From The Senate EPW Jim Inhofe Press Office, well worth your time to watch.
Dr. John Christy, Alabama’s State Climatologist, Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville testified before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing on global warming and stated:
“During the heat wave of late June and early July, high temperature extremes became newsworthy. Claims that there were thousands of records broken each day and that “this is what global warming looks like” got a lot of attention.
However, these headlines were not based on climate science. As shown in Figure 1.3 of my testimony it is scientifically more accurate to say that this is what Mother Nature looks like, since events even worse than these have happened in the past before greenhouse gases were increasing like they are today.
Now, it gives some people great comfort to offer a quick and easy answer when the weather strays from the average rather than to struggle with the real truth, which is, we don’t know enough about the climate to even predict events like this.
A climatologist looking at this heat wave would not be alarmed because the number of daily high temperature records set in the most recent decade was only about half the number set in the 1930s as shown in my written testimony. I suppose most people have forgotten that Oklahoma set a new record low temperature just last year of 31 below. And in the past two years, towns from Alaska to my home state of California established records for snowfall. The recent anomalous weather can’t be blamed on carbon dioxide.
See also his written testimony here
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Australia needs a John Christy to counter alarmist shrill on this side of the Pacific.
When I used to work down the hall from Christy in the late 1980’s I still remember when the then senator Al Gore just ripped Christy up one side and down the other for the temerity of actually looking at old satellite data and processing it to get a long trend. This trend did not match the computer models of the time and he caught pure hell for it.
I bet he feels pretty good today.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
WATCH THIS
This is good! This is better than I thought! 🙂
I would like to say lets get this on twitter and get it trending, but I’m too cynical to believe it would work. We are in the minority but there is enough of us to hold them to task at least (for now). Thank goodness for scientists like Christy and Spencer fighting the good fight it the true spirit of the scientific method. It can’t be easy for them. Great speech!
I found this blurb on Field and the Global Ecology program he heads up. Always good to remember he is building on Ehrlich’s Ecology work. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2004/april14/building-414.html
They are, according to Field’s own words in the blurb to right, seeking to “find a scientific foundation for a sustainable future.”
In other words, this is the future we want and we seek a rationale for imposing it. It’s not science driven. It’s not data driven. It is end result and theory driven.
Which is always when the ever useful social sciences and behavioral sciences plus federal funding plus monopoly over curricula, practices, pedagogy, etc start entering the fray. To create the desired science. To gain what Ehrlich called newmindedness. We must not forget when we are dealing with people who take a unified view of science. It may be factually wrong but it still guides their actions and influences their beliefs.
Christy, luckily, is still interested in the data of the natural sciences and reality itself. Not what will it take to alter it to get the future we desire.
Or the one grants pay to seek.
More power to Christy’s elbow – this and revelations like Anthony’s on Sunday will, hopefully, have a drip-drip effect upon people who presently support AGW but are amenable to common sense.
Thanks, Dr. Christy, for a clear summary of the state of climate science. This has provided (for me) a useful context in which to place Watts et al. It’s an important paper, it seems.
Bravo !
Undeniable facts once again..
Thank Dr. C !
What’s that unfamiliar sound? Good Lord, it must be common sense!
Eat it Barbara Boxer!
How ingracious can she be?
Kudos to Dr. Christy.
Global warming alarmism is what fear of an alien invasion looks like.
Mosher is already sand bagging,
http://climateaudit.org/2012/07/31/surface-stations/#comment-345586
“Perhaps, co author Christy should be sent a notice that the results he testified about were not fully baked.”
I am giving a friendly warning to Anthony not to get Mosher involved in any way relating to his paper. Everyone trusts McIntyre will accept whatever he finds relating to the data until the paper is published.
Great video
Thank you very much for bringing it so fast.
Am going to try and send it everywhere, saying that I got it here, and hope someone listens here in Spain, and gets us out of the anti- CO2 programs.
Poptech says:
August 1, 2012 at 7:02 pm
Apparently, Mosher thinks that he has found something that Christy overlooked. Or maybe he thinks he has found something that he needs to explain to Christy.
Who was it, just a day or so ago, who was applauding McIntyre’s website for its focused and controlled comments section?
Brilliant performance, Dr. Christy. The simplicity and directness of your exposition made your address a brilliant piece of work.
