He's one of Gray's protégés. But that's no secret.
Global warming may be "irrelevant" to them because they are working with decadal meteorological cycles, not overall global termperatures. But as for the "B.S." part, you're just wrong.
Gray's and Landsea's area of expertise is hurricane tracking and prediction, not "megayear" climatology, and certainly not paleoclimatology. I found nothing in a literature search where either of them called work on anthropogenic global warming "B.S.".
Bill Gray, indeed, was a critic of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) but seems to have moderated his criticism in the last 4 or 5 years. His strong public statements appear to have been made mainly from 1998 to about 2001 (but he made no mention of "B.S." or malice). It is worth noting that Gray works with data from the same Thermohaline Circulation that climate change scientists have been monitoring closely. Whatever the man's opinions are about AGW, I would expect him to present the data accurately, as he has always done.
Landsea resigned from a UN commission on climate change for what appeared to be political tensions on "both" sides; it appears that there was some careerism motivating one of the leads, too, rather than a political agenda. But Landsea has actually done scientific work on global warming; in fact, he is considered to be one of the pro-AGW experts, although he is much more conservative about the connection to hurricane formation.
Here's his statement to LiveScience Online:
According to Chris Landsea of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory, there is evidence for natural swings between high and low hurricane activity that extend for 25-40 years.
“The last ten years have been busy for the U.S. – similar to what we experienced between the 1920s and 1960s,” Landsea said.
He thought that global warming could have an impact on hurricanes, but he quoted one study that predicted in 80 years only a five percent change in wind speeds due to increases in heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
“It doesn’t mean there is zero effect,” he said. “But that’s hardly measurable.”
(Global Warming May Play Role in Hurricane Intensity, Michael Schirber, June 16, 2005.)
The fact that some climatologists and meteorologists disagree with him is to be expected. That's how scientific investigation is conducted. The article I cited, for instance, contains the opinions of several experts who take different points of view.
Vive le Difference!Actually, the same searches turned up hundreds of right-wing blogs and hit pieces from conservative magazines and "think tanks", most of which misrepresented Dr. Landsea as well as some of his critics. They basically took the droplet of gossip from a small academic in-fight and turned it into a political witch trial, which it was not; they got the wrong martyr for the wrong reasons. (And, by the way, I do not consider Dr. Landsea to be a martyr, but a man of integrity.) Once again proving that if you have an interest in scientific research and discovery, you just can't trust the barking-mad Right.
--p!
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