This testimony by Dr. John R. Christy, delivered on February 2, 2016, before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, is a fascinating overview of the latest real science regarding climate change. Dr. Christy demolishes claims that scientists know enough about how the climate works to understand the extent of humans impacts or to predict future climate conditions. Dr. Christy added an “extract” of his previous testimony showing man-made climate change is not causing a rise in extreme weather.
This document is clearly written, up-to-date, and well illustrated with charts and graphs, making it an ideal hand-out or reference for high school and college students looking for an authoritative presentation of the “skeptic” view on climate change.
Dr. Christy is distinguished professor of atmospheric science, Alabama’s state climatologist, and director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. He served as lead author, contributing author, and reviewer of United Nations’ IPCC assessments, have been awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, and in 2002 was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
The first part of Dr. Christy’s testimony concludes:
Climate change is a wide-ranging topic with many difficulties. Our basic knowledge about what the climate is doing (i.e. measurements) is plagued by uncertainties. In my testimony today I have given evidence that the bulk atmospheric temperature is measured well-enough to demonstrate that our understanding of how greenhouse gases affect the climate is significantly inadequate to explain the climate since 1979. In particular, the actual change of the fundamental metric of the greenhouse warming signature – the bulk atmospheric temperature where models indicate the most direct evidence for greenhouse warming should lie – is significantly misrepresented by the models. Though no dataset is perfect, the way in which surface datasets have been constructed leaves many unanswered questions, especially for the recent NOAA update which shows more warming than the others. Finally, regulations already enforced or being proposed, such as those from the Paris Agreement, will have virtually no impact on whatever the climate is going to do.
Dr. Christy attached to his testimony an extract of testimony he delivered previously to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation, Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, on December 8, 2015. That extract ends with the following summary:
The messages of the two points outlined in the extract above are: (1) the claims about increases in frequency and intensity of extreme events are generally not supported by actual observations and, (2) official information about climate science is largely controlled by agencies through (a) funding choices for research and (b) by the carefully selected (i.e. biased) authorship of reports such as the EPA Endangerment Finding and the National Climate Assessment.