Dennis Ray Wingo says:
It turns out that Spencer and Christy’s trend was wrong, in large part because of errors in their analysis that have been corrected over time ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/31/senate-epw-hearing-on-global-warming-tomorrow/#comment-1049302 ), although the particular shortness of the time period of the satellite record also contributed.
It’s okay to be wrong though…Fortunately, Christy’s detractors don’t try to criminalize it in the way that the detractors of Mann have tried to for his being…well, not really wrong as far as the current thinking in the temperature reconstruction field goes.
I was just glad to see Boxer rise above petty snark. /sarc
Sen. Boxer’s pummeling of Dr. Christy for citing an unpublished, non-peer reviewed — and as we now know deeply flawed even according to its own authors — paper in his written testimony was even more stellar. You gonna post that part, Tony?
REPLY: The name’s Anthony and yes, EPW is posting more tomorrow and I’ll have them, including the liar IPPC author that Pielke Jr. took down today. Be sure to watch that. And no, it isn’t “deeply flawed” just incomplete, and will be better thanks to good people who have stepped up to help, unlike you. You seem to have no trouble whatsoever though with the Muller non peer review papers being discussed. Biased much?- Anthony
joeldshore says:
August 1, 2012 at 8:40 pm
Right or wrong, at least it was available so errors COULD be found. Good idea, eh?
Robin says:
August 1, 2012 at 5:47 pm
“To gain what Ehrlich called newmindedness.”
Hmmm….never seen that word before. Must be newspeak.
Personally I find that everything Erlich writes is full of …. wrongness.
joeldshore says:
August 1, 2012 at 8:40 pm
Fortunately, Christy’s detractors don’t try to criminalize it in the way that the detractors of Mann have tried to for his being…well, not really wrong as far as the current thinking in the temperature reconstruction field goes.
You do realize that you have just said Mann and his hockey stick have been excoriated for being *right* — and you don’t base your belief on the evidence, which proves that both are wrong, but on your opinion, which assumes the existence of a claimed, but unproven, consensus.
Joel–Christy is not testifying for, reasearching on, and ascribing to policies that will cost each of us big bucks and ensure the poverty of millions in third world countries–him being wrong doesn’t punish everyone else as Mann’s does…big difference.
Intentionally repeating myself, “warmists and skeptics thus find themselves on the mutual, chaotic climate ground where the efficacy of CO2 as a GHG had better be right.”
The “Precautionary Principle” is rather absolute on this point. The most common articulation of the precautionary principle is the Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle, a consensus document drafted and adopted by a group of environmental activists and academics in January 1998. The statement defined the precautionary principle thus:
“When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”
At the half-precession old Holocene, the typical point where climate normally tips into a glacial (ice age), removing a “climate security blanket” GHG like CO2 (assuming, of course, that IR saturation is not possible with any concentration of CO2) might actually be the wrong thing to do, in terms of the Precautionary Principle.
Consider that removing the GHG CO2 from the late Holocene atmosphere might also be construed as the correct thing to do, naturally, so as not to impede the natural transition into the glacial state, thereby minimizing anthropogenic climate interference which might delay or prevent the next such ice age.
This, of course, represents a near paralyzing conundrum to the true and proper environmentalist. To be scientifically correct, CO2 above the politically correct concentration MUST be scavenged from the atmosphere so that nature may take its unimpeded course, which might just be the next glacial. But that places a true and proper environmentalist in diametric juxtaposition to the vaunted Precautionary Principle, which actually puts “human health” just a tad before “the environment” per the original wording!
What is a Homo sapiens sapiens (the wise wise one) to do? Legislate the “climate security blanket” to extinction and, regardless the cost, transition to the lowest density energy systems known (solar and wind) so that those humans with the best health can “weather” the next ice age naturally? Or would the wise wise one be able to recognize that the end extreme interglacials are ALWAYS attended by abrupt climate excursions to the tune of many to tens of meters of sea level highstands, naturally, which the heather devil gas CO2 might actually be the only “precautionary measures (which) should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”
???
Would you like fries with your Gordian Knot?
I have sent this to the Twitter sphere ( I have 3 thousand followers) plus I have a going into sophomore year son at Stanford. I have shared this and the Stanford project with him.
He has sent it to his Stanford roommate a chemical engineer major with a father who works as a chemical engineer at DOW –they are all against the hoax so Anthony work and Dr. Christy’s testimony is being spread.