Roy Spencer

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Roy Spencer

Roy W. Spencer (born December 20, 1955 ) is research director at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and head of the US team of scientists for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite . He worked in the field of climate research at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center .

Spencer is best known for his work in the field of satellite-based temperature measurement, for which he received the Special Award from the American Meteorological Society . Spencer is skeptical of the scientific consensus on man-made global warming and is also a fan of intelligent design .

Training and work

Spencer received his BS in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1978 and 1980 and 1982, respectively, MS and Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Wisconsin – Madison . Spencer developed an algorithm to detect tropical cyclones and estimate their maximum wind speed in advance. To do this, he used the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) at the University of Alabama.

He publicly disseminates his ideas about intelligent design and the climate. He appeared four times on Coast to Coast AM .

Climate research

Spencer proposes hypotheses about climate change, which he bases on models. In August 2007, he published an article in Geophysical Research Letters regarding cloud feedback in the tropics.

Current understanding of our climate predicts that an increase in soaring, heat-absorbing clouds will accelerate global warming. The reason is an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases . According to Spencer, however, he found negative feedback from the clouds in the tropics compared to climate models in a very short period of time. This observation would support Richard Lindzen's Iris hypothesis that this negative feedback would largely cancel out global warming due to increases in greenhouse gases.

In a press release, Spencer said, "To give an idea of ​​how powerful this advanced cooling mechanism is, it results in a reduction in future warming of over 75% when you relate it to global warming." Question that no one can answer at the moment is whether or not this extended cooling mechanism can be related to global warming. "

In 2011, a controversy arose after Roy Spencer and William Braswell published a controversial study in the journal Remote Sensing in which they questioned the temperature increases reported in current climate models. The study sparked sharp criticism from experts and led to the resignation of the journal's editor-in-chief, Wolfgang Wagner. In an editorial on the occasion of his resignation, Wagner stated that the peer review process should identify “fundamental methodological errors and false claims”. However, the study by Spencer and Braswell is most likely problematic in both respects and should therefore not actually be published.

Global warming views

Roy Spencer describes himself as a “climate optimist” who works on the quantification of the “thermostat of nature”. In some articles, Spencer showed views that are skeptical of scientific opinion on global warming.

In 2006, Spencer criticized Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth , saying, “For example, Mr. Gore claims that the earth is warmer now than it was in thousands of years. But the recent United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report on the matter now admitted that all we really know is that it is warmer now than it has been for 400 years, largely due to the Little Ice Age is due. "

The summary of the NAS report (p. 3) states:

“It can be said with high certainty that the global average temperature of the earth's surface in the last decades of the 20th century was higher than in any comparable period in the previous 400 years. This finding is justified by the consistency of a wide range of geographically different indicators. "
“One can put less trust in the large-scale reconstructions of surface temperatures for the period from 900 to 1600. The indicators currently available indicate that temperatures in many, but not all, locations in the past 25 years have been higher than any period of comparable length since 900. The uncertainties in reconstructing average hemispherical or global temperatures from these Data grows considerably the further you go back in time; they are not yet fully quantified. "
"One can have very little confidence in statements regarding the global surface temperature before the year 900 due to the inadequate data and because the uncertainties of the data and the methods of analyzing and combining them are greater than for more recent periods of time."

On February 26, 2007, Spencer wrote in a column for the tabloid New York Post : “Contrary to popular opinion, few scientists in the world - possibly none - have a sufficiently thorough, comprehensive (“ big picture ”) understanding of the climate system that one could rely on to predict the extent of global warming. We may all look like experts to the public, but the vast majority of us are only working on a small fraction of the problem. "

In an interview with conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh on February 28, 2007, Spencer said he doesn't believe that "catastrophic man-made global warming" is coming our way. He also criticized climate models, saying, “The people who developed the climate models that predict global warming believe that they have enough physics in those models to predict the future. I believe they don't have it. I believe that the climate system, the weather as it is today in the real world, shows a stability that they have not yet taken into account in their climate models. ”Roy Spencer also appears in the film The Great Global Warming Swindle , in which man-made global warming is denied.

Spencer was named "Official Climatologist of the EIB network" by Rush Limbaugh , owner of the Excellence In Broadcasting network.

Spencer testified before the Waxman Committee on Political Influence on Climatology on March 19, 2007.

In 2008, Spencer published a book on climate change: Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor .

Spencer is a member of the Heartland Institute and an employee of the George C. Marshall Institute , both think tanks with a politically conservative orientation.

In June 2016, as a result of the bankruptcy proceedings of the coal company Peabody Energy , which played an important role in the organized climate change denial , files were made public showing that the company was funding a large number of climate-skeptical organizations and individuals. Spencer was also mentioned in this context. Spencer had previously testified for the company as a witness in court about the social costs of carbon dioxide emissions.

Intelligent Design Views

About Intelligent Design in 2005 wrote Spencer: "Twenty years ago I was studying as a graduate student intense controversy between evolution and intelligent design over a period of two years. And finally - despite my previous acceptance of the theory of evolution as a 'fact' - I realized that intelligent design as a theory of origin is no more religious and no less scientific than evolutionism. ... I'm not alone in the scientific community. There are a lot of good books out there on the subject. Oddly enough, most of these books were written by scientists who lost faith in evolution as adults after learning how to apply the analytical skills they learned in college. "

Awards

  • 1989: MSFC Center Director's Commendation.
  • 1990: Alabama House of Representatives Resolution # 624.
  • 1991: NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (with John Christy ).
  • 1996: AMS Special Award "for the development of global, precise measurement data of the earth's temperature by polar-orbital satellites, which has fundamentally advanced our ability to observe the climate." (With John Christy )

Selected publications

Books

  • Roy W. Spencer: Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor . Encounter Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-59403-210-3 .

