that everyone had pretty much accepted climate change and moved on, here comes rogue NBC 4 chief meteorologist Jym Ganahl to blow your freaking mind.
“Just wait 5 or 10 years, and it will be very obvious. They’ll have egg on their faces,” Ganahl said this week of global warming advocates.
The “global warming hoax” is an obvious fallacy, Ganahl said in a YouTube video posted Jan. 23.
In the video, taped at a meet-up of the Ohio Freedom Alliance, Ganahl chats with Dave, the self-proclaimed No. 1 biker talk show host on radio, and—still odder—Robert Wagner, a former candidate for the 15th congressional district.
Although global warming is clearly “a fallacy,” Ganahl told the dudes, “It is remarkable how many people are being led like sheep in the wrong direction.”
Evoking Orwellian mind-control power of the media, Ganahl said it’s remarkable how easy it is to panic the unwashed masses.
Ganahl continued to evangelize offline this week.
Sunspots—and not carbon emissions—are to blame for the slow warming of the globe, Ganahl said. “It has nothing to do with us.”
“When there are sunspots, like freckles on the sun—dark spots—these are like turning on a furnace and the earth warms. When there are no sunspots, it is like the furnace is in standby and the earth cools.
“I have always thought we should celebrate and be thankful we live in a time when it is warmer, not curse it,” Ganahl said. “It allows us to grow food and feed the population—and the warming is slow and we can adapt to it.”
Cold, on the other hand, is to blame for a whole host of worldly disasters, including death of the Aztecs, the Vikings, and who knew?— the bubonic plague.
“Instead of screaming global warming, we should be preaching global cooling,” he said.
But with a new president who apparently buys into the whole carbon emission demonizing scam, Ganahl said, “It’s very scary,” and admittedly “very difficult,” to fight the mob mentality.
“Carbon dioxide is what we, as people, exhale. Enough said. Unless you eliminate people, you have it. It’s food for the plants and trees,” he said.
Our local Al Gore antithesis risked his career on his wild weather heresy—sort of.
Back in 2007, the take-no-prisoners field of meteorology was split over the issue of climate change. Prominent Weather Channel meteorologist Heidi Cullen called for those who deny the so-called truth about global warming to be stripped of their American Meteorological Society credentials.
Ganahl, who just celebrated 30 years at NBC, became the youngest person to be granted the AMS Seal of Approval, by the way, back in 1970.
Cullen’s call has thus far gone unheeded, but it stirred up a mini-schism among TV weather types.
“Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms,” Cullen said in a column written for the Weather Channel.
“And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy.”
Ganahl says he has kept his anti-global warming propaganda out of your living room, but he is prepared to sell on sunspots, and their relation to warming cycles, if you ever ask.
Asked if he’s worried that he’ll take a hit among the sheep for his climate thinking, he said he’s not concerned.
“Just tell them to wait five or 10 years, and I’ll have history to back me up.”
Seems there are a lot of people persuaded by one man…I have no doubt the Sun is the driver of our climate. Its not rocket science.
The Sun has driven our climate on a constant basis as can be seen in the 11000 year 14C graph. There has been a lot of credible work in this area, some science is making a lot of headway.
Roger Carr (22:39:21) :
[Anthony writing] Just look at the caption the reporter used for the photo: “some kind of glacier”, yeah sure.
Oh, I thought you wrote that caption. That’s a relief.
Just a garden-variety cornice. They also form on cliff tops and surprise (fatally) skiers who venture out too far looking to see if it’s a trail.
Just when did the normal practice of scientific debate, theorizing and quantification descend to the semi-religious concept of “deniers” and “believers”. These are sad and dark times for science.
Jym Ganahl – I will disagree with your arguement on the role of sunspots, but thank you for stepping out and clearly stating your objective view and concerns about where this AGW scam is taking us. Thank you for not feeding at the sheep trough.
I’m not so sure sunspots are the only factor, with so many other items known and unquantifiable that play a roll. Still, I disagree with the idea of muzzling someone because you do not agree with how he preserves climate change.
