Alabama scientist pushes back against claim that 2016 was the ‘hottest year on record’

Alabama’s State Climatologist is pushing back against claims that 2016 was the “hottest year on record.”

According to a Washington Post report last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) claimed that 2016 temperatures were 0.07 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than 2015. Last year, they had also asserted that average heat levels had increased over 2014.

Dr. John Christy is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and has been Alabama’s State Climatologist since 2000. He says that the problem with reports of prior years is that the system used for measuring the planet’s temperature is provably unreliable.

While climatologists with NOAA continue to use surface-level measurements, he advocates for the scientific community to instead look to bulk atmosphere temperature. He says it’s a more dependable method of temperature measurement, and has produced a far different set of results from those who continue to promote global warming.

“2016 was the warmest year in these deep-layer datasets, edging out the second warmest year, 1998, by a tiny fraction of a degree, less than 0.1 Farenheight,” Christy told Yellowhammer News. “Both years were what are called strong El Nino years where the Pacific ocean warms and heats up the planet for several months. The temperature has already fallen back from its peak in February 2016 to the present by over one degree Farenheight.”

He continues to agree that the earth’s temperature is constantly adapting, but insists that most mainstream dialogue over climate change amounts to alarmism.

“The real world is not matching the anticipated changes from theoretical models,” Christy said. “There is much more research to do because these observations clearly demonstrate that the ‘science is not settled’ because they do not match the popular claims of how the climate will respond to the extra greenhouse gases we are adding to the air as a result of human progress.”

It’s not the first time Christy has found himself at odds with his colleagues over global warming. In 2016, he also debunked claims that the previous year was the hottest on record.