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
- Monday, February 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
Lord Monckton should be the person to debate the AGW people. Of course Gore, Suzuki run the other way whenever they hear the name. Reading what Steve McIntyre said about his interview it’s seems that most people don’t think quickly enough for TV which is a soundbite exercise.
Monckton wouldn’t have allowed Gavin to use talking points (false ones at that) as facts.
I like Gavin schmidt. He let me down. Using the argument to popularity is as far from scientific as could be. If we all study the same corrupted data, why shouldn’t our conclusions be the same? It hurts when some one claims to be a scientist and can’t grasp a coincidental observation doesn’t prove a causal relationship. They could get a little sharper in isolating variables. Our sixth grade genius knows when the sun comes up, the dat becomes warmer and it cools after sunset. It doesn’t occur to the warmists the sun gives heat and when light is blocked, it cools.
Michael wrote:
Michael (17:58:59) :
“Could the proponents for the non-man-made global warming side just please get their talking points in order before going into the interview. And could they please remember to mention the recent cooling and the deep solar minimum we are in now?
Thank you.”
Most political issues can be summed-up with a few good talking points. Other posters have mentioned repitition as being an important aspect to getting your message across. A good strategy along with good tactics are necessary when involved with political war. Goal+Strategy+Tactics.
John Christy did not join the political battle that was waged against him by Gavin, and to some degree Wolf. Wolf did deliver some good fast balls that Christy should have hit out of the park.
Christy looked like a good scientist who was not ready for television debating.
Michael’s post was right-on!
markm
Poptech (18:38:17) :
I am familiar with all the old newspaper articles but they do not specifically talk about ice extent.
i thought Christy seemed classy and more confident (in his meekness). gavin looked poised for a fight and therefore came across as defensive and ultimately petty. contrary to some on this thread i thought that Christy looked much more appealing to thoughtful types who aren’t impressed with sass.
The current situation is skeptics are painted as unreasonable fanatic science haters. That is why no one has actually checked the science – I don’t check the science of the flat earth society either. I think the best thing the skeptic side can do is come off as calm, reasonable and only there to discuss the science. So I think this interview and the one with McIntyre was perfect, and far more powerful than scoring a point with a ‘yes it is’, ‘no it isn’t’ debate full of wild sounding claims.
The goal isn’t to convince people we aren’t warming like a barbecue, to goal is to convince them to take an impartial scientific look. For once.
Wobble said:
“we need to adopt talking points. It’s impossible to teach anyone the science in 45 seconds.”
What I wish Fox TV would do (actually, it could even be done by a large chain of radio stations) is give each side an hour of time per week to present its side of the case. After a few weeks these would settle down into rebuttals of the other sides’ prior presentations, using clips of the other sides’ statements. This time to explore in depth would produce adequate treatment of the issues.
One benefit is that episodes could be re-run every few months. Costs would be very low. An even cheaper way to test the waters would be to start the series with broadcasts of video-recorded past speeches by leading lights on both sides. If that gets good ratings, then the weekly point / counterpoint series could be initiated. The network could start cautiously, by scheduling the first episodes late at night. I think the series might be amazingly popular.
Good grief — TV and radio stations have been given their licenses under a general mandate to act in the public interest by doing some amount of public service broadcasting. Exploration of this topic qualifies in spades. Not giving time to this momentous matter would be a travesty. In fact, I think that two hours a week is an absolute minimum.
finny (20:15:25)
It seems that Mrs Thatcher first funded reseach into Global warming after a speech to the Royal Society, which later set up the Hadley centre (which controls the IPCC)
you could be right
the maiden speech
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=107346
PS: If a point / counterpoint series is set up, it would probably be a good idea to establish a framework of topics to be treated each week, so that the discussion doesn’t wander all over the map and not engage with the other side.
A few days after each show, perhaps an interviewer could ask questions of each side, to clarify points, tidy up loose ends, bring out more data, etc.
There’s no such thing as bad publicity. As long as we get to air our side on TV in any form, unlike nothing as before, it’s all good.
I thought both were OK. Gavin was pretty honest about the role of models (the stuff he knows about) but he also did very carefully evade the issue of exactly how much CO2 actually causes. Christy I thought was not strong enough on the same issue, nor the appalling state of the temperature record that is what the public is fed to “show” AGW in action.
P Wilson (19:44:49) :
Better yet…
If you look to the follow on articles, Syedoff was frozen in on the 18th of December 1938 but was free again in February 1939!
All reported in the NYT.
DaveE.
old news (2008), but oddly, this puts climategate into perspective before it happened.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/
MarkM (20:23:37) : wrote
“Could the proponents for the non-man-made global warming side just please get their talking points in order before going into the interview. And could they please remember to mention the recent cooling and the deep solar minimum we are in now?
Thank you.”
“Michael’s post was right-on!
markm”
Thanks Mark.
Most people just don’t know how the game is supposed to be played. How can you win if you don’t know how to play the game?
