Is Reid Bryson a global warming skeptic's wet dream?

Question

In the 1970s, Reid Bryson was one of the few scientists to claim that the temporary global cooling was leading to an Ice Age

http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2007/05/who-heck-is-reid-bryson.html
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/23/18534/222

Global warming skeptics love to talk about the mythical global cooling panic of the 1970s. Now that same Reid Bryson (supposed "Father of Climatology", though who knows how he got that title and who gave it to him) is one of the few scientists claiming that global warming isn't caused by humans.

http://www.madison.com/tct/mad/topstories/197613

It seems like this guy is always in the scientific minority.

So first he helps create the global cooling leading to a new Ice Age theory, then he becomes a famous anthropogenic global warming skeptic.

Is this guy a global warming skeptic's wet dream or what?

Answer 1

I think it's kind of odd that many skeptics will outright ignore the thousands of highly qualified climate scientists saying that global warming is real, yet the moment Dr. Bryson says it isn't real he is the 'Father of Modern Climatology' whose word is incontrovertible fact.

So any scientist who disagrees with your position must automatically be branded a scam artist and a fake, but everybody who agrees with you gets a fake title like 'Father of Climatology' and 'First Canadian Climatologist'? I know the skeptics don't have an especially strong case here but come on, don't let's be silly.

I'm Sure Dr. Bryson is more than qualified to discuss climate change, but that's hardly grounds to simply dismiss thousands of scientists and mounds of data as fraudulent.

Answer 2

Philip - The data shows that the kind of catastrophic ocean current disruption that some scientists raised as a theoretical possibility is not likely to happen, at least this century. This view is now well accepted.

Quoting the authoritative experts:

"Based on current model simulations, it is very likely that the meridional overturning circulation (MOC) of the Atlantic Ocean will slow down during the 21st century. The multi-model average reduction by 2100 is 25% (range from zero to about 50%) for SRES emission scenario A1B. Temperatures in the Atlantic region are projected to increase despite such changes due to the much larger warming associated with projected increases of greenhouse gases. It is very unlikely that the MOC will undergo a large abrupt transition during the 21st century. Longer-term changes in the MOC cannot be assessed with confidence."

Personally I think Suzuki just needs to update his web page. And this is an excellent example of how the IPCC is upfront about how much they know and what the uncertainties are.

Answer 3

Did you really want an answer to your question, or did you want to simply make a long statement? The answer is, we don't know what we don't know. In the past 100 years the media have reported that we were entering periods of drastic cooling or drastic warming. The only thing consistent is that the prediction changed about every 20 or so years. If you don't believe me, do the research - the New York Times has been both a Global Cooling advocate and Global Warming Advocate. We know that this planet's climate has changed in the past, is probably changing now, and will change in the future. We also know that the continental plates are moving, we'll have earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions in the future. So what? This planet is always changing and re-inventing itself. These natural changes are one of the things that has helped the create the diversity of life on this planet - species have flourished and become extinct due to natural climactic changes that occurred long before man could have had anything do do with them. But, I'm sure that you've got your mind made up. You're positive that we are entering a warming period and that man's burning of fossil fuels is to blame. Welcome to the Misanthrope Club.

Answer 4

David Suzuki also preached the same sermon.

And apparently still does.
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/Science/Conveyor.asp

It is well accepted that the earth - as a whole - is warming as a result of human activity. Ironically, the lessons of distant earth history show that warming may cause a sudden drop in temperature around the North Atlantic.

" Computer models with elevated greenhouse gas concentrations tend to show a warming and freshening (i.e. reduced saltiness) in the northern North Atlantic ocean. This simply results from a combination of global warming, changes in rainfall patterns, and melting glaciers. But after a period of warming, the models predict a weakening or complete halt of the NADW formation, similar to the situation during pulses of sudden cooling tens of thousands of years ago"

3dm's got you running again Dana.

Answer 5

Dana looking like a total moron in 3...2...1...

You didn't happen to follow the link in your "BigCityLib Strikes Back blog, did you?

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Schneider1977.pdf

If you had you'd know that you were spreading a lie, par for the course among lib alarmists:

"I must, however, mention that Professor Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin, whom the CIA and the Impact Team cite as the expert predicting most of the coming climatic disasters, has publicly repudiated much of the CIA reports, and they quote him as a principal source of specific climatic predictions. Bryson objected for the simple reason that the predictions were specific - something which is beyond the state-of-the-art skills of climatologists. In fact, much of the CIA reports depend on the pre-1974 views of Bryson, and he himself argued that new evidence has required him, as any good scientist, to revise and recast his views. In essence, I would characterise parts of the CIA reports that predict the climatic future as "Early Bryson extrapolated" and much of The Weather Conspiracy thus as "Early CIA extrapolated".