This is typical of religion and not science.
If they spent 1/10th the money and resources of the Global Warming religion on real science, we would likely be controlling the weather world wide by now, and have quantified 99% of the factors that effect weather.
I don’t have time to follow all this in detail but I seem to remember that if you look at correlation alone there is a good one between sunspot activity and temperature change up and down. Much better than CO2 concentration. Am I right? Sorry for being so lazy and not providing a proper argument. If this is true then we should be looking at the sun for answers. There are some cosmic ray theories, aren’t there but not proven.
The Interamerican Development Bank has sent an envoy to latin america to coordinate efforts to study the consequences of “global warming” in the different countries…I´ve just suffered him in a local TV show last night.
“And he expects to be taken seriously with drivel like this?!!”
Mary- Try looking in a mirror, whilst saying that carbon dioxide is going to cause catastrophic warming.
It sounds and looks much the same- drivel
This is not about him being right or wrong about sun-spots, but since we all have an opinion we will give it voice just as Jym has.
The real story here is the effort to remove him from his job ( do not kid yourselves that is the goal here ), not because his beliefs are affecting his performance, but because he has an opinion oppossed to the AGW crowd. ( send him to a climate change conference? Ok, there is a good one in NY in March)
Take a look at the cover of Newsweek and see where we are heading not only in policy but also in public attitude, there is no room in this new society for free thinnking people speaking out for what they believe is right if it goes against what the Government is saying, and the Government is saying Climate is Real and we are the cause.
I have never called for anyone’s job, not even Hansen’s, because of his polar opposite views and outspoken ways. It would not be right, even though I feel it does effect his job performance.
I emailed the GM Rick Rogala and simply told him 2 points
1) His opinions do not effect his performance.
2) People in America for the time being have the right to have these opinions and lend voice to them. The same rights the people calling to have him removed are exercising.
Somewhat OT, but in a similar vein, the Alaska Wilderness League is looking for the youth of America (20’s and under) to submit their videos highlighting their concerns for Polar Bears and climate change in general in their “2020 Vision for the Future of America’s Arctic to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill”. They exhort young videographers to “Let your creative juices run wild for the wild”.
Yes indeed. Never mind science, just keep the hype, propaganda, and alarmism alive. While they are at it, they really should be doing something about all this very dangerous dihydrogen monoxide that is everywhere, and which kills thousands every year.
Sunspots are colder than the surroundings, but they are surrounded by bright areas visible in the chromosphere (plages) with bright small features corresponding in the visible (faculae) which overcompensate for that. That’s one of the big problems in solar irradiance reconstructions, there are no measures of plage area for the early solar cycles, and one needs to assume that total sunspot area and plage area and temperature follow the same ration. People assume he is talking about light. Not necessarily, he may be talking about forms of solar activity, and that is indeed linked to the presence of sunspots. The furnace analogy is a poor one, but Al Gore uses worse than that.
I thought this line underneath the picture of the guy standing probably next to some frozen up fountain near an UHI of all rather hilarious:
Be afraid of the sun, not carbon: Ganahl, seen here with what appears to be some sort of glacier, doesn’t buy the hype
Now the analytical skill of TV meteorologists has reached a new height.
Thank you for this chuckle Anthony… a Glacier 😀
Sunspots are only a proxy for the sun’s magnetic activity, and Carbon-14 is a proxy for galactic cosmic rays hitting our atmosphere after being moderated by the sun’s magnetic field and solar wind.
Geochemist Jan Veizer had made a determination of the ocean’s temperatures over the 550 million year Phanerozoic, but it didn’t correlate with CO2 or anything else he knew of and was close to abandoning his line of research when astrophysicist Nir Shaviv noticed that Veizer’s temperatures pretty much matched his research into our solar system’s orbit around the galaxy. Galactic cosmic ray flux correlates well with the great temperature swings, from hot house to snowball Earth. The galactic cosmic ray connection with clouds is a far more plausible explanation for 20th century warming than CO2.
