Local Meteorologist Wants Skeptics To Put Up Or Shut Up Or Something

There was a time when local Raleigh weatherman for WRAL Greg Fishel simply did the weather, and, he’s damned good at it. If you want to know Raleigh and North Carolina weather, no one is better. When I want to know the local weather, if there’s something big going on, WRAL is the first place to go. Sorry, WNCN and WTVD. But, he’s become an uber-Warmist (who takes long fossil fueled trips to Alaska), and now has a challenge

‘Put up or shut up’: WRAL’s Greg Fishel goes off on climate change deniers

Popular local weatherman Greg Fishel had strong words for climate change deniers on his Facebook page on Sunday.

Fishel, chief meteorologist at WRAL, went off on people who question the science behind climate change, telling them to “put up or shut up.” The post had earned more than 3,500 reactions by Monday afternoon.

“You know everybody reaches their breaking point and quite frankly I have reached mine with the folks who post all over the internet about the scientific fallacies of man induced climate change,” Fishel wrote. “All of them are guest bloggers or essayists. None of this stuff has ever been published in a peer reviewed atmospheric science or climate journal. But we live in an age today where higher education and research are no longer respected. Heck, think of all the money my parents wasted on my education when I could have waited for the age of twitter and Facebook and declared myself as an expert in the field of my choice.”

First, let’s note that Mr. Fishel (who I’ve met in the past, nice guy) did not use the term “deniers”: that’s on the Raleigh N&O. I’m betting my comment at the screed which uses the terms Warmists, Alarmist, and Cult of Climastrology gets deleted rather quickly.

Regardless, I’ve challenged Greg in the past to put up or shut up, in terms of going carbon neutral in his own life. Giving up his own use of fossil fuels. He can go buy a Nissan Leaf, Tesla, or other straight plug-in vehicle. Get a Chevy Volt and pledge to never put gas in the reserve tank. Not take fossil fueled plane trips.Pay for offsets for his weather broadcasts while reducing the energy used.

Perhaps he’d like to take my yearly challenge, since he is attempting to shift the debate to the “hey, we’re experts, you aren’t, so shut up.” Of course, this means we aren’t supposed to listen to Obama, Gore, Dicaprio, and all the others yapping about the issue.

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23 Responses to “Local Meteorologist Wants Skeptics To Put Up Or Shut Up Or Something”

  1. drowningpuppies says:

    Is an uber-warmist similar to a catastrophist or what?

  2. o0Nighthawk0o says:

    He yammers about put up or shut up but fails to realize that there are 1000’s of peer reviewed, published papers that support the skeptics view.

    Tells me that he either dismisses these out of hand or has never researched the other side of the issue.

    • Zachriel says:

      William Teach: Regardless, I’ve challenged Greg in the past to put up or shut up, in terms of going carbon neutral in his own life.

      That’s not always a practical alternative, for instance, if he lives in an area that gets its electrical production from fossil fuels. It will take a revamping of the energy infrastructure to allow society to move towards a carbon-free future.

  3. Zachriel says:

    o0Nighthawk0o: there are 1000’s of peer reviewed, published papers that support the skeptics view.

    You might want to provide a few citations.

    • drowningpuppies says:

      It’s the “peer review” canard. Peer review isn’t science or the scientific method. Independent replication is.

      Thanks, kiddies.

      • Zachriel says:

        We didn’t bring up peer review, but how do you expect for a finding to be replicated if it isn’t submitted for review by your peers?

        • drowningpuppies says:

          We didn’t bring up peer review,

          Really, you asked for a few citations from Nighthawk.

          Peer review isn’t science or the scientific method. Independent replication is.

          • Zachriel says:

            drowningpuppies: you asked for a few citations from Nighthawk.

            o0Nighthawk0o claimed “there are 1000’s of peer reviewed, published papers that support the skeptics view”. We asked for a few.

            Peer review isn’t science or the scientific method. Independent replication is.

            How do you expect for a finding to be replicated if it isn’t submitted for review by your peers?

          • drowningpuppies says:

            Context, kiddies.

          • Zachriel says:

            Yes, the context is the claim of “1000’s of peer reviewed, published papers that support the skeptics view”. The request is for a citation to a few of those papers for discussion.

          • drowningpuppies says:

            So you did invoke the “peer review” canard.
            Thanks for admitting it, kiddies.

          • Zachriel says:

            drowningpuppies: So you did invoke the “peer review” canard.

            No. That was introduced to the conversation by o0Nighthawk0o.

            By the way, how do you expect for a finding to be replicated if it isn’t submitted for review by your peers?

        • 6drowningpuppies says:

          When the gate keepers abuse the peer review process to make sure that no paper that disagrees with them gets published, then “peer review” is a canard.
          Re: Climategate emails.

