The scene at the palm tree-lined Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando, Florida, was bright and active. Suntanned kids chased each other around in swimming trunks, laughing and giggling. It was the Friday before Easter weekend, and a Christian youth conference had just begun taking registration, crowding out the National Hurricane Conferences dwindling display tables. “Lads to Leaders & Leaderettes,” the Christian event was called. If it had occurred to the organizers that the slogan might seem to endorse sex-change operations, evidently the thought had not troubled them.
Many of the National Hurricane Center’s top forecasters and researchers, including Stacy Stewart, Lixion Avila, and Chris Landsea, had already given their talks here in Orlando. Now, inside the cavernous main conference room, National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield—a thin man with glasses who was playing the role of emcee for the conference’s final session—introduced “our friend professor Bill Gray” to the crowd of hundreds. Mayfield thanked Gray kindly for his “tremendous” contributions to tropical meteorology and to seasonal hurricane forecasting, and for sending talented students like Landsea to work at the National Hurricane Center. Not that Gray needed any introduction before this audience of journalists, insurance experts, emergency managers, and others working on the practical side of hurricane readiness. The crowd loved him.
For years, Mayfield noted, Gray had announced his Atlantic storm predictions in the capstone speech of this annual conference, the chief off-season gathering of the nation’s hurricane-preparedness community. But this year, Gray would officially hand off the lead forecasting duties to his latest protégé, a red-haired and freckled Ph.D. student named Phil Klotzbach. Meanwhile—although Mayfield didn’t mention this part—Gray planned to focus much of his energy on debunking global warming.
And so it began: a dramatic two-part anti-global warming polemic from Gray, interrupted briefly for Klotzbach’s calmly offered seasonal forecast (predicting seventeen named tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin) and then continuing until some in the crowd started to leave. “You poor people,” Gray commiserated at one point, even as he proceeded to toss up yet another slide. “I can’t go another two hours, can I?” he asked later.
The year was 2006. The human fingerprint on the current global-warming trend had been conclusively detected by the world’s scientific community. Consensus had been achieved among the vast majority of experts studying the issue. Yet in Gray’s audience sat some of the nation’s leading hurricane forecasters and emergency planners, who were hearing a very different message—and at least some of whom seemed to be soaking it up like Florida sunshine.
The years 1995 through 2003 had been very kind to the state of Florida. By historic standards, the entire period was extraordinarily active for Atlantic hurricanes (save during the record-breaking El Nino year of 1997, and another El Nino in 2002). Between 1928 and 1965 during the previous active hurricane period, the Florida peninsula had been hit by a major storm roughly once every three years. From 1995 to 2003, however, the worst storm Florida had seen was 1995’s Category 4 Hurricane Opal, which rapidly intensified over 28- or 29-degree (Celsius) waters in the Gulf of Mexico in early October, achieving estimated 150-mile-per-hour winds and a central pressure dip down to 916 millibars (27.05 inches). Luckily, Opal shrank back to a weak Category 3 before lifting a storm surge of eight to fifteen feet onto the delicate dunes of Santa Rosa Island, which hosts Pensacola Beach.
And that was it for Florida from 1995 through 2003: one major hurricane strike to the panhandle, none to the peninsula. Meanwhile the rest of the Atlantic was being terrorized by strong hurricanes, none of them worse than 1998’s Mitch, which reached Category 5 inten sity—with winds of 180 miles per hour and a minimum central pressure of 905 millibars (26.72 inches)—in the western Caribbean in late October. There Mitch sank the Fantome, a huge luxury schooner that went down in giant waves off the coast of Honduras with thirty-one people on board after its captain spent days trying to outwit the hurricane. By the time Mitch hit land it had weakened dramatically, but the storm’s slow movement allowed it to pour almost three feet of rainfall over mountainous terrain, causing flooding and landslides that swept away some 11,000 people (thousands more were left missing) in Honduras, Nicaragua, and other nearby nations. This death toll surpassed even that of the 1900 Galveston storm. You had to go back to the Great Hurricane of 1780, estimated to have killed 22,000 in the Caribbean, to find a more murderous Atlantic weather event.
And for every full-fledged hurricane disaster during the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were many near misses. As it was, 1998’s Hurricane Georges killed hundreds in the Caribbean; had the storm remained a bit stronger and made its final landfall a bit farther west, it could also have delivered a deadly blow to New Orleans. And then there was 2003’s Hurricane Isabel, a Category 5 Cape Verde-type storm (915 mb; 27.02 in.) that luckily weakened before reaching the Outer Banks of North Carolina. On September 13, the storm produced the strongest horizontal wind gust ever recorded in a hurricane. A GPS-equipped measuring device known as a dropsonde, released by a reconnaissance plane into the inner edge of Isabel’s eye wall, detected a wind of 239 miles per hour—a velocity more like what you’d expect in a strong tornado.
