Father of Modern Climatology ... Dr. Reid Bryson

I was fortunate enough to study with and work with Dr. Bryson. He was talking about climate change and getting laughed at for even addressing the issue. Dr. Bryson received the 30 th Ph.D in Meteorology in the United States. He was a pioneer in climate research. He was to climate research what Michael Jordan was to basketball ... a game changer and superstar.

The good Doctor passed away in June 2008, and I am proud to say I knew him and learned from him.

I hope he does not mind, but I have borrowed the information below from fellow blogger THRUTCH. Please read his comments about the importance of water vapor relative to carbon dioxide.

Could he be wrong? Maybe. But listen to what he said. He was THE pioneer in climate change and climate modelling; it is amusing that he shows his disdain for models 50 to 100 years in the future by simply asking if you trust the five day forecast.

“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.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”