Climate guy on Rush's show today

I really enjoyed listing to Rush this morning with his interview with Roy Spencer, a climatologist who used to work at NASA.

RUSH:....the effect on global warming and the temperature on the earth, is precipitation. He's made a career of studying this. He also is not a global warming advocate. He thinks it's basically a hyped crisis. He also, for example, used to believe in evolution and has become an ardent believer of intelligent design combined with evolutionary things, because evolution does take place, but it doesn't explain Creation. Obviously, it can't. I'm just giving you a heads-up on who he is. He also said precipitation and clouds have been a great factor.

Dr. Spencer:....that the Earth has a natural air-conditioning process which occurs that is mainly through precipitation systems. Now, people will think, “Oh, well, you mean when they come by they cool off the air,” and that's not what I'm talking about. It's about the Earth's natural greenhouse effect which is mostly water vapor and clouds. The Earth has a natural greenhouse effect that keeps the surface of the Earth warm.

RUSH: Isn't it true that the majority of greenhouse gases do come from the sources you just mentioned, not man made sources?

DR. SPENCER: Well, yeah, that's true. Carbon dioxide is a relatively small part of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect. Now, the party line on this whole thing is that what we're doing is, with the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we're enhancing the greenhouse effect, and by now it's like about 1%. And since we're changing what's called the radiation budget of the Earth -- you know, like how much sunlight comes in and how much infrared radiation goes back out to space, since we're changing the radiation budget of the Earth -- the temperature has to change. This is the way you'll hear scientists explain the greenhouse effect. From a simple physics standpoint, it's a very attractive way of looking at climate change. There's a big problem with it, though. It makes it sound like the greenhouse effect is what determines the temperature of the Earth, and actually the truth is it's more the other way around. Given a certain amount of sunlight coming in, that is mostly absorbed at the surface of the Earth, weather processes happen which create the greenhouse effect because most of the greenhouse effect is from evaporated water which then turns into clouds, and of course water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas.

Here is the Global Cooling article in Newsweek from 1975 here.

The weather at EIB Southern Command here.