"Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut, served as staff physicist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology),"
Inclusion on the list seems to be based on this April 23rd 2008 article he authored:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23583376-7583,00.html
Arguments condensed:
- 0.7C cooling since 2007
- We might be facing global cooling so should focus less on global warming
- Close correlation between variations in sunspot cycle and Earth's climate
- "reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming"
Notes:
- Doesn't mention the La Nina, possibly is unaware of it. This is probably the biggest weakness with the argument as it relies on the cause of the cooling being unknown and so potentially catastrophic.
- Proposes a solution to global cooling: "We could gather all the bulldozers in the world and use them to dirty the snow in Canada and Siberia in the hope of reducing the reflectance so as to absorb more warmth from the sun"
- Another solution which indicates he does accept the greenhouse effect: "We also may be able to release enormous floods of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from the hydrates under the Arctic permafrost and on the continental shelves, perhaps using nuclear weapons to destabilise the deposits."
- Claims that "All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007", but this article was written in April 2008 and by then temperature in HadCRUT had already started rising again: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2006
- Claims "the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770."
- Prediction: "We cannot really know, but my guess is that the odds are at least 50-50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades."
The article was rebutted by a following article by David Karoly:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23612876-11949,00.html
BIO info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Chapman
"From 1956 to 1957, he worked for Philips Electronics Industries Proprietary Limited in Sydney, Australia. He then spent 15 months in Antarctica with the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE), for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) as an auroral/radio physicist. The work required that he spend most of the winter with one other man at a remote camp."
There do not appear to be any published papers or evidence of work in the field of climate since then.