It was Svensmark’s citation of Shaviv & Veizer (2003) in his Cosmoclimatology article that was my epiphany: when two completely separate physical sciences arrive at the same point, one should take note.
Mary Hinge (01:23:31) :
And he expects to be taken seriously with drivel like this?!!
Do you expect to be taken seriously when you offer zero specific counter points? Just name calling, are we Mary? Seriously.
I’ll certainly be calling and e-mailing my support for Ganahl in hopes that the bully tatics of the AGW crowd are diminished just a tad.
Lower sunspot activity is directly related to lower solar enegry output. According to NASA the solar wind is at a 50 year low that is 13% cooler and 20% less dense. The sun’s underlying magnetic field has weakened by more than 30% since the mid-1990s. How is it possibe that the source of the earth’s heat cannot affect earth’s temperature?
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/23sep_solarwind.htm
Mary Hinge (01:23:31) :
“Sunspots—and not carbon emissions—are to blame for the slow warming of the globe, Ganahl said.” […]
And he expects to be taken seriously with drivel like this?!!
The “It’s the Sun, stupid” attitude is just as dogmatic and dangerous as the AGW propagit. While there may be [but not generally accepted – after 400 years of claims] a slight [0.1 degree] solar component in the Earth’s temperature, it is clear that the Sun is not a major climate driver. Proponents have been driven to more and more ‘special pleading’ as hard data have accumulated to cast doubt on the Sun as a major player. First TSI was blamed [e.g. Eddy], then when it turned out that TSI didn’t vary enough, then UV was the cause. Now that UV records [Ca II K-line] back to 1907 have shown no match with the temperature record [Foukal er al, 2009], solar magnetic fields are to blame [‘doubling the last 100 years’]. When that was shot down [the interplanetary magnetic field is now back to was it was 107 years ago], it is cosmic rays, except that the cosmic ray flux at minima has been rock steady since the 1950s [when our first good data starts]. Also, the cosmic rays were supposed to influence the albedo, except that albedo the last 20 years has not varied with the cosmic rays [or solar activity]. The solar wind is said to have weakened [it has not] and its pressure on the atmosphere is less [amounts to a Big Mac w/Fries hitting us every second]. And so on and on. The ultimate argument is that there may be unknown solar causes not yet discovered that drives the climate. This is not science anymore than AGW is. But as for AGW and astrology, it is hopeless to argue as the limitless, self-deceptive ignorance cannot be penetrated by reason, and the whole thing is politics anyway. This is sad.
Lower sunspot activity is directly related to lower solar energy output. According to NASA the solar wind is at a 50 year low that is 13% cooler and 20% less dense. The sun’s underlying magnetic field has weakened by more than 30% since the mid-1990s. How is it possible that the source of the earth’s heat cannot affect earth’s temperature?
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/23sep_solarwind.htm
(sorry about the spelling)
Greg Goodknight:
Thanks for the nutshell version. An undervalued talent.
Who listens to the Daily Kos anyway?
Don’t forget the ‘environmentalists’ who oppose cutting away the dead wood. Those people are causing mismanagement of forests.
Nature’s way of cleaning up is through wildfires. So which is better – controlled burning, controlled cutting and thinning or out of control fires?
BTW: I realize these fires may have been deliberately set, but they certainly weren’t done in order to better manage the forests!
“How is it possible that the source of the earth’s heat cannot affect earth’s temperature?”
It is not. Legacies built too close to the lapping surf demand homage before melting away.
As someone with a simple engineer’s brain, I was told to look upon the sunspots on the sun as an indicator of activity level, rather like a pot of boiling water, the bubbles furiously appearing suggest frantic activity within the body of water caused by heat. Remove the heat & the bubbles die away, although whilst cooling the occasional small bubble still appears! This was explained to me by scientist I worked with at Rutherford Laboratory many years ago, although I hasten to add there was no discussion about Global Warming as it didn’t really exist back then in 1982 as it hadn’t been invented. Surely the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence? I thus expect to see reports in the not too distant future that the Martian icecap is growing, & that other planets/moons previously identified as warming, are cooling. It will be interesting to see what happens.
