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.”
@Leif
“What correlation? some people would take your graph to be strong support for AGW.”
Since you are so determined to see no rough correlation (even though I find it blindingly obvious), there is obviously nothing else I can say… I had hoped you’d have something more interesting to say 🙁
tallbloke (08:53:49) :
Here’s the short term one:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1965/to:2009/mean:43/detrend:0.6/offset:0.35/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1965/to:2009/mean:12/scale:0.001
What say you Leif?
I say that if temperature leads the solar input, the correlation is spurious. Also, a 0.1 degree correlation with solar activity is within what I always have said is to be expected, That does not make the Sun a major climate driver.
Chris H (09:50:37) :
(even though I find it blindingly obvious),
The Earth is leading the Sun half of the time, the trends are opposite after 1980. Plot the data as a scatter plot [no smoothing] and compute the correlation coefficient. If you smooth, remember to decrease the statistical significance accordingly. Also remember to decrease the significance because of the high autocorrelation. All of these things are standard techniques and you can put hard numbers on everything. Do that, and ask me again.
Chris H (09:50:37) :
@Leif
“What correlation? some people would take your graph to be strong support for AGW.”
Since you are so determined to see no rough correlation (even though I find it blindingly obvious), there is obviously nothing else I can say… I had hoped you’d have something more interesting to say 🙁
Ok, Chris, let’s say that your graph demonstrates excellent correlation between sunspots and temperature for most of its period. Here it is again:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/mean:132/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1850/mean:132/scale:0.010/offset:-0.8
It’s pretty good up to about 1940, yes? Then there is a decoupling until about 1970, with temperature lagging – no problem, we can explain that by aerosols or whatever you fancy. The ‘correlation’ picks up again and runs through to about 1985, then – woops. If temperature was to be related to sunspots only it should have fallen to about -0.2 by now, but instead it’s up at +0.4. What can explain that extraordinary decoupling of the ‘correlation’? Clearly not sunspots! Hmm, now let’s think what that might be…..
Do you not see the point of how powerful an argument this is for the influence of anthropogenic forcing? Not only do you strengthen the case that recent warming cannot be accounted for by natural forcings, you also have to presume a very high climate sensitivity in order to make any sense of your supposed correlation, and that hugely strengthens the case for future AGW being to the extreme end of projections!
So – nice job! 😉
Sylvia (09:42:57) :
Anna V. (08:51:34), last night when my husband was reading to me about Hamiltonian mechanics, we went off on a tangent and started talking about chaos and fractals and wondered if, since you mentioned chaos in a comment some weeks ago, you might recommend some texts for us to study? Please?
I am sorry not to have a handy text to recommend. My “knowledge” of chaos and complexity comes from academic level lectures and I never bothered to really study it. If you have patience, I might ask a colleague for a book recommendation next time I am at the center from which I retired a while ago, if you tell me at what level you would want it.
Alternatively you could start with the wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
TomVonk who participates sometimes on this blog ( the venus thread recently) might be a better person to ask, if you catch him.
My mention of chaos was with respect to the paper by Tsonis et al http://www.uwm.edu/~aatsonis/2007GL030288.pdf where they model climate consistently with chaos theory.
This guy is a ~snip~. Solar activity doesn’t account for global warming today: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12234
He’s claiming we should feed the planet because it’s getting hotter. LOL! Does anyone really believe in that, with 6,7+ billion people on the planet?
Climate skeptics are ~snip~.
we are killing our planet. we are breeding like rats, destroying our environment, and poisoning our oceans. we’re running out of food and soon out of oil. THE DETAILS ARE INSIGNIFICANT. WE MUST REDUCE POPULATION AND INDUSTRY IF WE WANT TO SURVIVE. WAKE UP YOU ~snip~.
I agree. Global warming or not, we can’t justify any excuse to keep destroying our planet for the sake of “growth”. It’s just impossible, because there’s a limit somewhere.
Science was supposed to grow more crops more quickly with genetic engineering, and it did just that, but the human population grew just as quickly, and brought with it more pollution, more mouths to feed, and more land to develop!!
Earth’s already on its last leg as far as resources go, and we can’t keep growing and profiting without killing ourselves.
