Thomas Fuller
Environmental Policy Examiner
7/1/2010
John Christy is an atmospheric scientist and Professor of same at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and winner of achievement awards from NASA and the American Meteorological Society. He was a lead author of the IPCC’s 2001 Assessment Report, but in 2007 was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying, “I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see.”
The awards he received were for his work in helping develop a temperature dataset based on satellite measurements, and one of the major datasets used in climate science is just known as UAH. He is commonly perceived as a skeptic, but as has been the case with every interview I’ve done in this sector, the truth is far more nuanced. Professor Christy was kind enough to respond to my request for an interview very quickly, so without further ado…
Examiner: You are commonly labeled as a ‘skeptical’ scientist who does not agree with the IPCC consensus regarding human contributions to climate change. How accurate is that, and how would you describe your own beliefs regarding this?
J.C. I am mainly skeptical about those who claim to be so confident in understanding the climate system that they know what it is going to do in the next 100 years. This is my main complaint – overconfidence. We of all professions should be the most humble because there is so much about the climate system that we simply do not know. See my testimony given to the Inter Academy Council in June concerning these ideas – I think you will appreciate it.
(In his June testimony to the Inter Academy Council, Christy testifed that he felt the IPCC’s overconfidence in climate models was not justified. He also said: “The first objection I raised regarding the Third Assessment was that the fabled Hockey Stick was oversold as an indicator of past climate change. This was well before the critical work of the Wegman Report, National Academy of Sciences, McIntyre’s papers and the East Anglia emails. Indeed, I urge you in the strongest terms to engage Stephen McIntyre in your deliberations at a high level as he has accurately documented specific failures in the IPCC process, some of which I can attest to, as I was there.”)
The interview continues at the Examiner.
