I just came across this article by Dr. Richard Lindzen. I don't know him personally, but read many of his papers on atmospheric waves while doing my own research in that area. One of his former graduate students said "He's only half as smart as he thinks he is but still twice as smart as any of us." I wouldn't know about the first part of that assessment, but the second is certainly true as far as I'm concerned. So to find some of my own thoughts on global warming reflected in his article, well, modesty forbids.
The part about then-Senator Gore was new to me. It seems he's only gotten worse with time, and probably regrets no longer having any official government position from which to harass people who don't BELIEVE (see the June 16 and June 13 posts)
Anyway, enjoy.

Update following the article

From OpinionJournal

Climate of Fear
Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.

BY RICHARD LINDZEN
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?

The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.

But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.

If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less--hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.

So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear. An example: Earlier this year, Texas Rep. Joe Barton issued letters to paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and some of his co-authors seeking the details behind a taxpayer-funded analysis that claimed the 1990s were likely the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the last millennium. Mr. Barton's concern was based on the fact that the IPCC had singled out Mr. Mann's work as a means to encourage policy makers to take action. And they did so before his work could be replicated and tested--a task made difficult because Mr. Mann, a key IPCC author, had refused to release the details for analysis. The scientific community's defense of Mr. Mann was, nonetheless, immediate and harsh. The president of the National Academy of Sciences--as well as the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union--formally protested, saying that Rep. Barton's singling out of a scientist's work smacked of intimidation.

All of which starkly contrasts to the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Sen. Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists--a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.

Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen.

Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.

Mr. Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

Here's another example of what happens when you deviate from the global warming party line:

From Denver Westword:

The Skeptic

Celebrated and shunned, CSU's Bill Gray is taking heat in the global warming debate

Galileo got crosswise with Pope Urban VIII. Robert Oppenheimer didn't see eye-to-eye with Edward Teller. Every original thinker has a bête noire who torments and goads him.

For William Gray, a lean, six-foot-five emeritus professor at Colorado State University and one of the world's leading experts on tropical storms, the bugaboo on the horizon is another tall, charismatic fellow named Albert Arnold Gore Jr. You can call him Al.

Sitting in his office on the northwest edge of Fort Collins, Gray thumbs through Gore's An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, the coffee-table companion book to the documentary of the same name. Gore has been making the rounds of talk shows and bookseller conventions promoting both efforts. Turn on cable news and there he is, reciting the we're-in-deep-shit message he's been delivering by slide show for years, now bolstered by a website (www.climatecrisis.net) and startling computer graphics that depict the earth being ravaged by a gauntlet of man-made catastrophes over the next few decades.

Gray doesn't believe in the planetary emergency. Never has. Still, he picks his words carefully. A few weeks ago, a Washington Post article quoted him comparing Gore's convictions about global warming to Hitler's beliefs about the Jews, a burst of rhetorical overkill he says he sincerely regrets. So he's going to try to sound a diplomatic note here, even though the book, which some colleagues have asked him to review, strikes him as a piece of outright hysteria.

"I admire Al Gore," he says. "There's no doubt, with over six billion people, we have a lot of environmental problems in this world. He's pointing them out. That's fine. But that doesn't mean it's all due to global warming, or that you're going to solve these problems by cutting back on fossil fuels."

The tone seems conciliatory enough. But soon Gray is out of his seat, pointing out features on a map of the world pinned to the wall, reading passages from Gore's book aloud, scribbling lines of convection on a yellow legal pad. "This is a slick propaganda book," he declares. "The pictures are very good. But there are factual errors."

He's off and running. The people who are spreading the global-warming alarm, including the scientists, just don't understand the way the atmosphere works, he says. The ones who see a link between increasing ocean temperatures and more intense hurricanes in recent decades don't understand the ocean or hurricanes. The global computer models projecting that heat-trapping greenhouse gases will warm the earth between three and seven degrees Fahrenheit in the next hundred years -- melting polar ice, flooding shorelines and disrupting weather patterns everywhere -- are fatally flawed.

