Last weekend, on 6 January 2024, Professor Ray Bates died peacefully in the tender care of Blackrock Hospice in Dublin, Ireland, aged 83.
For many years, he spoke against unscientific climate alarmism. There is no justification for the level of fear that the general public has about climate change, Prof. Bates said.
“I think some of the climate activists are actually going too far. They’re not taking an objective view of the scientific picture – as it should be seen,” he said.
As someone who had worked in the field of research of meteorology all his life, Prof. Bates was well-qualified to give and have his opinion heard. To pay tribute to him, we are sharing an interview conducted by the Irish independent media outlet Gript on 7 October 2021.
In 2015, Prof. Bates was involved in a debate on RTE Prime Time. “He was the sole voice of scientific reason against two politicians and a non-government organisation shill,” Climate Ireland wrote in the caption when sharing a video of the debate on Telegram.
At the time of the debate, Ray Bates was a Professor of Meteorology at the University College Dublin, a position which he held from 2004 until 2023. The other panellists were Kevin Humphries, who at the time was the Minister of State for Employment, Community and Social Support, Oisín Coghlan from Friends of the Earth and the Green Party’s Eamon Ryan who is now a Minister for the Environment, Climate, Communications and Transport.
You can watch the 2015 debate on RTE’s website HERE.
Prof. Bates was also a former Branch Head of the Laboratory for Atmospheres at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (“NASA”), former deputy director at Met Éireann, the Irish National Meteorological Service, and Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at the University of Copenhagen.
“Despite his credentials, he was effectively shunned from any debate regarding climate since [the RTE television debate in 2015],” Climate Ireland said. However, this did not stop Prof. Bates from speaking out.
As reported by The Irish Times in 2018, Prof. Bates said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) report ignored “important scientific evidence” gathered since 2013 “which reduces the sense of a looming emergency … “As a practising professional, I do not see the current scientific evidence as indicating we are in a state of planetary emergency.”
Existing science about climate change is “unsettled,” he said, adding that “reasonable precautionary measures to reduce emissions should be taken on the basis of risk, but it does not require that we seriously damage our economy or bring our traditional way of life to an end in the process.”
In October 2021, Prof. Bates appeared on Gript. “Perhaps the biggest misconception is that climate science is completely settled and there’s no uncertainty,” he said. “This is not the actual situation.”
In April 2021, Professor Steven Koonin published a book titled ‘Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters’. This book, Prof. Bates said, provides the best evidence that climate science is not settled.
“[Koonin] has written this book pointing out that climate science is not a settled science and there is a risk in the longer term, certainly, but he doesn’t go along with the view that we’re in a climate emergency. Nor do I,” he said.
Read More: Irish climate expert Professor Ray Bates dies but his voice lives on