Monday, May 07, 2007

UW-Madison Prof: Warming NOT CO2 Related

Based on the interview (linked here) this guy would be a lot of fun to listen to.

Some excerpts:

Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology...

“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”

“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.”

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. 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?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

A: 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.

Like I said, he'd be a lot of fun to listen to.

PS: One wonders how the JS, or the Madistan papers, managed to miss this guy while conducting their "investigations" of the phenomenon.

Maybe he's too obscure???

2 comments:

Headless Blogger said...

My friend has been saying this for several years. His source attributes even more heat capture to water vapor than Dr. Bryson.

http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

NOAA confirms it.

http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/gases.html

Van Helsing said...

A law against climate change denial must be passed immediately. If scientists keep shooting off their mouths, pretty soon word will slip past the MSM gatekeepers, and people will get the idea that global warming is all a hoax being exploited by liberals to advance some of their more extreme policy objectives. People will keep using incandescent light bulbs, and all the polar bears will drown — maybe the penguins too!