Now 76 years old, Gray is an old-school meterologist who prefers observational data to computer modeling. "I could assemble fifty of my colleagues who are very skeptical about global warming," he says. "The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] never talks to us, but I have a bit of an obligation, at my age -- I was trained to tell the truth. There's a lot of hogwash in this. If I don't speak up, I'm not doing my job."

[break]

A key scene in the film An Inconvenient Truth is the moment Al Gore reveals that we are literally reaping the whirlwind. He stands on a stage, palms up in silent supplication, while images of a flooded New Orleans play on a big screen behind him. Pump enough crap in the air, the ocean warms up, and boom! -- Katrina trashes the Gulf Coast.

Such oversimplified notions of cause and effect exasperate Bill Gray. The scientists who've tackled the global-warming/ hurricane connection -- currently one of the hottest questions in science -- have stopped far short of blaming any one storm or season on CO2 emissions. But some have concluded that rising temperatures over the past three decades have produced more intense storms, and that a growing number of monster hurricanes should be expected in an increasingly warmer world. Such statements are greeted in Gray's office like a shot across the bow. The global-warming crowd has taken the battle to his turf.

The first major salvo was fired two years ago by Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at NCAR, who suggested that warmer oceans were producing stronger hurricanes. That was followed by a paper last summer from Kerry Emanuel, a well-respected hurricane expert at MIT, who re-examined historical data and found the intensity of storms in the Atlantic had basically doubled in thirty years, a phenomenon he attributed to rising water temperatures linked to global warming. Then came a study by NCAR's Holland, Webster and two other Georgia Tech researchers, Judith Curry and H.R. Chang, who'd set out to challenge Trenberth's work but concluded that the number of intense tropical storms had doubled around the world since 1970.

Gray took them all on. There are too many factors besides sea-surface temperature that influence hurricane intensity, he insisted. The data his colleagues were using was suspect, he told reporters, because of erratic weather information-gathering methods in certain parts of the world in the 1970s. They were playing with numbers and ignoring the cyclical nature of hurricane seasons. You want to talk busy hurricane seasons? How about 1933? From 1933 until 1965, the Florida peninsula was hit by major storms eleven times. From 1966 until 2003, it was hit only once. Up until the last two seasons, in fact, there'd been a great downturn in major storms making landfall, despite increased activity in the Atlantic.

Gray was hardly alone in his dissent. NOAA officials denied that global warming had anything to do with current hurricane patterns, which were "due to natural fluctuations and cycles." Chris Landsea, a former Gray student who now works as science operations officer at NOAA's National Hurricane Center in Miami, re-crunched the numbers and found no increase in the number or intensity of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes globally over the past fifteen years; by his calculations, even a four-degree increase in ocean temperature by the end of this century would have only a small effect on hurricane intensity. CSU's Klotzbach zeroed in on the past twenty years of storm data, considered more reliable than that of previous years, and found a large increase in major North Atlantic storms and a large decrease in Northeast Pacific ones, but no global trend that would support the notion that global warming is whipping up stronger hurricanes.

The rebuttals have prompted a flurry of additional papers and responses; Georgia Tech's Curry, for example, has suggested that Klotzbach is "cherry-picking" his data. But the most biting exchanges have involved Gray's critiques and the counter-volleys. Gray has "brain fossilization," Curry told a Wall Street Journal reporter a few weeks ago, and "nobody except a few groupies wants to hear what he has to say."

Read the whole thing

Judith Curry is head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. She really should have more respect for someone like Dr. Gray, who has forgotten more about tropical weather than she ever knew. Plus, the Institute itself should be very wary of someone, like her, who is too ready to jump on the global warming bandwagon. About 20 years ago, Tech learned the hard way about bandwagon science. Remember cold fusion? One or two days after Pons and Fleischmann announced their results, a team from Georgia Tech made headlines by confirming that they also had acheived cold fusion. It was very embarassing when they later had to retract their findings because they hadn't realized that their neutron detector was temperature sensitive and they were just observing an exothermic chemical reaction, not nuclear fusion (as were Pons and Fleischmann, evidently). Of course, we won't know if the climate model predictions are right or not for many years, so none of the current modelers will ever have to retract or face other consequences, more's the pity.