Maybe everyone that thinks Steve McIntyre and John Christy weren’t colorful enough (I thought they both were fine) would be satisfied if Ian Plimer were on these tv show (actually I would like that too)
Christy’s got his hand in the pork barrel – Sen. Richard Shelby earmarked $1.8 million for UAH’s “climate model evaluation project” in the FY2010 Energy and Water Appropriation Bill. The project even appears in the East Anglia emails 2 years earlier.
http://akwag.blogspot.com/2009/12/pork-barrel-spending-on-skeptical.html
I guess you can still get research funding from the government even if you’re a skeptic. (Of course, Roy Spencer makes a point of saying his research is 100% government funded on his website, so this isn’t really news).
My only point is, now no one can ever say that scientists are hyping global warming hysteria to win research grants – it’s clearly possible to find patrons in the US Senate by doing just the opposite. The conspiracy theory is busted.
vigilantfish (20:01:39) :
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?
Don’t read too much into what he was trying to say. He may not be as smart as you think he should be. Lower your expectations and then the picture will clear up for you.
(I may sound rude here I think)
DonS (20:03:33) :
Ahh Gavin. What a guy. I’m pretty sure that he was on an episode of “Cash Cab” not so long ago.
I remember that episode now that you bring it up. He does look like him. But I’m not sure.
Apparently many people here are new to this debate,
McIntyre and Christy’s performances are exactly the same as they have always been and their personal position on the issue has not changed. Both are low key and professional.
Now if you were expecting shock and Awe you want Monckton or Morano (who people were ironically complaining about).
Gavin is the alarmist’s go to guy to argue any and all positions, his whole Blog (realclimate) was created just for this purpose. For over three years every single “rebuttal” has been through him and his blog or originated there. So there should be no surprise to his demeanor.
Anytime Gavin brings up computer models, someone should ask him if he has a degree in Computer Science = debate over.
I’ve always said that this whole charade will unravel once actual computer scientists start looking at the code.
Gavin citing “this is how science works” is funny as he is a mathematician! No offense met to other mathematicians out there.
In the CNN face off, Schmidt’s body language betrays him. When he makes assertions that we know are not true, he blinks rapidly and is eyes dart . Other times in the interview where he isn’t flat out lying his blinks are at a normal rate .
John Christy is the polar opposite. He is calm and his body language is consistent throughout.
Gavin doesn’t even believe himself. He knows he’s lying.
I am wondering why the skeptical sides in these interviews are not hitting the most damning points
1) The distinction between admitting there has been warming, and the higher burden of proof of showing that mankind’s activities are the prominent reason for it.
2) The fact that incorrect science is fettered-out by falsification, and Mann’s hockey stick has clearly been falsified in the last 8+ years.
3) That it is nowhere near “good science” to keep raw data under wraps, as that prevents independent scientists from recreating their results.
4) That science is not democratic, and it doesn’t even matter if a majority of scientists are convinced about AGW…if they do not have evidence, or their results cannot be duplicated by independent scientists, their opinion is no better than a lay person.
5) That all IPCC climate models are based on a completely unproven and unvalidated assumption that CO2 feedback effects on temperatures are destabilizing. And further that historical data falsifies this assumption. (This issue is close to my profession as a control engineer…I know feedback systems and this is a massive error in their models).
I am a practicing aerospace control systems engineer and also an adjunct professor of aerospace engineering at an accredited engineering university in California. I, like many of my colleagues, could be much better spokesmen for the real scientific problems with the whole AGW agenda. But for that matter, why do none of these media outlets ever call on Roy Spencer? He would also be another very good spokesman for veridical science and the problems with the AGW religion.
I don’t get it…we should be tearing these pretenders a new one all over the TV! A few simple facts about how science works would put an AGW-friendly host and his AGW proponent guest on the defensive quickly. In fact, Roy Spencer made a good point on his blog yesterday: If this were cancer researchers caught not sharing data, attempting fraud, or trying to silence dissenters or other scientists trying to falsify their work, there is no doubt everyone would be outraged. But not everyone has cancer; however, everyone will be negatively impacted by the draconian measures being considered.
We need to do better getting the real science out there!
“The contrast between Christy and Schmidt was striking, with Gavin very much looking and sounding nervous, touchy, defensive, and . . . . yeah: Guilty. . . .”
LOL!
Neo wrote:
“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.”
Henry Bauer, who believes that the currently embedded practices of modern, bureaucratic science have corrupted it (the CAWG consensus being a prime example IMO), has suggested that 10% or so of funding needs to go to contrarian viewpoints, that there should be a place at the table for contrarians (in every field), and that there should be “science courts” where both sides can argue their case in matters where established science has shut out or shouted down outsiders. You can find more here:
“Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels”
By HENRY H. BAUER
Professor Emeritus of Chemistry & Science Studies
Dean Emeritus of Arts & Sciences
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 643–660, 2004
http://henryhbauer.homestead.com/21stCenturyScience.pdf
It was a good interview,it showed the public that the science is not settled,2 scientists stating different views.The interviewer was good,he pointed out that Jones was being investigated,thereby implying that there must have been something in the e-mails,which in turn led to doubt on anything Schmidt had to say.Any scientist or scientific organisation defending Phil Jones are automatically discredited,because they are trying to defend a wrong.It won’t wash.John Christy was very good,he calmly stated the facts.His face was expressive when Schmidt was commenting,he looked amused most of the time.