NASA GISS Gavin Schmidt vs UAH’s John Christy debate on CNN’s Situation Room an hour ago:
h/t to WUWT reader Chris
Gavin Schmidt -vs- John Christy on CNN
- Tuesday, June 9, 2026
NASA GISS Gavin Schmidt vs UAH’s John Christy debate on CNN’s Situation Room an hour ago:
h/t to WUWT reader Chris
If Christy is going to “debate”, he really should take a course. He got run over and he got “filibustered” as one observer noted. If he can’t even think of a reasonable counter to “The Arctic ice is melting”, he doesn’t belong on camera. The AGW crowd should be lining up to debate him.
Really lame!
CH
Watched the Christy/Schmidt. What a weasel Gavin is. Again he repeats the “everthing is out of context” and “the trick is just a way of describing a neat solution for smoothing”
I think the casual observer is gone to see that and recall the old saying “If you can’t dazzle them with footwork, then baffle them with bulls**t”
MSM needs to dedicate like 2-3 hours of debate time for these guys. Let them use presentations and make it similar to a presidential debate. They need more than 10-20 seconds to expand on a topic because the evidence is that detailed that you can’t say, here it is, here is what the code says, here are the results…etc all in a few seconds. MSM just skims over the surface of the lake at about 10,000ft and won’t allow these guys to explain themselves in a way that allows Joe the plumber to understand. Keep up the good work
Mark (17:42:55) :
Christy came across well IMO. Gavin did nothing to improve my very low opinion of him, in fact he might have made it worse.
It did for me too. I had been willing to give Gavin Schmidt the benefit of the doubt. But seeing his reaction to ClimateGate the past weeks he has only implicated himself as guilty.
Roger (17:45:27) :
…but Wolf was aware of Gavin’s habitual blathering using up valuable time, and for what I think is the first time EVER, allowed the Skeptic the last word!
I liked that too.
Gavin Schmidt not only talked over the top of John Christy he didn’t listen to Wolf Blitzer as he tried to interrupt his long winded monologues.
I once attended a seminar given by a guy who was a expert in radio communications. During a break, he told us a story about how he had developed a burst transmitter design for an agency within the “intelligence community”. In the process, he described how not only did this intelligence agency have guys designing radio transmitters that could be hidden, they had another set of guys, a “counter group,” who’s job it was to detect hidden radio transmitters. These two groups would go after each other in an attempt to come up with the best possible transmitters and the best possible methods of detection.
In climate science, we have a bunch of seemingly half drunken academics who live off the government dole while they concoct ridiculous schemes to prove something that it seems has been predetermined to be true, no matter the actual empiric data. The only group of guys trying to test they schemes are underfunded or doing work on their own time pro-bono.
This process is obviously corrupt. It was never meant to provide the truth. If it was, the government research community would also have a fully funded “counter group” to try to prove that “Anthropogenic Global Warming” doesn’t exist, has little impact or at least can be easily mitigated and therefore save billions, if not trillions, of dollars/Euros/pounds on trying to prevent a non sequitur.
The fact that there is no “counter group” immediately brings into question the purpose of the activity and whether it is meant to be part of that “waste, fraud and abuse” that so often infiltrates all vestiges of government. The fact that this is an international activity makes one wonder if the UN has any real function except to give heads of state a chance to go shopping in New York City from time to time and travel to useless conferences where they can dine well and come up with new ideas on how to fleece their citizens at home.
More discussion at CNN
http://campbellbrown.blogs.cnn.com/
Jeff Id (18:36:37) :
Schmidt has really dropped in my view. He’s exposed himself to be the advocatician I hoped he wasn’t.
I thought the same thing.
DaveE (18:51:59) :
That article was written mid December 1938 -at winter ice extent. That Russian breaker drifting within 300 miles of the North Pole is quite a statistic.
the arctic must have ben very small in those days.
“the trick is just a way of describing a neat solution for smoothing”
A bald faced lie and Gavin knows it. Mixing proxy reconstruciton with temperature data is NOT a ‘neat solution’ for smoothing, it is a neat solution for obfuscation of the fact that your proxy reconstruction is utterly worthless.
rbateman (18:45:03) :
The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn’t move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a “command-and-control” role
If the Senators can’t stand up to Lisa Jackson and Barak Obama I may start making jokes about certain parts of their anatomy.
rbateman (18:51:36) :
ABC World News Tonight had a piece on Climate Change vs Climate Gate.
