Robert Balling

Robert C. Balling
Born (1952-12-16) December 16, 1952
Uniontown, Pennsylvania
Fields Geography, climatology
Institutions Arizona State University
Alma mater Wittenberg University, Bowling Green State University, University of Oklahoma
Thesis Regional winter climatic variations associated with atmospheric circulation change in the coterminous United States, 1939-1965 (1979)
Known for Climate change skepticism
Notable awards 2011 Professor of the Year Award from the Order of Omega[1]

Robert C. Balling, Jr. is a professor of geography at Arizona State University, and the former director of its Office of Climatology. His research interests include climatology, global climate change, and geographic information systems.[2] Balling has declared himself one of the scientists who oppose the consensus on global warming, arguing in a 2009 book that anthropogenic global warming "is indeed real, but relatively modest",[3] and maintaining that there is a publication bias in the scientific literature.[4]

Education and career

Balling was born and raised in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and moved to Springfield, Ohio in 1970 to attend Wittenberg University.[5] While there, he decided to join Phi Gamma Delta after hearing good things about it and because many of his friends were pledging it. Balling gained bachelor's and master's degrees in geography in 1974 (Wittenberg University, BA) and 1975 (Bowling Green State University, MA), before gaining his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Oklahoma in 1979.[2] He was assistant professor at the University of Nebraska (1979–1984), before joining the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University.[2] He gained tenure there in 1987, and served as the director of the Office of Climatology until 2004.[2]

Research

Balling has published much research pertaining to various factors that influence the Earth's climate. In 1988, Balling published a study which found that the construction of golf courses around Palm Springs, CA may have cooled the city over the preceding 15 years, in contrast to the warming effect usually associated with urban areas (also known as the urban heat island effect).[6] Seven years later, Balling and Randall S. Cerveny, one of his ASU colleagues, published a study which found that the moon, when it is full, can cause Earth's troposphere to warm by more than 0.03 °F.[7] However, it remained unclear why the moon might be able to do this. When interviewed by the New York Times, Balling suggested the main reason might be that infrared radiation from the Sun is reflected towards Earth by the full moon.[8] In 1998, Balling and Cerveny published a letter to Nature which found that man-made air pollutants, especially ozone and carbon monoxide, were influencing weather patterns on the East Coast of the United States.[9][10] Their study also concluded that this effect was the strongest on Saturdays, and that this was so because "...the end of the week brings worse air pollution than the beginning."[11]

Funding controversy

Balling was mentioned as a fossil fuel industry – funded scientist in Ross Gelbspan's 1997 book The Heat is On. This led the Minnesota Star Tribune to run an editorial speaking of a "disinformation campaign" by some climatologists. Balling and his colleague Patrick Michaels took a complaint against the Star Tribune to the Minnesota News Council. By a 9–4 decision the council "voted to sustain the complaint that the Star Tribune editorial unfairly characterized the scientific reputations of Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling."[12] At the 1998 hearing, Balling "acknowledged that he had received $408,000 in research funding from the fossil fuel industry over the last decade (of which his University takes 50% for overhead)."[12]

Between December 1998[13] and September 2001[14] Balling was listed as a "Scientific Adviser" to the Greening Earth Society, a group that was funded and controlled by the Western Fuels Association (WFA), an association of coal-burning utility companies. WFA founded the group in 1997, according to an archived version of its website, "as a vehicle for advocacy on climate change, the environmental impact of CO2, and fossil fuel use."[15] In 2001, while it was directed by Balling, ASU's office of climatology received $49,000 from ExxonMobil.[16]

From 1989 to 2002, Balling received more than $679,000 from fossil-fuel-industry organizations; as of 2007, he also had received more than $7 million in research funding from the National Science Foundation and the EPA.[17] He has also come under scrutiny because he was listed as a tentative author of the Heartland Institute's NIPCC report; however, ASU's vice president of public affairs, Virgil Renzulli, pointed out that this did not imply that Balling had been receiving money from Heartland. Balling himself added that his prior involvement with the Heartland Institute's activities amounted only to appearing at a luncheon they held in 2008.[18]

On February 24, 2015, Arizona State Representative Raúl Grijalva wrote letters to seven universities where climate skeptic scientists (including Balling) worked, citing concerns about these scientists' conflicts of interest and non-disclosure of corporate funding. In these letters, Grijalva requested records on the funding and testimony prepared before a government body.[19][20]

Books

Views on global warming

Balling believes that humans are increasing the level of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere, and that the Earth should warm as a result. Balling also considers the mainstream description of climate change to be "a vastly overrated threat whose proposed solutions are worse than the problem."[21] In particular, he has dismissed the idea that use of renewable energy could be an effective strategy for combating global warming as "absurd."[22] In the book Climate of Extremes, Balling, along with his co-author Patrick Michaels, contend that certain phenomena usually attributed to anthropogenic global warming have actually been occurring for more than a century. The phenomena named include the loss of ice on Mount Kilimanjaro.[23] Balling has made similar statements about current sea level rise; namely, that it has been occurring for 8,000 years and it is therefore "quite a stretch" to blame it on global warming.[24]