We need to not shoot ourselves in the foot and stop this before it’s too late. It probably already is, but we need to take hold of the brakes right now.
I’ve always felt that the global warming campaign has been a massive distraction in consumption, because now, like some have said, some have taken economical advantage of the situation: green this, green that etc. Climate-friendly is the buzzword. However, if the paradigm was that the Earth’s going to radically cool down, I’m sure there are enough clever people to turn that into a marketing success. That taken into account, it doesn’t say very much about the truthfulness of the “truth”.
That said, for every movement there will be an anti-movement, which seem to be favored by the more “enlightened” ones, the kind of people who aren’t led around as easily as the ordinary “sheep” who just cling to the dogma they are fed. The way to be “hip” is to differentiate yourself from others, and to appear somehow unique. While people bicker over this other issues are left totally ignored: it’s that they are more difficult to accept than fighting against global warming/cooling/whatever that the modern technological society can do without sacrificing anything essential to itself.
What about overpopulation, what about our resource consumption, material and energy spent on simply keeping the economy pipelines pressurized?
“WE MUST REDUCE POPULATION AND INDUSTRY IF WE WANT TO SURVIVE.”
A volunteer?
Unfortunately anton – “the details” are very important. It is with details that we are able to identify and then address the most pressing problems. When you refer to the “breeding” situation – you should know how misanthropic you sound. Perhaps you see yourself in that light – but kindly leave the rest of us out of your misbegotten world.
Sunspots are in fact colder than the rest of the solar surface. In any case, they have little to no relevance here.
We are stupidly killing our planet with major overpopulation and (over)industrialization. Time to wake up.
[snip- Verm that was a despicable comment, suggesting that a person should be “put down” for his views has earned you a permanent ban here, I don’t tolerate hate speech. -Anthony Watts]
http://www.springerlink.com/content/j7l094tn80hvv178/fulltext.pdf
A 2nd Raspopov link. I have no idea if this is the paper the original poster was referencing.
I do wonder, as the earth seems to be on a multi-year cooling trend that Hanson characterizes as a blip in the every upward unstoppable CO2 driven catastrophe, what the human race will do to avert the actual catastrophe that even the most ardent GWists seem to admit will occur – ie – the next Ice Age.
We are well along into this interglacial. If we look back to the beginning of written history we do not as much foward to go before the earth is plunged again into it’s more normal icy state.
Where will the UK go? How will the national concept survive? Will governments and nations move to reclaim the new exposed seabeds?
This whole GW thing is so very short sighted. It’s not that unlikely that someones Great Great Great Great Great grandperson will be the generation that has to deal with the real deal to fear – ie the next ice age. Or maybe this drop in magnetic difference between the dark area of the sunspot and the rest of the sun that the National Solar observatory predicts will end sunsposts if the current trend continues in a few years along with the other cyclical cyles that preceed each ice age mean we are on the verge of one now.
Won’t that wonk the change of the new GW religion.
On an interesting side note. I just went on a ski trip with some scientists from a Big Ten university. One of them is involved in testing the level of carbon absorbtion in water by one celled beings and using light and a water slueth technology to detect these changes. The other counds polar bears each year. Neither buys into GW other than both wrote their grants on a GW basis in order to have their fun. It’s a pretty big game out there. As long as you can write your hypothesis and get your grant you can study whatever you want if it’s in GW terms. Their concern is how couch their negative GW results (ie Polar bear poplation is growing and the oceans don’t have a tipping point where they won’t absorb CO2) so that they can continue to get the next grant.
There are a lot of skeptics out there in university land, but they have to be a careful majority.
Hmmm. Looks like the trolls have found your excellent site Anthony. Sorry for that.
anna v (12:32:30)
Thank you for your kind offer. I will keep an eye out for TomVonk. If you do see your colleague, a recommendation for a text at the level of Goldstein’s Classical Mechanics would be lovely.
Sorry if this has already been posted, but it seemed appropriate here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090213114321.htm
“Mass Media Often Failing In Its Coverage Of Global Warming, Says Climate Researcher”
“Schneider, a coordinating lead author of chapter 19 in the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published in 2007, is calling for the news media to employ trained reporters in covering global warming.”
Woof-woof.
