Weather Channel Founder Calls for Al Gore to be Jailed

6 Responses to This Entry

1. jd on March 09, 2008 @ 1:09 pm

   Coleman spends a good part of his musings on climate change assigning crazy motives. I can see why he does it. It’s really fun.

   Coleman was only with the Weather Channel for its first year on the air; he was then forced out of the company. The business relationship between Coleman and the company ended in a court battle. No matter what the Weather Channel people are for, Coleman’s going to be against.

   Coleman does not believe that global warming is a problem because of issues he has with his father. In “Global Warming is a Scam,” Coleman informs us that:

   There is a culture and attitudes and values and pressures on campus that are very different. I know this group well. My father was a PhD-University type. I was raised in the university culture. Any person who spends a decade at a university obtaining a PhD in Meteorology and become a research scientist, more likely than not, becomes a part of that single minded culture. They all look askance at the rest of us, certain of their superiority.

   So, clearly, Coleman is a sore loser with unresolved daddy issues.

   I look forward to learning more about his ideas on climate change.

2. Climate Heretic on March 09, 2008 @ 9:56 pm

   My brother, a smart, Ivy League educated scientist, used to do climate modeling using supercomputers at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Because so many assumptions and variables are involved in modeling on such a scale, only small tweaks in the inputs are required for big changes in the results, and global systems are so complicated that plausible arguments can be made for almost any adjustment to the inputs. The result is that the chosen adjustments tended to lead to the ‘right’ outcomes, the ones that, because they produced ‘evidence’ for global warming, led to more research funding.

   My brother never found any statistically significant evidence of man-made global warming himself, and he told me that the other scientists he worked with at GISS also did not believe in man-made global warming. However, they did believe in getting global warming research money to buy expensive computers that could also be used for real research. They may have found it hard to completely avoid the politics of government funding for research, but they could at least try to salvage something from it.

3. Brendon Carr on March 09, 2008 @ 10:00 pm

   You and your brother, Climate Heretic, can shut up. Shut up, shutup, SHUTUP, damn you!

4. Climate Heretic on March 09, 2008 @ 10:01 pm

   One more thing: JD, you need to take a basic logic class. Attacking the messenger rather than refuting the message is the genetic fallacy. Even psychobabble must submit to the laws of logic sooner or later.

5. jd on March 09, 2008 @ 11:05 pm

   Climate Heretic,

   Thanks for the advice, but I think I might need to take a class in how to write more clearly.

   I googled Coleman’s name and read through some of his stuff. Peppered throughout his arguments are attacks on people who believe global warming is real. I figured that turnabout is fair play. I thought my post was easy enough to understand. Guess not.

   Now, I’m pretty sure that I understand your first post and I have to tell you I feel bad for your brother.

6. jd on March 12, 2008 @ 12:47 am

   WH,
   The climate models are likely more accurate than you make them out to be. Sure, there are lots of variables, but there is a way to see which set of assumptions are going to produce the most accurate projections. You just run the model backward.

   Running into the past, you can check to see how well your model reproduces specific events. The supercomputers at GSSI ran a model that was able to “predict” the conditions produced by a volcanic eruption in the Philippines in 1992. The model was within nine hundredths of a degree.

   You could argue that the models have a bad track record in making accurate predictions. And you’d be right. But the problems tend to be with “when,” not “what.” Recent data suggests that all the predicted changes are taking place, but much sooner and at a much faster rate than scientists thought they would.

   (The back cover blurb is right. Kolbert’s “Field Notes from a Catastrope” really is “sober, detailed, and alarming without being alarmist.” It’s a good book for cribbing information.)

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