David Douglass

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For the eighteenth-century actor, see American Company.

David H. Douglass is an 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 models 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.^[1] 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."^[2] Douglass presented the results of this study at the Heartland Institutes's International Climate Change Conference (a skeptics conference).^[3]

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.^[4]

The issues raised the paper and the criticisms by Real Climate have been discussed in detail at ClimateAudit.^[5]. The authors provided further clarification in a separate post. ^[6]