David Legates
| David Russell Legates | |
|---|---|
| Fields | Geography, climatology |
| Institutions | University of Delaware |
| Alma mater | University of Delaware |
| Thesis | A climatology of global precipitation (1989) |
| Known for | Global warming skepticism |
David Russell Legates is a Professor of Geography at the University of Delaware. He is the former Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the same university, and a former Delaware State Climatologist.
Legates has published research papers, opinion editorials, and spoken openly in opposition to the consensus scientific opinion on climate change. More recently, he has been known for his skepticism toward the anthropogenic cause of the observed global warming patterns and the severity of its consequences at the local geographical scale.
Legates viewpoint, as stated in a 2015 study that he co-authored, is that the Earth will experience about 1.0 C warming over the 2000 to 2100 period.
Legates started his career working on precipitation probability modeling. He extended his research to the study of global precipitation and temperature measurement correlation and performed critical analyses of the quality of traditional water budgeting methods applied to recent, better quality measurement data. He also became concerned with the study of the applicability of global circulation prognostication models at the regional and local level. Legates and his team argued for the necessity of technological progress in precipitation measurement used for validating climate change scenarios, and for validation of existing data used for that purpose. They demonstrated disagreement between satellite-based and in-situ precipitation measurements, and pointed out inconsistencies among satellite data processing algorithms. Legates argued for a better adequacy of observation-based climatologies compared to those compiled subjectively. His team concluded that uncorrected centered-pattern correlation statistics applied to the validation of general circulation prognostication models used to predict large-scale climate change may be inappropriate and may yield erroneous results. They proposed modified goodness of fit test methods more suitable for use in hydrologic and hydroclimate model validation. Legates and his coworkers became concerned with the quality of surface instrumental temperature data analysis, treatment and presentation of trends used in the communication of global warming research results.
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