Calling for a persons extermination or reprogramming because of non compliance to a political ideology sounds like Orwell 1984 or the beginning signs of a new religion.
Science/truth really doesn’t matter when you have been assimilate into the collective.
IPCC’s Schneider, also says:
“We’ve been using the atmosphere as a free sewer to dump our tailpipe and smokestack waste since the Victorian industrial revolution and now we tell the developing world, sorry, guys, the sewer’s full.”
Is it any wonder there are skeptics? This person has a clear political agenda to sell and he is a “lead author” for IPCC’s 2007 Report. Bias?
Since the so called “sewer” is Earth’s atmosphere and man made CO2 is about 3% of .0385 – apparently the rest of the GHGs (water vapor, trace methane) have filled it up.
Mr. Schneider is also miffed that TV News departments don’t thump AGW hard enough in their broadcasts. Rather than allow open debate – he expects science “reporters” to choose stories based on relative “credibility” of the source. Another clear bias toward institutional science on the grant dole. Following this criterion he would have dismissed Galileo, Newton, Copernicus and Einstein in favor of the “credible” majority at the time.
Most climate scientists agree that it is essential that man-made global warming is tackled now as it may already be too late to save the planet. Over population is a major threat too, especially since the west has developed and bred the Third World to the point where all Chinese and Indians expect to own cars, fridge-freezers, televisons, etc. We have to stop international aid and cut back severely on industrialisation. Even the British government’s “environment tsar” is proposing that domestic flights be taxed to oblivion and families be limited in how many holiday flights they may take. None of this has any benefit to the politicians. It is a sign of how desperate things are that they must propose vote losing gestures like this. And politicians will never do enough.
@ur momisugly Simon Evans (10:53:17)
“If temperature was to be related to sunspots only it should have fallen to about -0.2 by now, but instead it’s up at +0.4. What can explain that extraordinary decoupling of the ‘correlation’? Clearly not sunspots!”
Your problem (and perhaps Leif’s) is that you think I am claiming solar is the ONLY major climate driver. Where-as I actually think it may be a *significant* driver (say over 50%), but certainly not the only one. Also the sun-spot measurements are clearly a proxy for some other kinds of solar activity (which actually effect climate – sunspots obviously do not do so), so again we would not necessarily expect perfect agreement between sunspots & climate.
There are lots of things involved in climate, and I make no claims about what may or may not explain climate deviations from predictions based on sunspots. I leave that to those with more time & expertise than me. I simply wished to hear what Leif had to say about the rough correlation – sadly it seems nothing interesting (since his stringent method would disprove CO2 & just about everything else).
Graph linked again for clarity:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/mean:132/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1850/mean:132/scale:0.010/offset:-0.8
But I will say I find it unbelievable that CO2 would have no effect before 1985, and then suddenly have a massive effect after that.
This site presents two arguments against the climate skeptic in this blog post:
– Solar activity does not account for global warming today
– We cannot feed the entire planet just because it’s getting hotter
http://www.corrupt.org/news/how_climate_skeptics_play_heroes
Can anyone respond to this?
The biggest problem with the internet is it allows anyone capable of setting up a blog to declare themselves an expert on just about any subject they feel like – regardless of qualifications and irrespective of any evidence they may or may not have to back up what they assert.
ps. love how “5 to 10 years” is now considered “history”.
Jane (03:46:58) :
The only response needed is to Alex, your author’s concluding statement:
“I suggest we export them [Climate Skeptics] all to Africa, where it’s both hot and overpopulated. If you really want that future, you gotta live it baby!”
Indicative of the overt hatred your site reflects.
I don’t think we’re really keen in discussing all possible causes here…it could be the sun activity, although this:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/mean:132/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1850/mean:132/scale:0.010/offset:-0.8
and this
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12234
kind of disprove it already. It’s cool that this discussion is taking place (myself I’ve learned a ton from it!) but I don’t know why people here is so keen in disproving the CO2 emission theory while hanging at straws. Is it because it hurts the economy and the western way of life? I think it couldn’t hurt if we back down on excessive industrialization and let the planet catch a breath.
Why, then, are you still using a computer? Why haven’t you sold your home and all your material possessions and gone to live in the forest?
Governments finding new ways to tax their populations is evidence only of political dishonesty, not AGW.