Posted on 07/01/2007 7:31:26 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Since it was reported this month by The Capital Times, Professor Emeritus Reid Bryson's anti-establishment position against man-made global warming has provoked floods of interest, great indignation and -- particularly among his fellow University of Wisconsin scientists -- no shortage of exasperation.
The story of Bryson's denial that industrially produced carbon dioxide is linked to climate change caught the attention of national outlets like the Drudge Report and drew more than 30,000 readers in the first 90 minutes after it was posted on this paper's Web site.
More than 100 have posted their reactions to it on The Capital Times online forum, dozens of others have written letters to the editor and almost two weeks later the story remains among the most viewed.
Statements by the global warming skeptic also stirred up controversy in scientific departments across the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Many who work with the 87-year-old Bryson say they have the utmost respect for him, but fault his opinions for not being substantiated by fact.
"There is a huge mountain of evidence and scientific theory and publications, all out there in the public arena, and Reid comes along and has some other idea, but he provides no evidence. You just have to take his word for it," said Jonathan Foley, a climatologist at UW-Madison who directs the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.
"If he could come up with any evidence for his hypothesis, anything that would back up what he is saying, and he could publish it, he would win the Nobel Prize," Foley said. "Everyone would be thrilled if he were right. Global warming is a major, major global crisis and it would be fantastic if Reid were correct. But sadly he is not."
'Fabulously unorthodox': Foley has a strong personal link to Bryson and says he has always looked up to him. He was the student of one of Bryson's students, making Bryson his "academic grandfather." He stepped into Bryson's old position and was the first person on campus to hold the Reid Bryson chair.
Thousands of scientists all over the world support the idea of global warming and hold up their data to public scrutiny, he said, adding that they have been putting out evidence -- not just computer models, but real-world observations.
"There is nothing hidden, nothing obscured. This has been going on for decades," he said.
Bryson has every right to hold his views on climate change, Foley said. "Unfortunately, in the scientific world we demand evidence, just like you would in a courtroom. And I think he came to court empty-handed in this case."
Jonathan Martin, chairman of the atmospheric and oceanic sciences department at UW-Madison, also acknowledges a deep affection for Bryson, calling him an icon.
Martin said he doesn't want to get into a public fight over the issue, adding that Bryson is entitled to his "fabulously unorthodox opinion."
"He tends to not back up his opinions with any facts, with any argument," Martin said. "He'll just rather flippantly tell you. There really isn't much of an argument there, it's an assertion. Let's just be careful to not give assertions the same weight as considered scientific opinion, the kind that have gone through peer review. It's not really the same thing."
Dan Vimont, assistant professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and Center for Climatic Research, said he stands behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change findings.
"Our science has progressed quite a ways and I think it is pretty clear at this point that what the IPCC said is actually true: That humans are changing the climate," Vimont said. "We have introduced a good deal of carbon dioxide to the climate and we know that. And things will very likely continue to warm. I would object to the idea that this is a bunch of hooey."
Bryson's stand: After the Capital Times story was published, Bryson, known as the father of scientific climatology, said he got dozens of e-mails, some of them calling him a tool of the extreme right wing.
"They don't even know what that means," he said in a follow-up interview this week. "What far right? I don't even know anybody on the far right. And if I did, I would avoid them."
Bryson said politics gets in the way of looking at climate change.
He is not political, he said. He doesn't consider himself a Republican or a conservative. When asked who he voted for in the last presidential election, he said, "the wrong one."
Does that mean he voted for George Bush? "Of course not," he said. "I'm not that dumb."
Bryson acknowledges that he is up against an outspoken scientific community on the issue of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming.
Some may call him "a global warming skeptic." But he is not skeptical that global warming exists, he is just doubtful that humans are the cause of it. There is no question the Earth has been warming. It is coming out of a "Little Ice Age," he said.
"However, there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We've been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It's been warming up for a long time," Bryson said in the story published June 18.
Bryson was the founding chairman of the department of meteorology at UW-Madison and of the Institute for Environmental Studies, now known as the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. He retired in 1985, but has gone into the office almost every day since to create climate models. He does it without pay from the university.
For the last 20 years of his career Bryson's research was funded by a benefactor, who wished to remain anonymous, and who is now dead, he said.
"I don't get very much money from the endowment she left the university in my name," Bryson said.
He receives $8,000 to $10,000 now from the endowment, enough to support a graduate student to help him and computer costs. "It isn't a lot," said Bryson, who can be found in his university office every morning and often works from home in the afternoons and evenings.
He is not paid by any oil company or any energy company, he said emphatically.
After 25 years of work, Bryson has a how-to book coming out this week called "Paleoclimate." It details how to model climate on a computer. The book comes with a CD that people can put into their computers and learn how to model past climate without having a doctorate in meteorology or climatology, Bryson said.
He is giving a workshop in Hot Springs, South Dakota, in September on how to do climate modeling and the session is full. He has led about 10 of these sessions already, in Sweden, Germany, Canada, Colorado and California.
Since The Capital Times article ran, he has been asked to give lectures, including a speech to a group from NASA, whose director recently drew criticism himself for saying he doubted global warming is "a problem we must wrestle with."
