David Douglass
904626
216571851
2008-06-02T07:06:07Z
Stephan Schulz
28522
He used to do work on condensed matter physics
{{Copyedit|date=May 2008}}
{{for|the eighteenth-century actor|American Company}}
'''David H. Douglass''' is an [[United States|American]] [[physicist]] at the [[University of Rochester]]. Douglass is considered a [[global warming]] [[skeptic]] and his current research appears to focus on the role of natural forces and the debunking of [[anthropogenic climate change]]. He is a harsh critic of [[Al Gore]] and other global warming popularizers and is known to end his talks with an image of the former vice president juxtaposed with the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion in order to underscore his dislike of Gore's ideas. Douglass is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the NY Academy of Sciences.
Douglass was the lead author on a 2007 paper published in the International Journal of Climatology claiming that current leading [[climate model]]s are inaccurate. The study compared the results of 22 different climate models with observed temperature data in the tropical troposphere. According to Douglass, these models predict that the tropical troposphere should warm as much as 3 times faster than the surface. However observational temperature data from satellites and weather balloons show that the surface and troposphere warm at about the same rate thus contradicting these climate models. As a consequence, Douglass concludes that greenhouse gases must be having only a minor impact on global temperature trends.<ref>[http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,316566,00.html FoxNews.com: Study: Part of Global-Warming Model May Be Wrong]</ref> He has stated that the "human contribution is not significant and that observed increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases make only a negligible contribution to climate warming."<ref>[http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/global_warming/2007/12/10/55974.html NewsMax: New Study Explodes Human-Global Warming Story]</ref> Douglass presented the results of this study at the Heartland Institutes's International Climate Change Conference (a skeptics conference).<ref>[http://www.reason.com/news/show/125300.html Amazing Climate Predictions Revealed—Climate Models Reviled The Day-Two Dispatch from the International Climate Change Conference by Ronald Bailey | March 4, 2008 Reason Online]</ref>
The paper was rebutted by realclimate.org. The reasons given were that the paper was based on a great deal of over-confidence in observational data accuracy and an insufficient appreciation of the statistics of trends over short time periods.<ref>[http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/ Tropical tropospheric trends Real Climate]</ref>
The issues raised the paper and the criticisms by Real Climate have been discussed in detail at ClimateAudit.<ref>[http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3048 Tropical Troposphere Climate Audit]</ref>. The authors provided further clarification in a separate post. <ref>[http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3058 David Douglass’ Comments Climate Audit]</ref>
==References==
{{reflist}}
==See also==
*[[Fred Singer]]
*[[Global warming controversy]]
==External links==
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*[http://spider.pas.rochester.edu/mainFrame/people/pages/Douglass.html University of Rochester], Department of Physics & Astronomy
*[http://www.pas.rochester.edu/%7Edouglass/recentpublic.htm Publications]
*[http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/ Home page]
*[http://spider.pas.rochester.edu/mainFrame/people/pages/Douglass_David_H.html Home page #2]
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[[Category:American physicists]]
[[Category:Global warming skeptics]]
[[Category:Year of birth missing (living people)]]
[[Category:Living people]]
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