By Robert Bradley Jr. — February 5, 2019
“From the Climate Disinformation Database: John R. Christy” reads the headline from DeSmogBlog in its “Climate Denier Spotlight.” The following short profile follows (emphasis added):
John R. Christy is a professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He’s a vocal critic of climate change models and has testified on numerous occasions against the mainstream scientific views on man-made climate change. Christy has affiliations with a number of climate science-denying think tanks, including the Heartland Institute and the Cato Institute. And now Andrew Wheeler has appointed him to serve on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board.
Professor Christy is an excellent choice for EPA’s Science Advisory Board. And if you doubt me, please read the quotations below that DeSmogBlog has put up on its website to purportedly discredit EPA Secretary Wheeler’s choice. Christy’s views are mainstream in the world that most of us live in.
February, 2016
“The real world is not going along with rapid warming. The models need to go back to the drawing board.”
June, 2015
“[W]e are not morally bad people for taking carbon and turning it into the energy that offers life to humanity in a world that would otherwise be brutal (think of life before modernity). On the contrary, we are good people for doing so.”
April, 2015
“Carbon dioxide makes things grow. The world used to have five times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food. CO2 is not the problem.… There is absolutely no question that carbon energy provides with longer and better lives. There is no question about that.”
August, 2013
“I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol.”
February, 2013
“If you choose to make regulations about carbon dioxide, that’s OK. You as a state can do that; you have a right to do it. But it’s not going to do anything about the climate. And it’s going to cost, there’s no doubt about that.”
March, 2011
“…it is fairly well agreed that the surface temperature will rise about 1°C as a modest response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 if the rest of the component processes of the climate system remain independent of this response.”
May, 2009
“As far as the [2003 American Geophysical Union statement], I thought that was a fine statement because it did not put forth a magnitude of the warming. We just said that human effects have a warming influence, and that’s certainly true. There was nothing about disaster or catastrophe. In fact, I was very upset about the latest AGU statement [in 2007]. It was about alarmist as you can get.”
February, 2009
“We utilize energy from carbon, not because we are bad people, but because it is the affordable foundation on which the profound improvements in our standard of living have been achieved – our progress in health and welfare.”
December, 2003
In a 2003 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Christy describes himself as “a strong critic of scientists who make catastrophic predictions of huge increases in global temperatures and tremendous rises in sea levels.”
Christy also added:
“It is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the atmosphere and sending quantities of greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate change hasn’t been increased in the past century.”
Conclusion
The above quotations are neither radical nor errant. They are middle-of-the-roadish. John Christy knows that the climate changes and humans have a warming impact (good news indeed). And yes, the climate models are overpredicting real-world warming, a divergence that is growing, not contracting, as his iconic graph shows.
If Professor Christy sounds like a rational scientist working in a very unsettled field, you are correct. No “pretense of knowledge” here. Compare him to the know-it-all alarmist climatologists such as Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M, whose challenge to Texas Gov. Abbott was critically reviewed last week at MasterResource.
In fact, Dr. Christy (neutral profile here) is a global lukewarmer swimming upstream in a sea of Malthusian snowflakes, defined as those who think that the natural climate is optimal and that change cannot be good. (As Professor Dessler states: “… when it comes to climate, change is bad.” [1])
A polite, learned scientist, John Christy has to be among the most likeable physical scientists you will meet. (He was a star at a Houston Forum Climate Summit back in 1999, another story.) May America get to know him better in his new role.
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[1] Dessler, Introduction to Modern Climate Change (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2016), p. 146 (his emphasis).
Rob Bradley is the editor of Master Resource, well worth adding to your bookmarks.
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On Christy’s skepticism of models:
I’m curious why the Russian model that seems to be tracking actual data isn’t being touted more. Dr. Patrick Michaels, Director of the Center for Science, CATO Inst. was on Mark Levin a couple of weekends ago. He brought it up but nothing more than what I’ve mentioned here. I haven’t been able to find anything on it and am curious about what inputs they use and the ramifications, including for public debate away from vilifying CO2/fossil fuels.
He is without a doubt one of the most rational voices in the debate.
I like Dr. Christy for the EPA advisory board. Unlike most climate scientists, he is in touch with his inner-Feynman.
“[Human CO2 emissions] regulations are based on knowing how the climate system operates. One of the fundamental things about science is that when you understand a system, you can predict its behavior. I’ve demonstrated that the climate models we have now, cannot predict, even predict from the past, a major climate metric, the bulk temperature of the atmosphere.” – Dr. John Christy Congressional testimony.