At the same time, nine UW-Madison professors -- including Martin -- wrote a June 21 letter in The Capital Times, wishing to make it "absolutely clear" that Bryson's opinions on global warming were not shared by other scientists at the University of Wisconsin's Center for Climatic Research and Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
"The scientific evidence for human causation of global warming is now very strong, and gets stronger every year. Evidence includes well-documented rises in carbon dioxide concentrations and global mean temperatures, and repeated validations of the global climate models used to predict future climate changes," they wrote.
Two of the professors later expressed concern for their students in the wake of a comment Bryson made about beginning graduate students passing themselves off as experts on global warming when reporters call the meteorology building seeking the opinion of a scientist. "And that goes in the paper as scientists say ...'" Bryson said.
If the grad students are upset by his comment, Bryson asserted, they should come and talk to him and show him that they know the equivalent of a researcher with 20 or 30 years of experience. "I'm right there. My door's open. If they are upset, well, tough," he said.
"I didn't say they didn't know anything. But lumping a first-year grad student in with a 30-year experienced professor is sort of apples and pears. Someday they'll be there, but they aren't yet."
What's consensus: In the matter of going against so many of his scientific peers on global warming, Bryson said that throughout history there are clear cases where the consensus was wrong.
"The consensus was against Copernicus, Darwin and Galileo at the time. But were they wrong or was the consensus wrong? Now I am not necessarily a Galileo or a Copernicus, but the point is, the consensus does not mean that the science is right," he said.
Bryson said he moved the critical e-mails that The Capital Times story generated directly into his trash basket.
He estimated that 95 percent of the people who wrote him agreed with him.
A woman sent him an e-mail Sunday saying, "Thank you, thank you, thank you for being so brave. I wish I had said it but I didn't have the guts."
Exactly! When a boob like Al Gore try to convince you that his ideas can control global climate imagine that same boob trying to convince you his ideas can control continental drift.
File these comments under "H" -- for hooey.
I'm very happy to hear this is a hot topic in Madison! I have some very closed-minded liberal relatives out there and I'm happy to hear they can't avoid being introduced to this other point of view.
Algorged will deal with global warming, continental drift and planetary wiggle. His hugeness will then sit on his throne and accept you green bucks cause he is the reigning No Nuthing Nerd!
SARCASM ALURT!(ALgorged spelling of course!)
12,000 years ago, before a previous global warming, humans in Nashville were living in caves and hunting mastodon.
Nowdays, people in places farther north might want to have a piece of the "warmness" pie, but selfish Al Gore refuses to let them share the good life he has.
Global Warming Happens
It happened 11,000 years ago and removed these ice sheets 
That's why we can sail the Great Lakes and that's why Al Gore can have a farm.
I am thrilled that global warming is a hoax. I don’t have to throw away my ice fishing gear.
Professor Bryson is condemned because his research (which is well backed up) goes against the orthodoxy of so-called global warming.
Meanwhile, how many Communists and Marxists are there at the University of Wisconson? Don’t we have enough proof of how wrong they are?
It's been pointed out that GW "deniers" are most often Professor Emeriti who no longer have a financial interest in the outcome of the scientific research. After reading this, I've observed the pattern, too.
I’m here in Phoenix and I’m still waiting to see our high temp beat the record set in 1989 (122 F). Seems to me if the globe is progressively warming we would break all the previous high temp records every year.
Other References:
When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser. — Socrates
Same here in Northern CA. We usually have hit 100 at least once or twice by now but not yet and the last few days have been extremely nice. Today it is 75 at 11:45 AM. Great weather, but hardly the hot temps predicted last winter by global warming activists(read idiots).
"He tends to not back up his opinions with any facts, with any argument," Martin said. "He'll just rather flippantly tell you. There really isn't much of an argument there, it's an assertion. Let's just be careful to not give assertions the same weight as considered scientific opinion, the kind that have gone through peer review. It's not really the same thing." - Jonathan Martin, chairman of the atmospheric and oceanic sciences department at UW-Madison.
"...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..."
"...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?”
"Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up—or down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years..."
From a great interview with Bryson:
The Faithful Heretic - A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions
Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News - May 2007
Thanks for all the great posts; though I know I’m preachin’ to the choir here. :)
Prof. Bryson is awesome and very articulate. I heard him interviewed by our local afternoon talk radio ConservaBabe and he rocked. Batted down the calls from the Loony Leftists in this town like swattin’ flies, LOL!
Again, his position ISN’T that there isn’t any ‘Global Warming;’ just that we humans are so insignificant in the Grand Scheme of Things as to not be a cause.
Algore is going to have a lot to answer to when he gets to the Pearly Gates such as, “How can you place yourself above G-d as all knowing, while making a buck off of your fellow man?” ;)
Maybe some of these “scientists” should leave their Ivory Towers, go stand in the middle of a cornfield at midnight and gaze up at the stars...then they can tell me how IMPORTANT they are and how they personally effect the planet in any big way. Yeesh!
Even we dumb Farm Gals in “Flyover Country” know that controlling Nature is beyond our control. Ever planted 300 Gladiolus to sell, only to have them ripped to shreds by a hail storm the day BEFORE you’re to take them to market? Yep. That’s called ‘An Act of Nature’ and she’ll smack you down good whenever she feels like it.
And there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. ;)
I’ll be checking out the global warming in Walworth County in a couple weeks. Hopefully there won’t be tornado warnings, complete with sirens, on three consecutive days like the last time I was there, lol!
I’m praying for decent weather for my guys up in the Boundary Waters, too. They’re usually pretty lucky when they go; with the fish and the weather.
Have fun! :)
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