Climatologists Left Out at Global Warming Conference

I want to be clear. I was very pleased with the Skeptic Society Annual Convention, and its balanced view of global warming. My hat is off to Mike Shermer, founder and director, for his choice of speakers. But who was really missing? Experts in the weather.

Fox News in its special offered that climatologists and meteorologists were one group that seem very skeptical of the claims that continued warming is the most likely scenario for our planet. Here is an excellent commentary that quotes two top experts, Bill Gray who calls the scaremongering a hoax, and Roger Pielke Sr. who claims there isn't enough intellectual diversity in the debate.

The Fox story suggested that the folks most likely to know about forecasting weather recognize that the system has so many variables, that to zero in on one variable, CO2 concentrations, is not likely to yield good predictions of future weather. The impact of the Sun and clouds alone is so little understood that long term prediction over years or decades is fraught with unknowables.