Bill Kirk, Co-founder and CEO of Weather Trends International, Inc, brought two team members with him Bill Dunn and Josh Wildsin and spoke at ERC's regular Thursday morning meeting on global warming. He first laid out some of the contract work Weather Trends does to help industries and retailers. For example, retailers may see a 30% increase in the sale of birdseed for each degree it is warmer in the spring and for each degree, it is colder in winter.
NOTE: "The real Captain Kirk, USAF Gulf War Veteran 1989-1999." The other Captain Kirk is a t.v. character:) Our speaker grew up in Hawaii and has lived in the Lehigh Valley for the last 24 years. He studied at Rutgers in the 1980s when ice core samples were being taken from Greenland.
The main points of Kirk's argument that there is no "global warming" except what might be expected from coming out of the "Little Ice Age" around 1895 :
1. Human memory: While written weather records date to 1895 in the United States, no one in the room remembers first hand the year 1913 when there was no polar ice in Norway and on July 19th that year it was recorded that Death Valley experienced the heat of 134.1 degrees F.
2. There has been a homogenization of data since the first weather satellites were launched in the mid-1970s.
3. Compromised weather stations: while the USA has the best system of weather stations globally which are used to feed information to NOOA, only about 7 % of them give good quality data as buildings, parking lots, etc have both been built around them.
4. Human activity: Kirk does not think human activity has the same power as solar activity which causes ups and downs in the weather cycles. The sea is naturally full of carbon. If the world's human population stood quietly together, all of us would fit into the area of Kansas City.
While the international efforts to clean-up oceans of trash and to reduce our waste may be good, Kirk said that historical records: measurements and data, do not support global warming caused by human activity. He did end by saying that the world is getting greener and wetter.