  4. Jeffery says:

    This is why TEACH is so difficult to believe. In this screed he calls for a climate realist to give up all fossil fuel use of any kind or suffer being called a “hypocrite” by an scientifically illiterate conservablogger. But in a previous post he denied insisting that climate realists abstain from all fossil fuel use.

    Once and for all TEACH, which is it? Do you consider ANY fossil fuel use by a proclaimed climate realist to invalidate their position?

  5. larryw says:

    Ignoring the obvious carbon neutral production and distribution issues, how’s he supposed to charge his Leaf/Volt/Tesla? Unicorn farts?

    How many gravity models are there? One. That’s settled science. Once they come up with one climate model that works, JUST ONE, I’ll be happy.

    • Zachriel says:

      larryw: How many gravity models are there? One.

      That is incorrect. There are many models proposed to deal with the apparent inconsistency between relativity and quantum theories.

  6. Jeffery says:

    How many gravity models are there? One. That’s settled science.

    So you subscribe to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity explanation for gravity – that gravity results from objects distorting the space-time continuum?

    It has been observed for millennia that objects fall to Earth and that the moon orbits the Earth and the Earth orbits the Sun. Was (is) there a force causing the attraction – gravity waves or rays holding things together – or undiscovered particles or strings that interacted?

    Wikipedia lists a number of alternative theories to account for the observations we humans call “gravity”

    Modern alternative theories
    Brans–Dicke theory of gravity (1961)[42]
    Induced gravity (1967), a proposal by Andrei Sakharov according to which general relativity might arise from quantum field theories of matter
    Æ’(R) gravity (1970)
    Horndeski theory (1974)[43]
    Supergravity (1976)
    String theory
    In the modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) (1981), Mordehai Milgrom proposes a modification of Newton’s Second Law of motion for small accelerations[44]
    The self-creation cosmology theory of gravity (1982) by G.A. Barber in which the Brans-Dicke theory is modified to allow mass creation
    Loop quantum gravity (1988) by Carlo Rovelli, Lee Smolin, and Abhay Ashtekar
    Nonsymmetric gravitational theory (NGT) (1994) by John Moffat
    Conformal gravity[45]
    Tensor–vector–scalar gravity (TeVeS) (2004), a relativistic modification of MOND by Jacob Bekenstein
    Gravity as an entropic force, gravity arising as an emergent phenomenon from the thermodynamic concept of entropy.
    In the superfluid vacuum theory the gravity and curved space-time arise as a collective excitation mode of non-relativistic background superfluid.
    Chameleon theory (2004) by Justin Khoury and Amanda Weltman.
    Pressuron theory (2013) by Olivier Minazzoli and Aurélien Hees.

    Ironically, Svante Arrhenius proposed the still extant greenhouse gas theory of global warming some decade BEFORE Albert Einstein published his Theory of Relativity (which accounted for gravity). So why are there no big arguments about how gravity “works” but we have a brouhaha around greenhouse gas theory? It’s obvious. There are billions, if not trillions, of dollars involved in greenhouse gas theory.

    • drowningpuppies says:

      Uh no, little guy, the brouhaha is over man-made global warming.
      Try and get your brouhahas straight, little one.

    • david7134 says:

      Wikipedia?? Can’t stop laughing. Can you list anything that is legit?? Now, your point on gravity is well taken, there are many models for something studied for hundreds of years. But there is only one method in which climate changes and you continue to get the weather mixed up with the climate. And on the basis on this one view, you want to make major changes in our economy and take our wealth away and yet can not assure anyone that all these changes would make any difference.

      • Jeffery says:

        dave,

        Correct, gravity is “just a theory”.

        A number of mechanisms can cause major climate change. Massive volcanic eruptions. Asteroid strikes. Changes in the Earth’s orbit and positioning in relation to the sun, change in albedo, change in the ocean’s circulations, changes in greenhouse gases, changes in the Sun’s energy… Which of these mechanism(s) (or others) are observed to be changing now?

  7. Colin says:

    Our local weatherman has been very skeptical of GW. He a great weatherman, and makes jokes about all the GW news, He isn’t impressed by the MSM and their GW hysteria. Most of the time he just gives the weather, and mostly writes on Twitter his real feelings.

  8. larryw says:

    Poor example on my part. Nice deflection on yours, and I see you get my point. I wonder if the gravity sucks side calls the push crowd deniers, or if there open, honest debate on the subject as implied by that paradigm of peer review, Wikipedia.

    Seems like settled science never is…except when there are trillions of dollars at stake.

    • Zachriel says:

      larryw: there open, honest debate on the subject as implied by that paradigm of peer review

      Indeed, there is wide debate with the physics community about gravity. The recent discovery of the Higgs boson is an example of how theory guides experimentation.

      Notably, where there are issues of valid contention in climate science, there are ample opportunities for wide debate within the field, and there have been great efforts to collect more data, such as through the launching of satellites, deployment of ocean buoys, expeditions to the polar regions, development of new statistical techniques, and so on.

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