An Author's Perspective - All Comments

re: Al Franken: Tax Dodger?

jpflynn — Mon, 12 May 2008 00:14:26 GMT

I just started reading your stories and became very confused as to your line of thinking, then it came to me, you are indeed, as you profess, a fiction writer, even when writing about daily events.

Iraq » Who’s Serving Our Troops?

Iraq » Who’s Serving Our Troops? — Sun, 04 May 2008 16:07:29 GMT

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re: Al Franken: Tax Dodger?

Ken Brosky — Sat, 03 May 2008 19:24:03 GMT

Actually, I would agree with you on that. It seems like a lack oversight, although given the mistakes his accountant made, it's difficult to say how intentional it could have been. I'm basing this primarily on the analysis performed by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which makes a good point: "The revelation was not the confession of a tax cheat -- GOP spinners' best attempts to suggest otherwise notwithstanding. People trying to avoid paying taxes don't do so by paying them to the wrong state. No evidence of tax evasion has surfaced."

www.startribune.com/.../18430429.html

In addition, based on the information already put out by Franken, the consensus is that he OVERPAID his taxes by paying them primarily in Minnesota (and New York, to a lesser extent).

wcco.com/.../al.franken.taxes.2.712757.html

re: Al Franken: Tax Dodger?

Randy Hollenbeck — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:05:43 GMT

Ken are you sure about your findings? I cannot find anything to back you up. Franken's business dealings in New York and California, New York had levied a $25,000 judgment against Franken's private corporation for failing to carry workers' compensation insurance, and the corporation was in forfeiture in California.

What is your source?

Tax » Al Franken: Tax Dodger?

Tax » Al Franken: Tax Dodger? — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:44:51 GMT

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re: Earth Week: The Denial

Iron Man — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:39:39 GMT

Happy Earth Day Ken. May all your cards be recycled.

Global Warming » Earth Day/Week: The Inhofe 400

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re: Weekend Homework #5

Ken Brosky — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:56:11 GMT

Iron Man,

Not bad, although Reid Bryson was also one of the main scientists arguing that the earth was going into a global COOLING pattern during the 70's. He's been proven wrong before, and quoting an article written about him in the Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News is hardly what one would call a "scholarly article."

Global Warming » Some Earth Day/Week Articles

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re: Weekend Homework #5

Iron Man — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:05:31 GMT

Madison researcher skeptical of concerns

Planetary warming is part of natural cycle, he says, but he wants to curb fossil fuel use

By THOMAS CONTENT

tcontent@journalsentinel.com

Posted: Dec. 15, 2007

"The debate's over: Globe is warming."

"Be Worried. Be Very Worried."

"Global Warning: Bulletins from a Warmer World."

Those headlines on the front page of USA Today, Time magazine and National Geographic in recent years illustrate the degree to which the debate on global warming has moved beyond whether it is actually occurring. The discussion now is dominated by what can be done to address rising carbon dioxide emissions.

But talk to 87-year-old Reid Bryson about that growing consensus, and he is unmoved.

"I'm the burr under the saddle," Bryson said.

Bryson is Wisconsin's most high-profile global warming skeptic, and last week, he and 100 others from around the world called on international climate change negotiators in Bali, Indonesia, to resist calls to enact a global warming action plan.

Bryson is professor emeritus at the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Trained in geology and meteorology, he founded the university's meteorology department in 1948.

Although he retired more than 20 years ago, he continues to work in the field of archaeoclimatology, using computer models he developed to study site-specific trends in climate.

The climate variability we're seeing today is part of a natural cycle, Bryson said, adding that water vapor may be more to blame for rising temperatures than carbon dioxide.

"The climate has been changing rapidly for a long, long time - for as long as there's been an atmosphere," he said.

He says the planet has been warming since it left the last ice age, following the typical trajectory of planetary warming and cooling.

Today, the vast majority of scientists agree that humans' use of fossil fuels is a key contributor to the rapid rise in global temperatures in the past century. That consensus was amplified this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which concluded with more than 90% certainty that human activity is to blame.

The panel, which represents the consensus views of more than 2,000 scientists from more than 150 countries, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, along with former Vice President Al Gore, for its work to advance knowledge about the changing climate.

Bryson's research has been supported by the generosity of a single patron, who died last year but whose endowment continues to fund his work.

Although he has declined to identify the patron, in keeping with the benefactor's desire to remain anonymous, Bryson said the money he has gotten is "in no way" linked to the coal or oil industries.

Bryson has concerns about people's reliance on fossil fuels, though he says they aren't linked to climate change.

Agreeing with energy observers and those concerned about dwindling global petroleum supplies, Bryson believes in curbing the use of fossil fuels.

"Carbon dioxide emissions are not so important, so far as I'm concerned, but the use of fossil fuels is - because we know they're finite, we know they are going to diminish, and we know they are important in our food supply," he said.

By 2035, he believes, rising population will make it impossible for the world to have enough energy and food to meet the needs of the global population.

In Madison, Bryson's climate change dissent has rankled others on campus, and a Madison newspaper article about his views drew sharp rebukes in the newspaper's online forum. "I've been called a traitor," he said. "Traitor to what?"

re: Weekend Homework #5

Iron Man — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:02:52 GMT

Kenny,

I don't want you to miss a come back. It might make life less than happy at your Saturday night hang out.

