How can you tell when Dana is lying?

His lips are moving.

I can think of no better example than the speech that he gave recently on the floor of the House, the one that gathered national attention to him since he once again brought up dinosaur flatulence. If you want to read it, he is so proud that he has posted it on his House of Representative Web Site.

What you find there is a mixture of a small amount of fact, a lot of conjecture and a huge pile of horse manure. Let's take a good look at his technique. Consider this paragraph.

In a September, 2005, article from Discovery Magazine, Dr. William Gray, now an emeritus professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University and a former president of the American Meteorological Association, was asked if funding problems that he was experiencing and has been experiencing could be traced to his skepticism of man-made global warming. His response: ``I had NOAA money for 30 years, and then when the Clinton administration came in and Gore started directing some of the environmental stuff, I was cut off. I couldn't get any money from NOAA. They turned down 13 straight proposals from me.'' This man is one of the most prominent hurricane experts in the world, cut off during the Clinton-Gore administration because he had been skeptical of global warming.

First, he references an article in DiscoverY Magazine. Now, if you check things out, Discovery Magazine is for Kids. We all know that the triplets are far ahead of their dad, so maybe he was reading one of their subscriptions.

Well, actually, it was Discover Magazine, but the error is so prevalent on the internet that we know no one actually fact checked his speech. If they can't get the little stuff right, how can they be trusted with big ideas.

The circumstances behind this article are well documented by Chris Mooney in his book Storm World. Gray is a skeptic about man made causes of global warming, but not about the fact that it is occurring, nor about the fact that it will make fundamental changes in life until it starts to cool again.

I’m not disputing that there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and ’40s, and then there was a slight global cooling from the middle ’40s to the early ’70s. And there has been warming since the middle ’70s, especially in the last 10 years.

Here is more of the non-story.

On April 26, 2006, RealClimate.org, which describes itself as "a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists," responded to a paper written by Gray by detailing "the fundamental misconceptions on the physics of climate that underlie most of Gray's pronouncements on climate change and its causes" and "the gaping flaws" in his "scientific argument." A June 11, 2006, article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Judith A. Curry, chair of Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, said that "Gray's message that global warming is a hoax is being heard because of his media connections, but she [Curry] points out he has not published any research to back it up."

If you want more, then here it is...

Additionally, a May 28, 2006, Washington Post Magazine article by Joel Achenbach reported that Gray "concede[d] that he hasn't published the idea [his theory about recent warming trends] in any peer-reviewed journal." Achenbach also noted that Gray's rejection of climate models puts him "increasingly on the fringe" in the field of meteorology. When Achenbach "ask[ed] Gray who his intellectual soul mates are regarding global warming," Gray responded, "I have nobody really to talk to about this stuff.'"

(Source: Media Matters).

What Dana did is to take a string a "facts" and to imply a causality that does not exist. Gray makes the same argument that just because atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures move up and down together does not mean that one caused the other. The work cited above points out the errors in Gray's understanding and methodology when it comes to climate. He is nothing more than a damned good weather man, but the basic scientific understanding has gone far beyond what he knew or is willing to learn. He is left like the Pope arguing that the sun revolves around the earth, unwilling to change.

But, this is Dana's champion. I could go through the rest of Dana's talk. You can take it all apart and be left with not much but the enjoyment of discovering another charlatan. With his talent, Dana should put on a rubber nose and join Barnum & Bailey.

As long as Charles Krotch is paying for Dana to blather away, telling us to go use all the energy that Charlie can provide, then I guess that we will have to put up with Dana's blathering. Unfortunately, some people believe this sh**.