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The words "global warming" provoke a sharp retort from Colorado State University meteorology professor emeritus William Gray: "It's a big scam."
And the name of climate researcher Kevin Trenberth elicits a sputtered "opportunist."
At the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where Trenberth works, Gray's name prompts dismay. "Bill Gray is completely unreasonable," Trenberth says. "He has a mind block on this."
Only 55 miles separate NCAR's headquarters, nestled in the Front Range foothills, from CSU in Fort Collins. But when it comes to climate change, the gap is as big as any in the scientific community.
At Boulder-based NCAR, researchers project a world with warmer temperatures, fiercer storms and higher seas.
From CSU, Gray and Roger Pielke Sr., another climate professor emeritus, question the data used to make those projections and their application to regional climate change.
Science by its nature is disputatious - with every idea challenged, tested and retested. It's always been that way.
In the 18th century, Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz sparred over claims to the discovery of calculus.
About 140 years later, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was challenged - based on the science of the day - by Harvard University professor Louis Agassiz and the British Museum's Sir Richard Owen.
Now the battle is over global warming, or more accurately over myriad details - like temperature readings and the thickness of sea ice - upon which the larger idea is based.
On one hand, the fight is a natural part of the scientific process. But it also creates dissonance and uncertainty.
"Some of this noise won't stop until some of these scientists are dead," said James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, and among the first to sound the alarm over climate change.
While science is comfortable with uncertainty, policymakers are not, and that is what has turned this scientific debate into front-page headlines.
"I think there is a debate about whether it's caused by mankind or whether it's caused naturally," President Bush said in a July interview.
To be sure, Gray and Pielke are in a scientific minority. Still, their challenges remain part of the fractious scientific process.
"Science needs skeptics," said NCAR researcher Warren Washington.
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