In light of recent weather events I believe the Met Office should be taken to task over its failure to “predict”, “project”, or even “forecast” the extreme weather we have endured of late & may well still do. They consume vast amounts of taxpayers’ money & the whole idea of greater investment super computers was to improve the long-term weather forecasting. It appears that the long-term forecast is A, & in the short term lots of B keeps happening!
On the propaganda issue, the sober thinking environmentalists, i.e. those who probably won’t resort to violence & direct action of any kind, need to be offered a way out of their predicament without the huge loss of face that would ensue if not, that would simply make them more resistant to common sense thought processes & drag the whole thing out for longer. Some people will not be able to stand the humiliation.
Leif: Off topic. Hopefully you’ll come back and take a look at this thread.
I’ve been trying to identify how the Pacific Warm Pool “recharges” so quickly after an El Nino event. Pavlakis et al in “ENSO Surface Shortwave Radiation Forcing over the Tropical Pacific” identified a correlation between NINO3.4 SST anomalies and Downward Shortwave Radiation over the Pacific Warm Pool due to the significant decrease in cloud amount. Their paper is here:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/8/6697/2008/acpd-8-6697-2008-print.pdf
Their comparative graph of the NINO3.4 SST anomalies and the west Pacific region they studied (fundamentally a portion of the Pacific Warm Pool) is here:
http://i41.tinypic.com/2435kbb.jpg
During the 97/98 El Nino the downward shortwave anomaly peaked around 20 watts/meter^2.
My post on it is here:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/02/recharging-pacific-warm-pool-part-2.html
Solar climate sensitivity presently stands at 1 watt/meter^2 change equals a global temperature response of 0.1 deg C.
My question, is there a similar simple ratio that could be applied to downward shortwave radiation anomaly and SST anomaly, so that I can approximate the SST increase in the Pacific Warm Pool during that period of the 97/98 El Nino?
anna v (02:34:37) :
The Palle articles that measure albedo, shows that albedo follows the temperature trends
which, however, does not follow the cosmic ray [or sunspot] variation.
Filipe (07:51:27) :
That’s one of the big problems in solar irradiance reconstructions, there are no measures of plage area for the early solar cycles, and one needs to assume that total sunspot area and plage area and temperature follow the same ratio.
There are reliable plage area determinations back to 1907 and they follow the sunspot areas very closely.
nobwainer (Geoff Sharp) (05:34:15) :
I have no doubt the Sun is the driver of our climate. […] some science is making a lot of headway.
realitycheck (06:05:38) :
These are sad and dark times for science.
Indeed.
Filipe (07:51:27) :
i>That’s one of the big problems in solar irradiance reconstructions, there are no measures of plage area for the early solar cycles
A Century of Solar Ca K Measurements and Their Implications for Solar UV Driving of Climate
P.Foukal, L.Bertello, W.Livingston, A.Pevtsov, J.Singh, A.Tlatov, R.Ulrich
Abstract
Spectroheliograms and disc – integrated flux monitoring in the strong resonance line of Ca II ( K- line) provide the longest record of chromospheric magnetic plages. We compare recent reductions of the Ca K spectroheliograms obtained since 1907 at the Kodaikanal, Mt Wilson, and U.S. National Solar Observatories. Certain differences between the individual plage indices require further investigation. Our main finding, however, is that the indices show remarkably consistent behavior on the multi- decadal time scales of greatest interest to global warming studies. The reconstruction of solar ultraviolet flux variation from these indices differs significantly from the 20th century global temperature record. This difference is consistent with other findings that, while solar UV irradiance variation may affect climate through influence on precipitation and storm tracks, its signature in global temperature remains elusive.