Video of the hearing: https://youtu.be/_3_sHu34imQ (quoted statement occurs at approximately 1:31:20
The entire video is 2:11, and if you’ve never watched it, it’s a classic. Mann accuses “climate D Nye Rs” of being like Trofim Lysenko, and in the process, misrepresents the whole point of who the politically favored scientists are (it’s him and the hockey team). Quite ironically, without realizing the own goal, Mann accuses Roger Pielke, Jr. of bullying others for having threatened some lawsuits over nasty stuff said about him during the Nate Silver 538 fiasco. But then NO ONE ASKS MANN HOW MANY PEOPLE HE HAS THREATENED, AND THEN ACTUALLY SUED! For the record, Mann has sued the National Review, Mark Steyn, Dr. Tim Ball and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. And of course, no one even thinks about asking Mann if he bullied Keith Briffa for years, to keep the declining Larch “temperatures” from appearing in the hockey stick spaghetti graph, whether it be for the IPCC assessments or the WMO cover page. And if you pay close attention, Mann accuses Republicans of “motivated reasoning” but then notice that the Democratic Congressal delegation asks questions almost exclusively of Dr. Mann, and nothing of the other witnesses. The Republicans, on the other hand, occasionally let Dr. Mann answer the same questions asked of the others.
Sorry, I had not rewatched in full, and was going from memory from seeing this a couple of years ago. I need to make a correction.
Above, I said no one from the Congressional committee (or the other witnesses) challenged Mann on his bullying victim assertion against Pielke Jr. using the actual lawsuits that he filed. But near the end of the session, Congressman Lahood does challenge Dr. Mann about his lawsuits and equates Mann’s use of the term “D Nye R” against Dr. Curry and “carnival barker” to describe Dr. Pielke, Jr. to the bullying he claims is directed against the “consensus” scientists. Mann flatly refuses to talk about the lawsuits he has instigated, but then goes on to assert that he doesn’t remember the carnival barker comment, and denies that he called Dr. Curry a “D Nye R” whereupon she laughs and informs him that it’s in his written statement. Dr. Pielke’s response is wonderful. He says in an ironic and suggestive way that everyone needs to see Dr. Mann’s performance and testimony, and judge for themselves.
A non-victim of Climate “Science” group-think being introduced into the “group”?
HORRORS!
He might be infectious and Climate “Science” at the might actually lose it’s quotes!
PS Praying.
J. Christy, J. Curry and R. Lindzen are among the most balanced climate scientists. Their view of the climate is the one with which I identify myself most. Christy in a nice choice for EPA. I hope that he stays there for long enough to bring back EPA’s credibility, at least on climate. This kind of choice should be completly free from any political view. When one puts the views on more democratic or republican views, it turns out to ruin everything (unfortunately, as reality has been showing, stupidity has no political party; and in this matter it’s a complete tie). John Christy is one of those people whose choice for this kind of role should be transgovernmental.
But Christy is but one out of some 25 others on the board. So is Pres. Trump going to get rid of the probably appointed by Obama types on this board.
Yes I agree the time for being nice to the Greens is way past, they are a dangerous mob, not so much the rank and file, they are sadly a bit like Joseph Stalin’s ” Usefull idiots”
Its the top brass of the Green movement we should be concerned about. The old saying , “Green on the outside, but very Red inside”. is sadly the truth.
Read your history, St. Petersburg in 1917, following the collapse of the Russian economy, part the Great War, part Russian poor administration, the Duma, ‘ Russia’s new Parliament was taken over by the Communest. What followed was a civil war, but the Communests won.
The lesion is that before Communism or other take overs can succeed, one has to have a collapse of the economy.
Today the weapon is CO2, and Global Warming come the new version of Climate Change.
Then reduce the energy of a economy, and upon its collapse, offer the population a second way. Dress it up as being far better than the old Free Enterprise, and Volla we have Communism. , and then we have the likes of Angela Mercal .
MJE
Of the 45 members of the EPA Science Advisory Board, Christy brings the total of those with any experience/expertise in weather or climate up to . . . 1.
Perhaps he will be able to correct some of their mistakes relating to how the climate works.
There are at least 660 people/organizations listed as “deniers” by DeSmog. The vast majority of them people. The majority of those people scientists. One name on the DeSmog list which surprised me is Jack Barrett, who wrote a mildly alarmist book called: “Global Warming – The Human Contribution“. Barrett pretty much accepts the mainstream IPCC view. He admonishes “extreme skeptics” for denying a GHGE from carbon dioxide alone of “1.1°C or 1.3°C“.
Witch hunts always end up burning their own.
This is a great letter to a minister of climate change following the recent heavy snow storms in Europe:-
https://waikanaewatch.org/2019/01/12/open-letter-to-james-shaw-minister-of-climate-change/
Acting EPA administrator has appointed Brant Ulsh, a leading member of Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information, to chair its radiation advisory committee. Dr. Ulsh has published several papers questioning scientific soundness of LNT assertion.
“…it is fairly well agreed that the surface temperature will rise about 1°C as a modest response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 if the rest of the component processes of the climate system remain independent of this response.”
__________________________________________________
No. CO2 atmospheric doubling lags temperature rise.
Not the other way round.
“the natural course of climate change hasn’t been increased in the past century.”
That partial statement by Christy doesn’t make sense. You can’t increase the course of something. You can alter its course, our divert it, but increasing in this context doesn’t seem to mean anything.