John Christy, the Ned Flanders of climate denial, appeared once again before a welcoming crowd at Rep. Lamar Smith’s House Science committee, in a show-hearing designed to whip up more impotent right wing rage against pointy headed intellectuals, their wacky left-wing climate science, and a suspiciously French global climate agreement.
Especially entertaining for me – Dr. Christy spent a good part of his time responding to stinging and long overdue critiques of his science, and his much ballyhooed satellite measures of global temperature, delivered by several of the world’s most respected atmospheric experts in my recent video.
Dr. Christy is one of those fortune-favored individuals who consistently make a name for themselves by “failing up”. It’s a time-honored path to success, celebrated in films like Forrest Gump, and Being There – and George W. Bush proved it will take you all the way to the Presidency. Christy has done it in the science world.
In a series of egregious errors in the 1990s and 2000s, Dr. Christy and his partner Roy Spencer, actually managed to read their satellite data as showing the planet cooling, a 180 wrongway boneheaded analysis, let’s call it “Freedom Science” – that they defended stubbornly for more than a decade, until the overwhelming weight of evidence forced them to admit they were wrong.
For ordinary people, blowing it that bad could be a career killer – but if you are telling climate deniers and wealthy barons of the world’s most profitable industry what they want to hear, it makes you the toast of Washington.
Certainly, if not for a rich history of bungling, error, and accompanying arrogance, no one would ever have heard of Dr. Christy. But in these confusing times, for a science-challenged and ideologically blindered audience, Dr. Christy is science denial’s enthusiastic go-to guy, and a hero to intellectual titans like Ted Cruz, Rush Limbaugh, and Lamar Smith.
Below, if you have not seen, the satellite video that’s gotten under Dr. Christy’s skin.
Reblogged this on A Green Road Daily News.
So….does Christy, or HAS Christy, ever addressed the rising temperature of the oceans since they are the primary housing of the increase in heat?
When I read Dr Christy’s testimony, I burst out laughing at the “well funded video” statement.
I didn’t burst out laughing, but I did grin broadly. Peter is getting under Christy’s skin, and I hope he keeps it up long enough that we will have Christy’s entire pelt hanging on the wall one day.
Regarding the ‘well-funded” part, Peter is apparently doing well enough to keep the lights on at Greenman Studios most days, but he is not rolling in Exxon-Mobil and Koch money like the deniers.
There’s a reason for that DONATE button in the top right corner, folks. IMO, anyone who visits this site should kick in and help keep it running. I subscribe to and/or visit many climate sites, and this one is tops on my list.
endlessly amusing on this end.
stand by – there may be an upcoming opportunity to help with a new sea level related project, coming soon…..
Now that Lindzen and Pielke Sr. are retired, what are the odds that a full 66.7% of all currently active contrarian climate scientists would have been working in the same small research affiliate of a small university on the same project for the last 25 years? They must be staggeringly low.
Judith Curry
John Christy
Roy Spencer
By God you’re right! I smell conspiracy – by the climate alarmists! They have rounded up those three brave iconoclasts, and are moving in…. slowly….. inexorably….. for the final curtain.
I just appreciate the exposure of Christy’s antics in Mike Mann’s book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.
What about that chart presented by Christy? I could google it only at denier sites. Some explicit debunking of the chart would be good.
Gisser,
it is a variation to this
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/02/roy-spencers-latest-deceit-and-deception.html
And of course if the results don’t suit your expectations…. Adjust the model!
http://davidappell.blogspot.nl/2016/02/those-arbitrary-changes-to-uahs-model.html
No wonder “skeptics” expect ” warmist” to adjust the results to the desired outcome, they do so them selves
projection. climate denial is a continuing lesson in psych 101
I think something like that is coming. the graph is unpublished for a reason – but it exists in the netherworld of the denio-sphere, and in the minds of the lamar smith’s of the world.
Look for someone to do something about that before long.
I for one would be very interested in this!
Some years ago I did a number of high altitude balloon experiments. More as an engineering challenge than anything. Learned a lot from it. In particular just how quickly the temperature plummets as you head up through the troposphere.
As part of the design phase I looked at how a number of earlier sonde beacons were done. I noted that the measuring parts were rather basic and possibly not particularly accurate. These beacons were disposable and not expected to be recovered. I expect they were built to a price rather than as accurately calibrated lab equipment.
