Bill Gray's Jihad

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) decided to give its highest award, the Rossby Research Medal, to James Hansen this year, and emeritus Professor William Gray is not pleased. He sent a long, angry letter to the AMS denouncing the award.

Much of the letter has the familiar lament of old coots everywhere about the failing of the new generation:

I am appalled at the selection of James Hansen as this year’s recipient of the AMS’s highest award – the Rossby Research Medal. James Hansen has not been trained as a meteorologist. His formal education has been in astronomy . . .

We AMS members have allowed a small group of AMS administrators, climate modelers, and CO2 warming sympathizers to maneuver the internal workings of our society to support AGW policies irrespective of what our rank-and-file members might think. This small organized group of AGW sympathizers has indeed hijacked our society...

Gray is also angry that the the AMS has been giving its top medals to AGW believers for some time, and never to his fellow doubters:

Since 2000 the AMS has awarded its annual highest award (Rossby Research Medal) to the following AGW advocates or AGW sympathizers; Susan Solomon (00), V. Ramanathan (02), Peter Webster (04), Jagadish Shukla (05), Kerry Emanuel (07), Isaac Held (08) and James Hansen (09). Its second highest award (Charney Award) has gone to AGW warming advocates or sympathizers; Kevin Trenberth (00), Rich Rotunno (04), Robert D. Cess (06), Allan Betts (07), Gerald North (08) and Warren Washington and Gerald Meehl (09). And the other Rossby and Charney awardees during this period are not known to be critics of the AGW warming hypothesis.
The AGW biases within the AMS policy makers is so entrenched that it would be impossible for well known and established scientists (but AGW skeptics) such as Fred Singer, Pat Michaels, Bill Cotton, Roger Pielke, Sr., Roy Spencer, John Christie, Joe D’Aleo, Bob Balling, Jr., Craig Idso, Willie Soon, etc. to ever be able to receive an AMS award – irrespective of the uniqueness or brilliance of their research.

The substance of the complaint has the usual story: global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a the media and a small but sinister cabal controlling the AMS. The models are all wrong, because they fail to take into account deep ocean currents and various small scale effects.

So is Gray just another sad example of the distinguished elderly scientist going off the rails and becoming a crank? I think so, but given his career and accomplishments, he deserves at least the respect of a refutation. The most substantive claim in his letter is that all the models fail by overpredicting the water vapor feedback and consequently the warming, and that this is shown by satellite measurements. From Appendix A to his paper:

1. Models assuming that an increase in atmospheric CO2 will cause weak global warming and an increase in global precipitation that will lead to a large increase in upper-level water vapor and cloudiness. They simulate that this increase in water vapor and cloudiness will block large amounts of infrared radiation emitted to space. New observations by satellite and reanalysis data however, do not support these GCM model assumptions. The global warming that has occurred since the mid-1970s has been associated with a general decrease of global upper tropospheric water vapor and an increase of Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) to space. These measurements are opposite to what the models predict.

Where are these measurements? He doesn't say. Perhaps some expert (Prof Rabett?) could comment on this.

From Appendix B:

Skillful initial-value numerical GCM climate prediction will likely never be possible. This is due to the overly complex nature of the global atmosphere/ocean/land system (Figure 12) and the inability of numerical models to realistically represent the full range of this physical complexity and to be able to integrate this overly complex physics forward in time for hundreds of thousands of time steps. Skillful initial-value numerical forecasts currently cannot be made for more than a few weeks into the future. This is because any imperfect representations of the highly non-linear parameters of the atmosphere-ocean system tend to quickly degrade (the so-called butterfly effect) into unrealistic flow states upon integration of longer than a week or two. Skillful short-range prediction is possible because there tends to be a conservatism in the initial value momentum-pressure fields which can be extrapolated or advected for a week or two into the future. But after 1-2 weeks, one must deal with the far more complex variation of the moisture and energy fields. Model results soon decay into chaos as indicated in Figure 13.

Note here that he is attacking the whole idea of physics based computer modeling of climate. Also, it seems, he really doesn't seem to understand the effects of chaos on a statistical ensemble of systems. While prediction of any given trajectory is highly uncertain, the envelope and statistics are not necessarily so limited.