It's been all over the news.
"Forecaster Blasts Gore on Global Warming."
Some stories even report that he is a leading climate scientist. The reality is that William Gray is not a scientist, and is nothing more than a propagandist for companies that want to hide the truth behind global warming.
Crossposted on Blue House Diaries and Texas Kaos
First of all, the guy is a good meteorologist. He is not a scientist. He's just an upgraded version of the guy on the news standing in front of the green screen telling you that there's a 40% chance of rain today. He knows very little about the actual science behind climate change, and he refuses to learn about it.
In fact, a blogger met with William Gray back in 2006, and wrote about the meeting, which should shed some light on Gray's anti-scientific view:
I was at a meeting a few weeks ago where I ran into Bill Gray, a famous emeritus skeptic. He gave his standard stump speech in which he claims that the water vapor feedback is negative. I followed up on this with him and it became quite clear to me that he is unfamiliar with all of the peer-reviewed literature on this subject that has been published in the last five years. This makes sense. Reading the literature is a difficult and full-time job, and emeritus faculty simply don't need to do that. Especially (in the case of Gray) when your time is occupied being interviewed and screaming at people. As a result, my sense is that the views of emeritus skeptics are often substantially out of date.
But the story goes on. After arguing with him for a few minutes, it became clear that Bill Gray has no scientific theory of his own why the water vapor feedback is negative, and no data to support his non-theory. He has no manuscript describing his non-theory and no plans to attempt to publish it. After I pointed out all of the evidence supporting a positive feedback, he looked confused and finally said, "OK, maybe the feedback isn't negative, maybe it's neutral. I'll give you that." I quickly concluded that he has no idea what he's talking about. I wish everyone that considers him credible could have witnessed this exchange.
So the guy clearly is not informed or anything close to a scientist. He is simply a shill. Part of this becomes clear when you see what organizations he is associated with, such as the right-wing anti-science group Tech Central Station, which is funded by Exxon, among others:
As an LLC, there is little Tech Central Station must publicly disclose about itself save for the names and addresses of its owners, and there is no presumption, legal or otherwise, that it exists to serve the public interest. Likewise, rather than advertisers per se, TCS has what it calls "sponsors," which are thanked prominently in a section one click away from the front page of the site. (AT&T, ExxonMobil, and Microsoft were early supporters; General Motors, Intel, McDonalds, NASDAQ, National Semiconductor, and Qualcomm, as well as the drug industry trade association, PhRMA, joined during the past year.)
In fact, TCS released an anti-global warming propaganda movie:
In June 2006, the broadcast PR firm Medialink Worldwide put out a video news release (VNR) titled, "Global Warming and Hurricanes: All Hot Air?" In accompanying materials, the firm identified "TCS Daily Science Roundtable" as the client behind the segment. But Medialink didn't disclose that TCS Daily is a website published by Tech Central Station and was, at the time, a project of the Republican lobbying and PR firm DCI Group. (In October 2006, DCI sold the TCS Daily website.) Or that DCI Group counts among its clients ExxonMobil. Or that ExxonMobil gave the Tech Central Science Foundation $95,000 in 2003, for "climate change support."
The VNR features Dr. William Gray and Dr. James J. O'Brien, who are identified as "two of the nation's top weather and ocean scientists." Gray denies that there's any link between global warming and the severity of recent hurricane seasons. "We don't think that's the case," he says. "This is the way nature sometimes works." The VNR attributes increased hurricane activity to "the cycle of nature."
Additionally, William Gray appears to have been a paid skeptic all the time. He is a complete shill, and he makes Coulteresque statements, such as when he compared Al Gore to Adolf Hitler. Gray said:
Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews."
So as you can see, his credibility is virtually nothing. He is not a scientist, he associates with groups that are paid for by Exxon, and he does not research anything.