Try this.

The Faithful Heretic

A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions

Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky enough to love it, and then there’s Reid Bryson. At age 86, he’s still hard at it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.

Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.

Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out from a general—and the general’s apology the next day when he learned they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that’s trained some of the nation’s leading climatologists.

How Little We Know

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.

In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.

“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”

“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”—assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data—helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.

We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it’s second-tier stuff. “Don’t talk about proxies,” he says. “We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It’s all written down.”

Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners’ instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.

Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

What Leads, What Follows?

What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the “greenhouse effect,” various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.

We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”

Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up—or down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

Renaissance Man, Marathon Man

When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate. We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist, about the significance of Bryson’s work in advancing the science he’s now practiced for six decades.

“His contributions are manifold,” Hopkins said. “He wrote Climates of Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures.”

This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson’s high-school interest in archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology, and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. “He’s looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on human societies,” Hopkins says. “He’s one of those people I would say is a Renaissance person.”

The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson’s work today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being outpaced by an octogenarian.

Without addressing—or being asked—that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as “the father of the science of modern climatology.”

“In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the present state of climatology,” Moran says, adding, “We’re going to see his legacy with us for many generations to come.”

Holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, Moran became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “I came to Wisconsin because he was there,” Moran told us.

With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin’s Weather and Climate, a book aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface for the book but Hopkins told us the editors “couldn’t fathom” certain comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that “Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.”

Clearly what those editors couldn’t fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what might make them—and consequently us—behave differently. This was immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing up for work at a job he’s no longer paid to do.

“It’s fun!” he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.

“I think that’s one of the reasons for his longevity,” Moran says. “He’s so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes people don’t react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but that’s how real science takes place.”—Dave Hoopman

re: Weekend Homework #5

Iron Man — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 22:21:52 GMT

Ken,

Relax, you will live longer. I guess you have so much hatred and rage it is hard to do.

re: Weekend Homework #5

Ken Brosky — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:48:11 GMT

What does this have to do with debunking anything at Climate Progress? If you're so confident on your position, then debunk something. Please. I beg of you. Cite ONE scientific article that supports your opinion or debunks the articles written on Climate Progress. Just do one, Iron Man, and stop wasting your time with bizarre prostitute articles.

re: Weekend Homework #5

Iron Man — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 17:08:05 GMT

Ken, I saw this and thought you would enjoy seeing this.

Global Warming: now it hits brothels

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

If people could still do this, they wouldn't want prostitutes. Or something like that. Brothel owners in Bulgaria are blaming global warming for staff shortages.

They claim their best girls are working in ski resorts because a lack of snow has forced tourists to seek other pleasures.

Petra Nestorova, who runs an escort agency in Sofia, said: 'We have hired students, but they are temps and nothing like our elite girls.'

re: Weekend Homework #5

Iron Man — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:08:57 GMT

Ken, I can easly debunk your arguments. Your sources are suspect at best and could never pass critical examination. I know you like to think it does. I guess you do not understand critical thinking.

As I see it it is all about you. And there is no discussion unless it is about you. I am sure your degree in writing gives you all the credibility in science.

re: Weekend Homework #5

Ken Brosky — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 13:20:44 GMT

"Alarmists." For those of you reading this entire post and have read previous posts, this is exactly the kind of talk we dissected, ironically in the exact same context of environmentalism as a whole.

The point of debating, Iron Man, is not about accepting both sides of an issue. So far, I've completely debunked your arguments and I did it using simple Google searches. You'll have to try harder in the future.

re: Weekend Homework #5

Iron Man — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 03:02:17 GMT

All I asked Ken is for you to look at other views on the subject. You asked me to do the same and I read what you suggested. I am sorry you will not look into the fact that the global warming alarmists may be wrong. I am sure that UW-Eau Clair taught you to be a critical thinker.

re: Weekend Homework #5

Ken Brosky — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:46:16 GMT

Again, this is a classic example of ignorance on the part of conservative world views. There was NEVER a "global cooling" crisis mentioned in scientific journals. The "Global Cooling" scare of the 70's was due mainly to misinterpretations by the media at the time. For a very thorough analysis and explanation complete with over a DOZEN scientific articles written at the time, here's a link:

www.wmconnolley.org.uk/.../iceage

But if you want a more condensed version, Real Climate has a good posting. This is also a web page maintained by scientists studying global climate change:

www.realclimate.org/index.php

re: Weekend Homework #5

Iron Man — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:20:10 GMT

And you believe that spring is global warming.

What the heck, in the 70s it was global cooling. Junk science taken as real science. I know you do not want discussion you want to shout down those who disagree.

re: Weekend Homework #5

Ken Brosky — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 01:17:08 GMT

AH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh my God, this is the funniest response I've ever seen. For those of you who need, perspective, the writer of this particular column (besides having no actual experience with science in general) also believes that Noah's Ark is sitting on top of a mountain in Iran:

www.christiannewswire.com/.../43814445.html

So who are you going to believe, people? The scientist who actually studies global climate change, or Iron Man's columnist who writes part time for the Christian News Wire?