My understanding is these beacons are mainly interested in rates of change of pressure and temperature through the atmosphere rather than absolute accuracy.
Hence why I think absolute measurements particularly at the lowest parts of the troposphere from these beacons is probably not very useful……
The IPCC projects about 0.2 °C/decade. UAH shows 0.142 ±0.063 °C/decade (2σ). The results are consistent. Of course Christy is working to change that: http://davidappell.blogspot.ca/2016/02/those-arbitrary-changes-to-uahs-model.html
Here’s a comparison of UAH vs models including the confidence interval for the models: https://andthentheresphysics.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/cv-xxg7w4aabg3-jpg_large.jpeg . In addition to including the confidence interval, he’s also shown the two side by side rather than moving the model projections well above the UAH measurements. This makes them much easier to compare.
If you take the uncertainty in either the models or the measurements you find that they agree. If you take them both together you have quite a large overlap.
Start here: http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/02/roy-spencers-latest-deceit-and-deception.html
Spencer takes the published material of the scientific community where they (as all good scientists do) cast doubt on earlier published results (CMIP-5) then holds it up to his own audience claiming he found the error himself.
Here is some info about the CMIP-5 controversy: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Models-Show-Remarkable-Agreement-with-Recent-Surface-Warming.html
There has been some debunking of the Dr Christy US Congress charts over the years. The 5 year baseline and the realignment of the zero-axis crossing is a bit suspicious in my mind.
I did have a look a while back, but I could not find the source of his data.
From 3:10 on Dr. John Christy, whose expertise “might best be described as building data sets from scratch to help us understand what the climate is doing and why” gives expert testimony before some politicians somewhere about geopolitics, energy policy, the optimal sources of energy, the future energy choices of major nations (apparently this one), the causes of poverty and international competition. I know there are some major nations in Europe who have experts on all these topics available to give expert opinion, not this poky country here, wherever it is.
Strewth – this guy Christy really lays it on in his denial and did you know that Alabama is a proxy for the whole world, see from 0:24 in this video.
Now to discover which paper and which journal he is being rather coy about.
“Degree-day Charts” are available for every county in North America and are primarily used to aid the sizing calculations of for heating and cooling devices (furnaces and air conditioners). I have never heard of a country-wide degree-day chart and cannot think of a practical reason to produce one. But think about the possible cherry-picking opportunities when someone uses a local chart from a warm state to deny climate warming completely. Now I am surprised by Dr Christy (who name-drops his association with the IPCC) would leave out this gem: all the climate models predict that the greatest amount of warming would “first appear” in the polar regions. The whole world is watching this happen in the arctic (not really a continent since it has a average elevation of zero (a.k.a. sea level) and a little less so in the antarctic with an average elevation of 2,000 ft (600 m)
Dr Christy may have done his analysis from the NOAA nClimDiv data set.
What he says about the 100 degree days is probably correct, I have seen the US heat wave index and it is indeed flat.
But there is plenty of other data showing the US to be warming. Lying by omission, as they say.
That Christy chart in the video looks like a simplified rehash of the one presented in testimony to The Committee on Natural Resources in 13 May 2015 – PDF, as linked to by David Sanger in a comment at Open Mind.
When I was watching the movie “Madoff” last night on TV…..I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between Maddoff, Christy/Spencer/Curry (deniers), and Lance Armstrong.
When you have a “story” that you want to keep “promoting” (Armstrong: He is a great rider and doesn’t use illegal performance enhancing drugs; Maddoff: He is just better than others on Wall Street and they are jealous of him; Denier group: That somehow the extremely high levels of CO2 have little if any effect on the atmosphere)………that they will go to “the very end” to keep up the charade.
Armstrong lied for over 15 years……and mowed over anyone who got in his way, or tried to question him.
Madoff……even though he had to know that at some point “the fat lady would start to sing” and he would get caught…….still kept up the charade at incredible cost to others….including the family around him.
Deniers……they are “hell bent” on spinning anything they can into a story that supports their side…..even though the mountain of evidence against them is overwhelming.
Anyone who has been really looking for the TRUTH of what is happening……has long since found it. The only ones left on the denier side are those that have absolutely no desire to find the truth….AND….some lemmings who follow them that don’t like the consequences of the truth.
Actually, I think you may have the last bit slightly mis worded. These people probably do know the truth. But don’t want to admit it, even to themselves. That’s why it’s called denial…..