Scientific work

  • Spencer, RW, et al. Cloud and radiation budget changes associated with tropical intraseasonal oscillations (PDF; 352 kB) - Geophysical Research Letters , 2007.
  • Spencer, RW, and WD Braswell, 1997: How dry is the tropical free troposphere? Implications for global warming theory. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society , 78.
  • John R. Christy, Roy W. Spencer, William D. Braswell, Kevin E. Trenberth , James W. Hurrell: How accurate are satellite 'thermometers' ?, Nature , September 25, 1997, doi : 10.1038 / 38640 .
  • Spencer, RW, JR Christy, and NC Grody, 1996: Analysis of "Examination of 'Global atmospheric temperature monitoring with satellite microwave measurements'". Climatic Change , 33, 477-489.
  • Spencer, RW, WM Lapenta, and FR Robertson, 1995: Vorticity and vertical motions diagnosed from satellite deep layer temperatures. Mon. Wea. Rev., 123,1800-1810.
  • Christy, JR, RW Spencer, and RT McNider, 1995: Reducing noise in the MSU daily lower-tropospheric temperature dataset. J. Climate, 8, 888-896.
  • Spencer, RW, RE Hood, FJ LaFontaine, EA Smith, R. Platt, J. Galliano, VL Griffin, and E. Lobl, 1994: High-resolution imaging of rain systems with the Advanced Microwave Precipitation Radiometer. J. Atmos. Oceanic Tech., 11, 849-857.
  • Spencer, RW, 1994: Global temperature monitoring from space. Adv. Space Res., 14, (1) 69- (1) 75.
  • Spencer, RW, 1993: Global oceanic precipitation from the MSU during 1979-92 and comparisons to other climatologies. J. Climate, 6, 1301-1326.
  • Spencer, RW, and JR Christy, 1993: Precision lower stratospheric temperature monitoring with the MSU: Technique, validation, and results 1979-91. J. Climate, 6, 1301-1326.
  • Spencer, RW, and JR Christy, 1992a: Precision and radiosonde validation of satellite gridpoint temperature anomalies, Part I: MSU channel 2. J. Climate, 5, 847-857.
  • Spencer, RW, and JR Christy, 1992b: Precision and radiosonde validation of satellite gridpoint temperature anomalies, Part II: A tropospheric retrieval and trends during 1979-90. J. Climate, 5, 858-866.
  • Spencer, RW, JR Christy, and NC Grody, 1990: Global atmospheric temperature monitoring with satellite microwave measurements: Method and results, 1979-84. J. Climate, 3, 1111-1128.
  • Spencer, RW, and JR Christy, 1990: Precise monitoring of global temperature trends from satellites. Science , 247, 1558-1562.
  • Spencer, RW, DW Martin, BB Hinton, and JA Weinman, 1983: Satellite microwave radiances correlated with radar rain rates over land. Nature , 304, 141-143.

items

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ - ( Memento of the original from February 16, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / aqua.nasa.gov
  2. ↑ http://datamining.itsc.uah.edu/case_studies/cyclone.html
  3. ↑ http://www.coasttocoastam.com/guests/1162.html
  4. ↑ http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL029698.shtml
  5. ↑ http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/adinfriris.pdf
  6. ↑ http://www.uah.edu/News/newsread.php?newsID=875
  7. ↑ Faulty climate skeptic study leads to resignation , in: derStandard.at , September 9, 2011
  8. ^ Roy W. Spencer and William D. Braswell (2011): On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance , in: Remote Sensing, Vol. 3, No. 8, pp. 1603-1613
  9. ↑ Climate Change Debunked? Not So Fast , in: LiveScience , July 28, 2011
  10. ^ Andrew E. Dessler (2011): Cloud variations and the Earth's energy budget , in: Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 38, L19701
  11. ↑ Resignation due to poor climate study , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 6, 2011
  12. ↑ Wolfgang Wagner (2011): Taking Responsibility on Publishing the Controversial Paper “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance” by Spencer and Braswell, Remote Sens. 2011, 3 (8), 1603-1613 , in : Remote Sensing, Vol. 3, No. 9, pp. 2002-2004, online
  13. ↑ http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm
  14. ↑ - ( Memento of the original from July 7th, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tcsdaily.com
  15. ↑ http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676
  16. ↑ - ( Memento of the original from July 6, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nypost.com
  17. ↑ - ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rushlimbaugh.com
  18. ↑ - ( Memento of the original from September 3, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rushlimbaugh.com
  19. ↑ - ( Memento of the original from March 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / oversight.house.gov
  20. ↑ http://www.weatherquestions.com/Climate-Confusion-by-Roy-Spencer.htm
  21. ↑ http://www.globalwarmingheartland.org/expert.cfm?expertId=163
  22. ↑ Biggest US coal company funded dozens of groups questioning climate change . In: The Guardian , June 13, 2016. Retrieved June 15, 2016.
  23. ↑ - ( Memento of the original from October 3, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tcsdaily.com
  24. ↑ - ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / science.nasa.gov
personal data
SURNAME Spencer, Roy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spencer, Roy W.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American climatologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1955