Climate Fight Loses a Warrior

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H. Sterling Burnett

Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News at The Heartland Institute

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute. Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, most recently as a senior fellow in charge of NCPA’s environmental policy program. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations, including serving as a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission.

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Climate researcher Vincent Gray passed away in mid-June.

In a letter to friends and colleagues reporting Gray’s death, Heartland Institute Director Joe Bast wrote, “It is with sincere regret that I pass along news of the passing of Vincent Gray, a true pioneer and giant among critics of the global warming alarmism. He passed away on June 14th near his home in New Zealand.”

Bast noted Gray’s critique of the IPCC’s Second Assessment, Climate Change 95: An Appraisal, was Heartland’s first publication devoted to climate change. Gray spoke at Heartland’s first International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-1) in March 2008 in New York City and contributed to all five volumes in the Climate Change Reconsideredbook series, Bast noted.

“A gentleman and a scholar, deeply committed to science and honesty in the policy debate, Vincent Gray will be sorely missed,” Bast wrote in conclusion.

The Science and Environmental Policy Project’s homage to Gray called him

a stalwart defender in the battle to keep rigorous science [from] descending into bureaucratic nonsense[,] … an enthusiastic expert reviewer of all five Assessment Reports by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), [whose] comments number in the thousands, and he was effective. Gray singularly fought the IPCC for using the term predictions to describe the results of the global climate models because the models used have not been verified and validated. They have not been meticulously tested, scientifically. Gray won. The IPCC uses the term ‘projections.’

With the late Robert Carter, Gray cofounded the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition and wrote two books on climate change: The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of Climate Change 2001 (2002) and The Global Warming Scam (2015). Both are available on Amazon.