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‘You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.’

RIP: Renowned Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Reid Bryson Dies At 88



[Note: Dr. Reid Bryson is prominently featured in the U.S. Senate’s report of now over 500 skeptical scientists of man-made global warming fears. (See: [url=http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport]http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport[/url] ) Senator Inhofe frequently cited Dr. Bryson and he was always available to answer questions or email with me personally during the climate change battles. Whether it was posting comments on the New York Times blog or emailing data, Bryson was razor sharp to the very end. One of Bryson’s most cited quotes on his man-made global warming views was: "You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.” (New peer-reviewed studies are validating Bryson’s views.) Bryson was a legend in his field and we will be greatly missed and appreciated. God Bless you Dr. Bryson. ]

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Professor Greg J. Tripoli of the University of Wisconsin - Madison has shared this sad news with all of us.

Excerpt: June 12, 2008: “I have the sad news to report that Professor Emeritus Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin - Madison passed away in his sleep Wednesday morning. Reid founded the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1948 . Although Reid is most well known for his work in Climate, People and the Environment, it is less known that Reid was also a pioneer in tropical meteorology and hurricane forecasting. As U.S. Army Air Corps meteorologist out of Saipan, Marshall Islands during World War II (December, 1944), Reid pieced together evidence that a typhoon was apparently developing in harms way and commissioned reconnaissance of the storm that he believed surrounding observations suggested must exist in one of the many data void regions. The reconnaissance that he ordered found the storm, encountered 140 kt winds and aborted an apparent eye wall penetration. Reid then identified a trough of low pressure in the storms path and predicted to his superiors that the storm would recurve into the path of the US Third Fleet. Believing that typhoons never recurve so far to the east, Reid’s superior officers chose to not believe his forecast. Reid pleaded that this was not a guess, they actually flew into the storm and measured the winds! His superior officers conceded to watch it closely but did not act to move the fleet. Reid tells me that he went so far as to place unofficial warnings (off the record) of his own which he is convinced did save lives. Then 36 hours later the storm began the recurve, just as Reid predicted and they tried to move the Third Fleet out of the way, but is was now too late. Unfortunately this resulted in one of the worst naval disasters in navy history (3 ships sunk, 28 ships damaged, 146 aircraft destroyed, 756 men lost at sea (see Henderson, 2007: Down to the Sea, ISBN 978-0-06-117316-5 for a detailed account of this incident). I suppose that this experience went a long way to shape Reid’s views on conventional thought and to compel him to dedicate the rest of his life to the science of weather and finding truth.”

Bryson was pioneer in climate research

Excerpt: [Bryson’s] scholarly work wasn’t limited to climate science alone, though. He wrote five books and more than 230 articles spanning diverse fields, including limnology, archaeology, geology, meteorology and geography. “He made more contributions to more scientific fields than any other scientist in the history of this campus,” said Jonathan Foley, a UW-Madison climate scientist. “He was one of the most intellectually fearless people I ever met. His brain was always on.” […]Bryson was a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor, which recognizes “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He is survived by his wife, Frances, and their four children.

Pioneer of climatology dies at 88

Excerpt: Reid Bryson, a towering figure in climatology and interdisciplinary studies of climate, people and the environment, and the founder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's meteorology department and Center for Climatic Research, and the first director of the Institute for Environmental Studies, died in his sleep early June 11 at his home in Madison. He was 88. Bryson was one of the pioneers of modern climatology and was among the first to explore the influence of climate on humans and human culture and, in turn, some of the human impacts on climate.

Dr. Reid Bryson’s entry into U.S. Senate Dissenting Scientist Report of December 20, 2008:

One of the "Fathers of Meteorology," Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, was pivotal in promoting the coming ice age scare of the 1970s (See Time Magazine's 1974 article "Another Ice Age" citing Bryson: & see Newsweek's 1975 article "The Cooling World" citing Bryson) has now converted into a leading global warming skeptic. On February 8, 2007 Bryson dismissed what he terms "sky is falling" man-made global warming fears. Bryson was on the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world. "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?" Bryson told the May 2007 issue of Energy Cooperative News. "All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it's absurd. 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," Bryson said. "You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide," he added. "We cannot say what part of that warming was due to mankind's addition of ‘greenhouse gases' until we consider the other possible factors, such as aerosols. The aerosol content of the atmosphere was measured during the past century, but to my knowledge this data was never used. We can say that the question of anthropogenic modification of the climate is an important question -- too important to ignore. However, it has now become a media free-for-all and a political issue more than a scientific problem," Bryson explained in 2005.

Bryson Signed Dec. 2007 Letter: Over 100 Prominent International Scientists Warn UN Against 'Futile' Climate Control Efforts in a December 13, 2007 open letter.

Excerpt: "Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems," the letter signed by the scientists read. (LINK) The scientists, many of whom are current and former UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scientists, sent an open letter to the UN Secretary-General questioning the scientific basis for climate fears and the UN's so-called "solutions." "It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables," the scientists wrote. "In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is ‘settled,' significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming," the open letter added.

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