Mototaka Nakamura

Dr. Mototaka Nakamura Sc. D
Born
💼 Occupation	Scientist
Known for	Climate dynamics, Meteorology

Mototaka Nakamura is an oceanographer and meteorologist with background at MIT (1995 Doctor of Science in meteorology), Georgia Institute of Technology, Goddard Space Flight Centre, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Duke and Hawaii Universities, and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. In 2019, he wrote a short book, initially in Japanese and later translated to English, Confessions Of A Climate Scientist: The Global Warming Hypothesis Is An Unproven Hypothesis.

Personal and professional history

Nakamura became concerned with climate change in high school, because of "odd weather patterns" possibly due to "deep-circulation changes in the oceans.” Before attending college, Nakamura worked for a company in Japan. He left Japan to obtain his BS in meteorology with minor in oceanography from North Carolina State University in 1989.

At MIT for his Ph.D work, Nakamura used conceptualized models to show existence of complex stabilizing and destabilizing feedbacks among atmospheric transports of moisture and heat, thermohaline circulation, ice-albedo effects, and river runoff processes, and how they are masked by flux adjustments in coupled Global Climate Models. His work on non-linear behaviors of Rossby waves helped "explain characteristics of material mixing in the upper troposphere and stratosphere and issues relating to the ozone hole problem.” Nakamura completed his Ph.D in 1994 and stayed another year at MIT.

Subsequently, Nakamura had a series of short-term jobs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Goddard Space Flight, and MIT, followed by three years at CalTech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Nakamura next worked as a professional jazz musician for almost 2 years, when chronic thumb pain made him return to work in science. After working at Duke University, he went to Frontier Research Center for Global Change, where he researched atmospheric and oceanic topics from improvement of a convective mixing scheme to examination of eddy–mean relationships' role in large-scale ocean circulation.

In Fall 2005, Nakamura joined IPRC as visiting associate researcher from Frontier Research Center for Global Change. At IPRC he investigated alternating zonal jets and worked on mid-latitude atmosphere and ocean dynamics.

In May 2008, Nakamura chaired a session at the IPRC Annual Symposium on Accomplishments of the APDRC. In November 2008, Nakamura hosted his former advisor, Professor R. Alan Plumb at IPRC for a series of seminars. In April 2010, Nakamura participated in the IPRC Governing Committee annual meeting in Tokyo office of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC).

From 2010 to 2013, Nakamura was Senior Scientist at the Research Institute for Global Change, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), where he worked in the "Improving early prediction system" group for prediction of climate variations and applications in the southern Africa region.

Research and publications

He wrote four scientific articles while affiliated with CalTech. He was Visiting Associate Researcher with 12 publications while at International Pacific Research Center.

He has authored or co-authored other studies, including:

• Destabilization of the Thermohaline Circulation by Atmospheric Feedback
• Effects of Atmospheric Coupling on the Stability of the Thermohaline Circulation

and a book length dissertation,

• Characteristics of Potential Vorticity Mixing by Breaking Rossby Waves in the Vicinity of a Jet (Sc. D Thesis)

Nakamura has authored or co-authored nearly 20 research publications that have been cited hundreds of times. In 1994, Nakamura was co-author of a report that drew attention to "fudge factors" being used to make climate models appear to better match climate data. In 2013, Asahi Shimbun said Nakamura, as a senior scientist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, analyzed Greenland Sea surface temperatures since 1957, and predicted the Northern Hemisphere could start a cooling period around 2015.<

Confessions of a climate scientist

In September 2019, Tony Thomas, a widely published author, with many published articles on energy and environment, wrote a detailed review of the book and summarized Nakamura's background, for conservative magazine Quadrant.

In September 2019, Carolina Coast Online, News-Times, a subsidiary of TownNews, published an editorial discussing the coverage of Nakamura by Thomas Lifson, the publisher of American Thinker, and at Quadrant, and disparaging the "global warming crisis."

In late September 2019, writing an opinion column in The Manila Times, Yen Makabenta, discussed the Quadrant article, and several other events he argued support his opinion "that the rejection of the climate scare is at hand."

In November 2019, Ferruccio Ferroni, an energy consultant with nuclear energy patents and published articles on solar energy, wrote a detailed summary of Nakamura's book, for Carnot-Cournot Network. Ferroni said Nakamura's goal for his book was to renounce "fraudulent claims" of the "mainstream climate science community." He summarized a few of Nakamura's long list of criticisms as:

• Models for influence of storage and transport of large amounts of energy in the seas are “Mickey Mouse models,” because important complex phenomena cannot be included with today's computers, and these ocean phenomena are more important than the atmosphere.
• Current computer models are not adequate for complex interactions of natural and human-caused greenhouse gases such as water vapor, carbon dioxide and radiation.
• The hypothesis of global warming through human activity has not been proven.

Reception in Letters to Editors

In October 2019, The Telegram published a letter to the editor by Clayton Rowsell, citing Nakamura as an example. Also in October 2019, Steamboat Pilot & Today published two letters to the editor with discussion of Nakamura's book, one supportive and the other critical.

Reception in notable blogs

Nakamura's "Confessions" was featured in a review article and referenced several times at a prominent climate change denial blog, Watts Up With That?, and "caught the eye" and was mentioned by climate expert Judith Curry in her blog. The Lavoisier Group also published a summary and provided a PDF for download. In a review at PBME, Gastao Taveira said the book was a "best seller in Sciences & Technology in Japanese on Amazon." The book has been reviewed and summarized in French.

References

This article "Mototaka Nakamura" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Mototaka Nakamura. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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