On the other end of the intensity spectrum, meanwhile, 2003 also introduced Tropical Storm Ana. Born as a hybrid between a tropical and an extra-tropical storm but later gaining more clearly defined tropical characteristics, Ana remained at sea and never had sustained winds above about 60 miles per hour. But the storm had a feature distinct from every other Atlantic tropical cyclone on record: A birthday in late April, radically early in the year, more than a month before the start of the official Atlantic season.
Throughout this new period of frequent and intense Atlantic basin activity, Bill Gray had been the rock of the hurricane community—the reliable guy with the forecasts; the source of warnings (and chidings) for those who had built in harm’s way. It surely helped that he was a university professor, not an official government forecaster like Max Mayfield. As such, Gray had far more freedom to be the colorful character that he was. He could scare your pants off and make you laugh at the same time. His pivotal speaking role at the National Hurricane Conference, as well as at the annual Florida Governor’s Hurricane Conference, reflected this popularity and renown. He was, more than anyone else, “Mr. Hurricane.”
Yet in all this time, Gray had never warmed up to global warming. As the years went on, his forecasts also came to contain a boilerplate section debunking any connection between climate change and hurricanes. Gray’s rebuttals to the climate worry-worts, however, were neither the source of his fame nor the reason for his steady appearances at these practically oriented mega-conferences. There Gray officially appeared as the nation’s top hurricane expert, the guy with the preseason forecast that everyone wanted to hear about. Especially Floridians.
By 2006, however, Gray’s two personas—“Mr. Hurricane” and “Mr. Climate Skeptic”—no longer appeared even remotely separable.
That had become clear during Gray’s press availabilities at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando, held daily before his final keynote speech (he was very much in demand). During the second of them Gray was in rare form, decked out in a dark suit, a dandyish purple shirt, and a clashing red tie as he denounced the “baby boomers and yuppies” who’d produced the latest global climate models.
Later, in a witty story on climate skeptics that featured Gray and focused on his Orlando appearance, The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach noted that these press events had been organized by TCSDaily.com (formerly Tech Central Station), a Web site published at the time by a “strategic public affairs” firm in Washington, D.C., called the DCI Group. The site had received funding in the past from fossil-fuel giant ExxonMobil—which also retained DCI’s lobbying services—and its “Science Roundtable” offered a kind of clearinghouse for the contrarian arguments of outlier scientists who continued to attack the main stream understanding of global warming. And now, TCSDaily had appeared at the National Hurricane Conference to help Gray get his message out.
The group must have heartily enjoyed Gray’s keynote speech. It opened with his best material: In the 1940s we worried about warming; then came the “Ice Age” scare in the 1970s; and now, lo and behold, we’re worried about warming again. And so Gray issued his long-range climate forecast: Global warming, he augured, would go away sometime within the next five to ten years. “I predict—I won’t be around to see it, but Phil Klotzbach says he’ll put some dandelions on my grave if twenty years from now the Earth is a little cooler than it is now,” Gray offered.
After Klotzbach provided the forecast, Gray lumbered back to the podium to ventilate some more. “I think there’s been so much foolishness out there over this human-induced global warming,” he said—and proceeded to launch yet another assault on the climate modelers. Showing a Rube Goldberg-type image meant to depict the complexity of the climate system, Gray asked the audience: “Do you think people can write equations for all these things?” Later, Gray went on to his water vapor routine and explained his view that ocean circulation is the “fundamental driver for climate change.” As more time passed, he started to repeat himself. He performed the water vapor-feedback debunking two times over. At one point he confused “global warming” and “global cooling.” He went on too long, and had to be gently cut off” after the presentation had passed the 35-minute mark.
Yet despite a somewhat awkward finish, for Gray the speech and especially its reception represented a successfully defiant stand in favorable territory. Given the state of scientific consensus on the subject as 2006, that the National Hurricane Conference would close not just with a debunking of any hurricane-global warming connection, but with a debunking of global warming itself, was staggering. Yet Gray ended to thunderous applause.
Gray’s speech proved that the rift between the hurricane and climate communities remained alive and well. Their battle had dramatically amplified in 2004, the first major upturn year for damaging land-falling hurricanes in the state of Florida; and intensified further still in 2005, a year that increased both the damage levels and the ferocity of debate. And now, the divide seemed set to continue as the 2006 hurricane season approached.
After Gray’s speech, it fell to Max Mayfield to pull the curtain on the event. No one knew it yet, but after delivering so many CNN-ready statements about Atlantic hurricanes over the years in his reassuring drawl, the Hurricane Center director would announce his retirement within months. As he sat adjacent to Gray on the stage the entire time, there was no telling what Mayfield thought of the unfolding diatribe, which he had prefaced by glowingly praising its speaker. While Mayfield didn’t seem visibly uncomfortable with Gray’s talk, he certainly hadn’t endorsed any of it.
“I hope to see everyone, including our good friend Bill Gray, back in 2007,” Mayfield said in closing. “We’ll see you next year.”