Joseph D'Aleo


Joseph D'Aleo is a certified consultant meteorologist and was the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel. He was chairman of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting. He was the founder of the "Icecap" blog. He has been a contributing meteorologist to the Old Farmer's Almanac, in which he predicted in 2008 that the earth had entered a period of global cooling. D'Aleo is currently a meteorologist at Weatherbell Analytics.
D'Aleo is a signatory to the Cornwall Alliance's "Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming". The declaration states:
"We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth's climate system is no exception."

Early life and education

Joseph D’Aleo is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, from which he received B.S. and M.S. degrees. He was a doctoral student in Air Resources at New York University, where he completed everything except his dissertation.
D’Aleo was a professor of Meteorology and Climatology at Lyndon State College. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Lyndon State College for his "accomplishments as an educator and a pioneer in the field of broadcast meteorology".

Career

D'Aleo has been a professional meteorologist for over 30 years. He was the first Director of Meteorology at the Weather Channel on cable TV, Chief Meteorologist at Weather Services International Corporation, and Senior Editor of "Dr. Dewpoint" for WSI’s Intellicast.com website. He has also taught Meteorology at Lyndon State College in Vermont. He is a contributing author to the Non-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was on the research and writing team of the Independent Summary for Policymakers.
He has also served as chairman of the American Meteorological Society Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting; is a member of the AMS Council; is a fellow of the AMS; and has been elected a Councilor for the AMS. A certified consulting meteorologist, he has co-chaired national conferences for both the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association.
D'Aleo is currently co-chief meteorologist at Weatherbell.com. He is also Executive Director of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, an organization and website that bring together climate scientists to examine climate change. He is listed as a policy expert at the Heartland Institute and as a partner in Hudson Seven Ltd.

Views

Climate change

D'Aleo has become a leading figure in the debate over man-made climate change. After hacked emails by and to Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, were made public in November 2009, D'Aleo was a major participant in the resulting controversy.
In 2008, D'Aleo published a list titled “12 Facts about Global Climate Change That You Won’t Read in the Popular Press”, including the following claims:
  1. Temperatures have been cooling since 2002, even as carbon dioxide has continued to rise.
  2. Carbon dioxide is a trace gas and by itself will produce little warming. Also, as CO2 increases, the incremental warming is less, as the effect is logarithmic so the more CO2, the less warming it produces.
  3. CO2 has been totally uncorrelated with temperature over the last decade, and significantly negative since 2002.
  4. CO2 is not a pollutant, but a naturally occurring gas. Together with chlorophyll and sunlight, it is an essential ingredient in photosynthesis and is, accordingly, plant food.
  5. Reconstruction of paleoclimatological CO2 concentrations demonstrates that carbon dioxide concentration today is near its lowest level since the Cambrian Era some 550 million years ago, when there was almost 20 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today without causing a “runaway greenhouse effect.”
  6. Temperature changes lead, not lag, CO2 changes on all time scales. The oceans may play a key role, emitting carbon dioxide when they warm as carbonated beverages lose fizz as they warm and absorbing it as they cool.
In a December 2009 article, D'Aleo wrote that “The Climategate whistleblower proved what those of us dealing with data for decades know to be the case — namely, data was being manipulated. The IPCC and their supported scientists have worked to remove the pesky Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and the period emailer Tom Wigley referred to as the 'warm 1940s blip,' and to pump up the recent warm cycle.” While much attention had been paid to “the emails dealing with Michael Mann’s hockey stick and other proxy attempts,” and especially “to the email about the 'trick' and the effort to 'hide the decline,'” D'Aleo wrote that he was in fact “more concerned about the coordinated effort to manipulate instrumental data... to produce an exaggerated warming that would point to man’s influence.”
D'Aleo asserted in a January 2010 report with E. Michael Smith that, in addition to the "deceptions" of the CRU, researchers at the National Climate Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City had also manipulated climate data, in order to claim that 2005 was the warmest year on record. "When the differences between the warmest year in history and the tenth warmest year is less than three quarters of a degree, it becomes silly to rely on such comparisons," said D'Aleo, who called the claimed manipulation a "scientific travesty" committed by activist scientists to promote a global-warming agenda.
Also in 2010, D'Aleo and Anthony Watts published a book-length report entitled Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? In the report, which they described as "a work in progress," they analyzed worldwide temperature records and concluded with the claim that the systematic manipulation and exaggeration of instrumental temperature data by leading meteorological institutions makes it impossible to say whether or not there was a significant amount of global warming in the 20th century.
In the report, D'Aleo and Watts claim that "Just as the Medieval Warm Period was an obstacle to those trying to suggest that today’s temperature is exceptional, and the UN and its supporters tried to abolish it with the 'hockey-stick' graph, the warmer temperatures in the 1930s and 1940s were another inconvenient fact that needed to be 'fixed'. In each of the databases, the land temperatures from that period were simply adjusted downward, making it look as though the rate of warming in the 20th century was higher than it was, and making it look as though today’s temperatures were unprecedented in at least 150 years."
In summarizing the report, D'Aleo stated that he and Watts "don’t dispute the fact that there has been some cyclical warming in recent decades — most notably from 1979 to 1998 — but cooling took place from the 1940s to the late 1970s, again after 1998, and especially after 2001, all while CO2 rose. This fact alone questions the primary role in climate change attributed to CO2 by the IPCC, environmental groups, and others."

Icecap blog

D'Aleo started a blog called "Icecap" that aligns with his views, namely while accepting the reality of global warming and the role of humans including greenhouse gas pollution, it promotes the idea of "a sudden climate shift that history tells us will occur again, very possibly soon." In line with climate change denial, the blog argues that the threat of human-caused global warming is exaggerated. The name is a backronym of "International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project". It was founded in 2006. They are a 501 tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation.
Aside from D'Aleo, the blog features the writings of Robert C. Balling, Jr., Sallie Baliunas, Robert M. Carter, and others. In attributing recent climate change, ICECAP states that the effect of water vapor is much more significant than carbon dioxide; water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but has an expected lifetime of only ten days and makes less significant contributions to radiative forcing. On their FAQs and Myths page, ICECAP argues that limiting or reducing CO2 emissions could lead to mass extinctions, while continuing to increase emissions will protect plants and animals.

Other work

D'Aleo has written and delivered a number of papers on the improved ability to make seasonal forecasts based on the use of new technologies and research into such meteorological phenomena as ENSO. He has also written many papers on the effect of solar and oceanic cycles in climate change and on questions about the validity of surface temperature measurements.
His published works include a resource guide for Greenwood Publishing on El Niño and La Niña.