Is there a link to this? Hopefully a video?
Jim (18:55:34) :
Blitzer didn’t ask the multi-dimensional question: Are climate models tools or are climate scientists tools?
Niiicce! 🙂
vendome (19:18:43) :
I like your viewpoint.
In part two of that interview CNN showed scenes of the blizzard up north saying winter has arrived two weeks early. What was that thing about getting in the last word? I think Mother Nature got in the last word in that interview.
RT news gives good coverage of the Alternative Summit in Copenhagen:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AD6S22JGmg&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
Was Gavin Schmidt implying that climate science was built on a foundation that goes back to the 19th century, or was he out-and-out stating that science as a whole is built on a 19th century foundation? I guess in that case Galileo and Newton don’t count. However, I guess most viewers would neither know or care. But it does not say a lot about Dr. Schmidt’s understanding.
Christy came out looking like a scientist with inner confidence from knowing that they can answer any question with a reasonable answer.
Schmidt came out looking like a typical US media commentator who believes that value comes from how much you say not what you say. If you didn’t tell me he was a scientist I would have never guessed.
Michael
Ahh Gavin. What a guy. I’m pretty sure that he was on an episode of “Cash Cab” not so long ago. This is probably where he developed his TV skills, although, as I recall, his companion had most of the answers. Gavin was just a guy with a beard, no hair, and a leather coat that he couldn’t zip. Anybody else see this?
I hate to say it but this was a missed opportunity to educate the public about the flaws in global warming theory. Christy said the right things but he certainly could have given a better TV performance. How? I did a web search and found this link. Maybe it can help next time…
http://www.pantaneto.co.uk/issue31/darkin.htm
I’ve only read a few of the comments here, so this has probably been stated ad infinitum: the performance of both McIntyre and Christy was so tragic that they may as well have been on the side of the alarmists! Very sad – golden opportunities missed.
2009
M. Simon (17:22:36) :
Strange that Brits seem to form the core of the Team. Or is it just my observer bias kicking in? Or memories of Beatles movies?
The way I see it global warming is a form of restitution. There was alot of noise being made about British colonalism france Spain ect.. rapeing the resources of the poor countries and that restitution should be paid. So low and behold Britian and the euro socalist devised the AGW scam. Instead of just britian and such making thier payments of reperations themselves They scam and bully us into the belief that we are making payments to the enviroment for crimes that we all took part in. People would be up in arms if they told us we had to help them make thier restitution payments for the greedy colonialism of thier past. Blaming Agw helps keep the noise level down some. The only problem is mother nature has her own agenda and is leaving whole lot of egg on thier faces. So I am not that suprised that Britian is leading the scam. They’re just not that intrested in flipping for the bill themselves.
I think John Christy did a great job he didn’t got sucked into a shouting match with Schmidt, he came over level headed wile Gavin Schmidt had only the usual talking points to offer with no substance.
Get historical like Gavin did and you loss all credibility and the polls show it more and more people aren’t buying the AGW crap anymore.
Wow Gavin can talk. Did he not just use up 5 minutes of my life breathing out CO2 with volume?
Not seen the video but I have read the comments.
Christy seems to have acted carefully, not a bad ploy.
The polar ice cap matter is best left silent because…
Strictly no room for wriggle there is no defence either way even though there is zero prospect of losing the ice caps. <—- note the pleural.
The Arctic cap given the changing orbital tilt of the Earth and maybe other processes might even if very unlikely disappear. As things stand maybe 2150 to 2200.
I have been doing a lot of work on the data and I know that something very strange is happening.
There has been a smooth dip and recovery __not the brief loss of summer ice__ but right now there is no way of knowing what next. Now note this: the ice and UAH North Pole temperature track very well. (same for Antarctica)
There was no temperature follow for the brief 2007/8/9 dips in ice, it follows the broader trend which is at normal right now.
Firstly I have shown that sea ice extent and area datasets are the same and for both Arctic and Antarctica. That is based on monthly data. In other words forget area as telling anything more.
Secondly I have successfully created a daily Arctic sea ice dataset by merging NASA stereo and IJIS/JAXA even though they use a different geometry. Fortunately this difference is constant. (they cannot both be numerically accurate!) NASA ceased updating 31st Dec 2007
On removing the annual ice cycle a change signal remains. This too matches UAH just like the monthly data. So it should.
Whether these data will see the light of day remains to be seen. Question ought to be why it falls to an amateur?