(excerpts from original text)

 Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education.

Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of   Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N.says, to recognize "outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the
environment." He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was   identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the  world.

Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. 

Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that’s trained some of the nation’s leading climatologists.

                              How Little We Know

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to 
acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the 
planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

"I was laughed off the platform for saying that," he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.

  In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things   have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.

  "Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so   something was making it change in the past," he told us in an interview this past winter. "Before   there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was   changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?"

  "All this argument (if) the temperature (is) going up or not, it’s absurd," Bryson continues. "Of course   it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air."