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Climate Change Is Caused By.....Climate Change?

Mike

Well-known member
http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-natural-or-manmade/
Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

He is principally known for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work, for which he was awarded the American Meteorological Society's Special Award. He is also a supporter of intelligent design[1] and is skeptical of the scientific consensus that human activity is primarily responsible for global warming.


[edit] Education and work
Spencer earned a B.S. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1978 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980 and 1982.[2] Spencer designed an algorithm to detect tropical cyclones and estimate their maximum sustained wind speed using the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.[citation needed] The AMSU is a microwave radiometer that can be used to detect temperature at different levels of the atmosphere. Based on gradients in temperature measurements in a given area, it is possible to estimate maximal sustained radial wind speed. [3]

He publicly promotes his ideas on intelligent design and the weather, including four appearances on Coast to Coast AM.[4]


[edit] Climate Change Research
Spencer is proposing hypotheses on climate change. In August, 2007, Spencer published an article in Geophysical Research Letters regarding cloud feedback in the tropics. [5] Current understanding of the climate system predicts that an increase in high-level, heat trapping clouds will accelerate the warming due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. Spencer's observations in the tropics found a negative feedback, though this was on a different time scale than climate models. He found a "sensitivity of total (SW + LW) cloud radiative forcing to tropospheric temperature is -6.1 W m-2 K-1." (This was on short time scale compared to climate models.) Spencer and colleagues state that the feedback possibly supports Richard Lindzen's Infrared Iris hypothesis of compensating meteorological processes that tend to stabilize climate change.[6]

In a subsequent press release Spencer said, "To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent," Spencer said. "The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming." [7]


[edit] Views on global warming
Roy Spencer describes himself as a global warming optimist working to quantify Nature's thermostat.[8] In several articles Spencer has espoused opinions that are skeptical of the scientific opinion on global warming.

In 2006 Spencer criticized Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth saying, "For instance, Mr. Gore claims that the Earth is now warmer than it has been in thousands of years. Yet the latest National Academies of Science (NAS) report on the subject has now admitted that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years, which is mostly made up of the 'Little Ice Age.'" [9] The NAS report summary (p.3) [10] states:

"It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.
"Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from A.D. 900 to 1600. Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since A.D. 900. The uncertainties associated with reconstructing hemispheric mean or global mean temperatures from these data increase substantially backward in time through this period and are not yet fully quantified."
In a New York Post opinion column on February 26, 2007, Spencer wrote:

Contrary to popular accounts, very few scientists in the world - possibly none - have a sufficiently thorough, "big picture" understanding of the climate system to be relied upon for a prediction of the magnitude of global warming. To the public, we all might seem like experts, but the vast majority of us work on only a small portion of the problem. [11]

In an interview with conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh on February 28, 2007, Spencer stated that he doesn't believe "catastrophic manmade global warming" is occurring. He also criticized climate models, saying "The people that have built the climate models that predict global warming believe they have sufficient physics in those models to predict the future. I believe they don't. I believe the climate system, the weather as it is today in the real world shows a stability that they do not yet have in those climate models."[12] Roy Spencer is also included in a film that argues against the theory of man-made global warming called "The Great Global Warming Swindle."

He has been referred to as the "official climatologist of the EIB Network" by Rush Limbaugh, who is the owner of the Excellence In Broadcasting network.[13]

He testified before the Waxman committee's examination of political interference with climate science on March 19, 2007.[14][15]

In 2008, Spencer published a book on climate change: Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor.[16]

Spencer is listed as a member of the Heartland Institute and a contributor to the George C. Marshall Institute.


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