The Faithful Heretic

From the Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News:

Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education.

And more awards and honors than you can shake a stick at. He’s 86 years old and has seen and done a lot in his chosen field. He’s an expert’s expert. And he was ahead of the crowd.

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.

So, what does he think of all this hullabaloo over CO2 causing Global Warming?

“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.”

So what about the CO2 in the models devised to predict the coming heat wave?

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?
…
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.

But….But..the models!?

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?”

Hmmmmm?

The rest of the article/interview is here.

(Seen at The Drudge Report)