Reaction to Balling's views on global warming

In the December 1995 issue of Harper's Magazine, Ross Gelbspan described Balling and other global warming skeptics as "extraordinarily adept at draining the [global warming] issue of all sense of crisis."[25] Climate of Extremes was reviewed in Foreign Affairs by Richard N. Cooper, who concluded that "Even if the authors have cherry-picked their scientific papers, this book is a useful antidote to the heavy dose of hype to which the public is regularly subjected."[23] By contrast, The Satanic Gases, another Balling-Michaels collaboration which was published in 2000, received a scathing review from American Scientist. Reviewer John Firor argued that the book "does not fulfill" its claim (on the dust jacket) that global warming predictions are "simply wrong", that Michaels and Balling criticized the Kyoto Protocol without having read it, and that they quoted a well-known scientist out of context.[26] After Balling wrote an article for TCS Daily harshly criticizing An Inconvenient Truth as scientifically inaccurate,[27] his article was itself criticized as inaccurate by Judd Legum, who said that the article used "misleading scientific arguments." Legum's critique was endorsed by geochemist Eric Steig, a contributor to RealClimate, who said that “All those points are accurate,” and that “Some of them could probably have been stronger; that is, Balling is even more wrong that Legum indicates.”[28]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Balling's CV
  2. 1 2 3 4 Professor Robert C. Balling, Jr. at Arizona State University
  3. ↑ Patrick Michaels and Robert C. Balling, Climate of extremes: global warming science they don't want you to know, Cato Institute, 2009. p7
  4. ↑ Michaels and Balling (2009:10)
  5. ↑ "Fiji Climatologist Named ASU Professor of Year". Phi Gamma Delta at Arizona State University. 5 May 2012. Retrieved 19 March 2014.
  6. ↑ Wilford, John Noble (13 September 1988). "New Factor Affecting Climate: The Golf-Course Effect". New York Times. Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  7. ↑ Balling, R. C.; Cerveny, R. S. (10 March 1995). "Influence of Lunar Phase on Daily Global Temperatures". Science. 267 (5203): 1481–1483. Bibcode:1995Sci...267.1481B. doi:10.1126/science.267.5203.1481. PMID 17743548.
  8. ↑ Browne, Malcolm W. (10 March 1995). "Surprising Scientists, Full Moon Is Found to Play Role in Warming the Earth". New York Times. Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  9. ↑ Cerveny, Randall S.; Balling, Robert C. (6 August 1998). "Weekly cycles of air pollutants, precipitation and tropical cyclones in the coastal NW Atlantic region". Nature. 394 (6693): 561–563. Bibcode:1998Natur.394..561C. doi:10.1038/29043.
  10. ↑ Maugh, Thomas H. II (6 August 1998). "Weekday Pollution Linked to Pattern of Rainy Weekends on East Coast". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  11. ↑ "Saturday-night showers". The Economist. 6 August 1998. Retrieved 6 April 2014.
  12. 1 2 Minnesota News Council, 16 April 1998, Determination 118: Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling v. Star Tribune archived at Archived March 17, 2004, at the Wayback Machine.
  13. ↑ "Scientific Advisers" at the Wayback Machine (archived December 5, 1998), Greening Earth Society.
  14. ↑ Greening Earth Society, "Scientific Advisers" at the Wayback Machine (archived September 25, 2001), Greening Earth Society.
  15. ↑ "Join GES" at the Wayback Machine (archived March 8, 2005), Greening Earth Society website.
  16. ↑ "Put a Tiger In Your Think Tank". Mother Jones. May–June 2005. Retrieved 30 March 2014.
  17. ↑ Purtill, Corinne (11 November 2007). "Outspoken ASU prof draws ire". The Arizona Republic. Retrieved 14 March 2014.
  18. ↑ Peirano, Michelle (4 March 2012). "Professor accused of bias in environmental research". State Press. Retrieved 14 March 2014.
  19. ↑ Ryman, Anne (12 March 2015). "ASU prof 'shocked' to be target of Dems' climate probe". Arizona Republic. Retrieved 14 September 2016.
  20. ↑ Editorial Board (11 March 2015). "Drop the climate-change witch hunt". Arizona Republic. Retrieved 14 September 2016.
  21. ↑ Whipple, Dan (22 December 2003). "Climate: Taking stock of what is known". UPI. Retrieved 26 March 2014.
  22. ↑ Kokai, Mitch (8 March 2006). "'Warming' Skeptic Stresses Costs". Carolina Journal. Retrieved 31 March 2014.
  23. 1 2 Cooper, Richard N. (November–December 2009). "Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know". Foreign Affairs. Retrieved 21 March 2014.
  24. ↑ Ruibal, Sai (5 June 2006). "Sports offers a new arena for climate change concerns". USA Today. Retrieved 26 March 2014.
  25. ↑ Plank, Dave (25 January 1996). "The Center of the Warm". Phoenix New Times. Retrieved 16 July 2014.
  26. ↑ Firor, John (November–December 2000). "Heat vs. Light in the Global Warming Wars". American Scientist. Retrieved 26 March 2014.
  27. ↑ Inconvenient Truths Indeed at the Wayback Machine (archived June 1, 2006)
  28. ↑ Mieszkowski, Katharine (10 June 2006). "Did Al get the science right?". Salon. Retrieved 16 April 2014.

Further reading

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