This not only says Bryon was not the "leader" as you claim, but that the government used BOGUS science in direct opposition to Bryson's views at the time. Sounds like AGW alarmists distortion of the nonexistent "consensus". Bryson had already recanted his views ("pre-1974") by the time of the infamous Newsweek article.

Well, at least you don't look as stupid as the BigCityLib.

Why don't you look at the words of Bryson again:
"Bryson objected for the simple reason that the predictions were specific - something which is beyond the state-of-the-art skills of climatologists. In fact, much of the CIA reports depend on the pre-1974 views of Bryson, and he himself argued that new evidence has required him, as any good scientist, to revise and recast his views."

Change the dates and names and you could have any of the growing number of scientists currently distancing themselves from the IPCC's "science".

As for myself, I could care less who the faces are that make a case for or against AGW. I do care about scientific integrity, and in this instance, Bryson showed it.

Maybe you are the skeptics' wetdream...

...keep on asking those inane questions!

Answer 6

so that would make it a frozen or slush dream

Answer 7

I have compiled a small list from various articles and other sources, showing a few of the scientists on the forefront of the global warming debate. You are terribly misguided if you believe that Mr Bryson is part of a minority of scientists engaged in questioning the methods and conclusions drawn by the scientists that ‘believe’ in the human causation of global warming. Notice that I used the word 'believe', this is not by accident since the scientists argueing for the human causation believe it to be so, even if their studies point them in other directions. Enjoy the reading, and get your head out of Al Gores butt.
SCIENTIST OPPOSING GLOBAL WARMING ‘CONSENSUS’
[edit] The cause of global warming is unknown
Scientists in this section conclude it is too early to ascribe any cause to the observed rising temperatures, man-made or natural.
• Claude Allègre, French geophysicist, Institute of Geophysics (Paris): "The increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere is an observed fact and mankind is most certainly responsible. In the long term, this increase will without doubt become harmful, but its exact role in the climate is less clear. Various parameters appear more important than CO2. Consider the water cycle and formation of various types of clouds, and the complex effects of industrial or agricultural dust. Or fluctuations of the intensity of the solar radiation on annual and century scale, which seem better correlated with heating effects than the variations of CO2 content." (Translation from the original French version in L'Express, May 10, 2006 [4])
• Robert C. Balling, Jr., director of the Office of Climatology and an associate professor of geography at Arizona State University: "[I]t is very likely that the recent upward trend [in global surface temperature] is very real and that the upward signal is greater than any noise introduced from uncertainties in the record. However, the general error is most likely to be in the warming direction, with a maximum possible (though unlikely) value of 0.3°C. ... At this moment in time we know only that: (1) Global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. (2) Mid-tropospheric temperatures have warmed little over the same period. (3) This difference is not consistent with predictions from numerical climate models." (George C. Marshall Institute, Policy Outlook, September 2003 [5])
• Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland: "There is evidence of global warming. ... But warming does not confirm that carbon dioxide is causing it. Climate is always warming or cooling. There are natural variability theories of warming. To support the argument that carbon dioxide is causing it, the evidence would have to distinguish between human-caused and natural warming. This has not been done.[6]
• David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma: "The amount of climatic warming that has taken place in the past 150 years is poorly constrained, and its cause--human or natural--is unknown. There is no sound scientific basis for predicting future climate change with any degree of certainty. If the climate does warm, it is likely to be beneficial to humanity rather than harmful. In my opinion, it would be foolish to establish national energy policy on the basis of misinformation and irrational hysteria." (Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, December 6, 2006 [7])
• Richard Lindzen, MIT meteorology professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences: "We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5°C higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of CO2 have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that CO2 is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds). But--and I cannot stress this enough--we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to CO2 or to forecast what the climate will be in the future." [8] "[T]here has been no question whatsoever that CO2 is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas — albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in CO2 should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed." (San Francisco Examiner, July 12, 2006 [9] and in Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2006, Page A14)
• Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville: "We need to find out how much of the warming we are seeing could be due to mankind, because I still maintain we have no idea how much you can attribute to mankind." (George C. Marshall Institute Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, April 17, 2006 [10])
[edit] Global warming is mostly due to natural processes
Scientists in this section conclude that natural causes are likely more to blame than human activities for the observed rising temperatures.
• Khabibullo Ismailovich Abdusamatov, at Pulkovskaya Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the supervisor of the Astrometria project of the Russian section of the International Space Station: "Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy - almost throughout the last century - growth in its intensity." (Russian News & Information Agency, Jan. 15, 2007 [11]) (See also [12], [13], [14])
• Sallie Baliunas, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "[T]he recent warming trend in the surface temperature record cannot be caused by the increase of human-made greenhouse gases in the air." [15] In 2003 Baliunas and Soon wrote that "there is no reliable evidence for increased severity or frequency of storms, droughts, or floods that can be related to the air’s increased greenhouse gas content." [16]
• Robert M. Carter, researcher at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia: "The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown." (Telegraph, April 9, 2006 [17])
