William Gray

Learn more from the Center for Media and Democracy's research on climate change.

William Gray has been a professor at Colorado State University since 1974 and heads the University's Tropical Meteorology Project. Gray's focus is the "observational and theoretical aspects of tropical meteorological research," especially "meso-scale tropical weather phenomena" and "the global aspects of tropical cyclones." His doctorate degree is in geophysical sciences.

Gray is a well known climate change skeptic. He is a featured speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009) organized by the Heartland Institute think tank.

Gray told the Washington Post in 2006, "Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews." He added, "Yes, I am incendiary. But the other side is just as incendiary. The etiquette of science has long ago been thrown out the window." Gray also told the Post that people who warn about the effects of climate change want to "organize, propagandize, force conformity and exercise political influence. Big world government could best lead (and control) us to a better world!"

In 2006, Gray appeared in a video news release, or fake TV news spot, produced by the PR firm Medialink Worldwide and sponsored by Tech Central Station, a conservative website that was owned and operated at the time by DCI Group, one of ExxonMobil's lobbying firms. The VNR was titled, "Global Warming and Hurricanes: All Hot Air?" In the VNR, Gray denies that there's any link between global warming and the severity of hurricane seasons -- a link independent research has supported. "We don't think that's the case," Gray says. "This is the way nature sometimes works."

Also in 2006, Gray told the Denver Post that global warming is a "hoax," something that "they've been brainwashing us [about] for 20 years."

Gray signed onto a December 2007 open letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon that called global warming "a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages," called carbon dioxide "a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis," and claimed the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's reports "quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity." The letter also stated, "Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability."

Quotes

• "Humankind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes"
• "My belief is that three, four years from now, the globe will start to cool again, as it did from the middle '40s to the middle '70s." In interview with Denver Post May 2006
• "In just three, five, maybe eight years, the world will begin to cool again."
• "I don't think anybody in the world understands how the atmosphere functions better than me."

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Climate change skeptics
• ExxonMobil
• Heartland Institute
• International Conference on Climate Change (2009)
• Tech Central Station
• Video news releases

External resources

• DeSmogBlog profile [5]

External articles

• William Gray, "Climate Change Is Primarily Driven by Salinity-Induced Deep Ocean Circulation Changes", Presentation to the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change (2009), March 10, 2009. (PowerPoint)