Hurricane forecaster Dr. William Gray: still crazy after all these years

With hurricane season heating up and all of us in America's Wang™ (and Taint™) keeping a wary eye on the tropics, it's fun to revisit the batshit crazy rantings of hurricane wild guesser forecaster Dr. William Gray of Colorado State University (where they almost never get hurricanes).

As I've chronicled here before, Dr. Gray, a notorious wingnut, has been spending a good deal of time denying the existence of global climate change. His failure to provide any scientific justification for his position -- a curious omission by him, being a scientist and all -- rightfully has made him a laughingstock in his field, as have some of his guesstimates regarding tropical activity each year. (Of course, he "revises" his forecast several times during the season, as evidence indicates just how inaccurate he's going to be.) But the increasing lack of respect he gets doesn't deter him from ranting about how Al Gore is fat:

I[, Sun-Sentinel senior editorial writer Gary Stein, have] made fun of [Gray] in print for years. I got paid to make fun of him.

But I recently found out two things about Gray after having a phone conversation with him. First, he knows people make fun of his predictions, and it doesn't drive him nuts.

Second, he's a very cool guy.

[...]

In recent years, Gray has been talking about the hysteria over global warming.

"People say global warming is making hurricanes worse, but there is no evidence of that," said Gray, who estimates he's flown into about 20 hurricanes with research planes over the years.

"Sure, there is some global warming. But it's not due to CO2. It's due to ocean circulation changes. [Global warming] is a hoax, and we're going to put restrictions on CO2 and change lifestyles. We can't alter the weather."

President Obama would say differently, Dr. Gray.

"Then our president is wrong," Gray said. "I've been doing this 56 years. How does [Obama] and Al Gore know so much more than me?"

Now is that a cool guy or what?

No, Gary, that's not a cool guy. That's a poor excuse for a scientist, whose delusions put him somewhere between "curmudgeon" and "raving lunatic."

Maybe President Obama and Al Gore know more because they rely on competent scientists who have proven over and over again that global climate change is real? Maybe calling global climate change a "hoax" suggests that the speaker has more than just science in mind -- something like a right-wing political agenda, perhaps? After all, Holocaust deniers call that a "hoax," too, as though these events actively are being imagined through some kind of massive conspiracy to fool us into believing that they actually happened. And maybe -- just maybe -- there's a certain meteorological scientist in Colorado who has exceeded his useful shelf life in academia.

That's not cool. That's sad.