• George V. Chilingar, professor of civil and petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California, and Leonid F. Khilyuk: "The authors identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate: (1) solar radiation ..., (2) outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, (3) microbial activities ... . The writers provide quantitative estimates of the scope and extent of their corresponding effects on the Earth’s climate [and] show that the human-induced climatic changes are negligible." (Environmental Geology, vol. 50 no. 6, August 2006 [18])
• William M. Gray, professor of atmospheric science and meteorologist, Colorado State University: "This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential." (BBC News, 16 Nov 2000 [19]) "I am of the opinion that [global warming] is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people." (Washington Post, May 28, 2006 [20]) "So many people have a vested interest in this global-warming thing—all these big labs and research and stuff. The idea is to frighten the public, to get money to study it more." (Discover, vol. 26 no. 9, September 2005 [21])
• Zbigniew Jaworowski, chair of the Scientific Council at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw: "The atmospheric temperature variations do not follow the changes in the concentrations of CO2 ... climate change fluctuations comes ... from cosmic radiation (21st Century Science & Technology, Winter 2003-2004, p. 52-65 [22])
• David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware: "About half of the warming during the 20th century occurred prior to the 1940s, and natural variability accounts for all or nearly all of the warming." (May 15, 2006 [23])
• Marcel Leroux, former Professor of Climatology, Université Jean Moulin: "The possible causes, then, of climate change are: well-established orbital parameters on the palaeoclimatic scale, ... solar activity, ...; volcanism ...; and far at the rear, the greenhouse effect, and in particular that caused by water vapor, the extent of its influence being unknown. These factors are working together all the time, and it seems difficult to unravel the relative importance of their respective influences upon climatic evolution. Equally, it is tendentious to highlight the anthropic factor, which is, clearly, the least credible among all those previously mentioned." (M. Leroux, Global Warming - Myth or Reality?, 2005, p. 120 [24])
• Tim Patterson [25], paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada: "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?" [26]
• Frederick Seitz, retired, former solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences: "So we see that the scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities.", Environment News, 2001 [27]
• Nir Shaviv, astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: "[T]he truth is probably somewhere in between [the common view and that of skeptics], with natural causes probably being more important over the past century, whereas anthropogenic causes will probably be more dominant over the next century. ... [A]bout 2/3's (give or take a third or so) of the warming [over the past century] should be attributed to increased solar activity and the remaining to anthropogenic causes." His opinion is based on some proxies of solar activity over the past few centuries. [28]
• Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia: "The greenhouse effect is real. However, the effect is minute, insignificant, and very difficult to detect." (Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 2005) [29] "The Earth currently is experiencing a warming trend, but there is scientific evidence that human activities have little to do with it.", NCPA Study No. 279, Sep. 2005 [30]. “It’s not automatically true that warming is bad, I happen to believe that warming is good, and so do many economists.” (CBC's Denial machine @ 19:23 - Google Video Link)
• Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "[T]here's increasingly strong evidence that previous research conclusions, including those of the United Nations and the United States government concerning 20th century warming, may have been biased by underestimation of natural climate variations. The bottom line is that if these variations are indeed proven true, then, yes, natural climate fluctuations could be a dominant factor in the recent warming. In other words, natural factors could be more important than previously assumed." (Harvard University Gazette, 24 April 2003 [31])
• Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center: "Our team ... has discovered that the relatively few cosmic rays that reach sea-level play a big part in the everyday weather. They help to make low-level clouds, which largely regulate the Earth’s surface temperature. During the 20th Century the influx of cosmic rays decreased and the resulting reduction of cloudiness allowed the world to warm up. ... most of the warming during the 20th Century can be explained by a reduction in low cloud cover." [32]
• Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, Professor Emeritus from University of Ottawa: "At this stage, two scenarios of potential human impact on climate appear feasible: (1) the standard IPCC model ..., and (2) the alternative model that argues for celestial phenomena as the principal climate driver. ... Models and empirical observations are both indispensable tools of science, yet when discrepancies arise, observations should carry greater weight than theory. If so, the multitude of empirical observations favours celestial phenomena as the most important driver of terrestrial climate on most time scales, but time will be the final judge." (In J. Veizer, "Celestial climate driver: a perspective from four billion years of the carbon cycle", Geoscience Canada, March, 2005. [33], [34])
Don't Believe the Hype
Al Gore is wrong. There's no "consensus" on global warming.

BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.
Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."
That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.
The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't know."
So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.
They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.

The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.
Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming because he can't think of anything else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.
A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended--at least not in terms of the actual science.
A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.
There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.
Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.
The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."
In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.

So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.
Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.
Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.