Retired EPA meteorologist, now living in North Carolina, Charles Hossler just sent me this interview from Discover Magazine with William Gray, as the prologue points out, considered by many to be the world’s most famous hurricane expert. Primarily the interview is about hurricanes, their intensity, and his predictions for the future. But as all such discussions do these days, the questions turned to global warming. The questions and answers below provide a glimpse at Gray’s views. I guess he didn’t get the memo about the science being settled.
You don?t believe global warming is causing climate change?
G: No. If it is, it is causing such a small part that it is negligible. I?m not disputing that there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and ?40s, and then there was a slight global cooling from the middle ?40s to the early ?70s. And there has been warming since the middle ?70s, especially in the last 10 years. But this is natural, due to ocean circulation changes and other factors. It is not human induced.
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That must be a controversial position among hurricane researchers.
G: Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical as hell about this whole global-warming thing. But no one asks us. If you don?t know anything about how the atmosphere functions, you will of course say, ?Look, greenhouse gases are going up, the globe is warming, they must be related.? Well, just because there are two associations, changing with the same sign, doesn?t mean that one is causing the other.
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With last year?s hurricane season so active, and this year?s looking like it will be, won?t people say it?s evidence of global warming?
G: The Atlantic has had more of these storms in the least 10 years or so, but in other ocean basins, activity is slightly down. Why would that be so if this is climate change? The Atlantic is a special basin? The number of major storms in the Atlantic also went way down from the middle 1960s to the middle ?90s, when greenhouse gases were going up.
