HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Alabama’s state climatologist, Dr. John Christy, is no stranger to drawing criticism from his peers for his stance on the prevalent theory of climate change. Now Christy and other “deniers” are being investigated by Democrats in Washington, but he says he is “past the point of being intimidated.”
A member of the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) faculty since 1987, Christy has recently come under increased scrutiny for his failure to fall in line with other climatologists. Arizona congressman Raul Grijalva reportedly sent a letter to UAH’s president requesting the funding sources of Dr. Christy’s research.
A similar letter was sent to other members of the climatology community who have testified before Congress that the science is far from settled when it comes to the pace and danger of climate change.
“[The letter is] not going to work as intimidation, which is what it’s designed to do,” Christy told AL.com. “But it does have a backfire aspect to it. It emboldens you when you’ve gotten under somebody’s skin because you know this is what the real world is doing.”
Christy maintains that he has accepted no funding from any organizations that lobby against global warming legislation.
No such letters were sent requesting the funding sources of scientists whose research relies on the “settled science” version of climate change.
While Christy does not deny that the Earth’s climate is changing, he vehemently rejects the assumptions at the core of the government’s growing list of environmental regulations implemented mostly by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) without any real congressional input.
In recent comments submitted to the EPA, Christy pointed out that “the (climate change) models do not yet have the ability to discern ‘why’ a climate variation may have occurred simply because they cannot even reproduce ‘what’ has occurred.”
“The recent investigation by the Democratic congressman of me and six of my colleagues is simply because we provided irrefutable evidence in Congressional testimony that the Administration has been wrong,” Dr. Christy said on Yellowhammer Radio with Cliff Sims earlier this month. “So, rather than attack our science, because it’s unassailable at that point, they attack us.”
Dr. Christy, who pioneered a way to determine global temperatures using information from satellites, maintains that the data indicates the infamous “hockey stick” charts used to craft global warming public policy is deeply flawed.
He found that the real, observed temperatures of the last several decades deviate sharply from what was predicted by other climatologists. Here is a graph Dr. Christy submitted to the EPA comparing global warming alarmist predictions to what actually happened:
“These models can’t even predict what happened in the past,” Christy said. “Doesn’t that ring alarm bells in your mind about trusting this as a policy tool?”
“This is simply a way for the Administration to publicly draw attention to us as scientists not aligned with their views, implying there must be a scurrilous reason for daring to think the way we do,” Christy told Environment & Energy Publishing.
Dr. Christy’s administration at UAH is standing behind the scientist, with the university President’s chief of staff saying in a statement, Christy “has always approached his work with the utmost of integrity, and the quality of his research is nothing short of exemplary.”
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— Elizabeth BeShears (@LizEBeesh) January 21, 2015
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