"Relentlessly Refuted" Over Decades By Other Climatologists, John Christy The Face Of GOP "Science"
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But mainstream climate scientists who have analyzed the work of Christy and Spencer say the problem is more profound than a single mistake. "The history of the UAH tropospheric temperature data sets is a history of serious scientific error," said Benjamin Santer, a climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, referring to the University of Alabama in Huntsville. "Most of the serious errors in UAH temperature data have been detected by other research groups, not by UAH scientists." While the debate was raging over Christy's work in the scientific community, he was accumulating a following in the fossil fuel industry and the U.S. Congress. "Sensitive satellite measurements have shown no warming since the late 1970s," said then-ExxonMobil chief executive Lee Raymond in a speech on the eve of the 1997 Kyoto climate talks. "In fact, the earth is cooler today than it was 20 years ago."
In 2001, ExxonMobil's chief lobbyist successfully recommended that President George W. Bush's administration choose Christy to review the submissions of the U.S. team contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report, an assignment that helped burnish his scientific credentials. Christy became a frequent witness on Capitol Hill. He has testified before Congress some 20 times, typically at the invitation of Republican lawmakers looking to cast doubt on the science of human-caused climate change. When asked about warming, Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz frequently invokes the superiority of Christy's satellite data, which shows no such trend.
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Christy's argument has shifted from the early days of his work, when he challenged the notion that global warming was taking place. Since at least 2007, he has acknowledged that the Earth is warming, but not as quickly as the climate models predict. A team from NASA, the University of California, Berkeley, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently published a study showing that global sea-surface temperatures were well in line with climate models. But Christy, Spencer and others who rely on their work often display a chart that plots their satellite readings against those of the climate models that show no such agreement. It has become iconic among those who challenge climate science. Although the chart itself has not been published, it is based on a 2007, peer-reviewed paper, of which Christy was a co-author. That paper, too, became a lightning rod for criticism. Other researchers said that if Christy had included the full range of uncertainty in both his own data and in the climate models, the projections and observations would have been shown to overlap. And in a paper published in 2008, a team of scientists from 12 institutions found that Christy and his colleagues did not account for the effect on their temperature readings of natural non-climate factors like El Niños and La Niñas.
That team was led by Santer, who had won a MacArthur "genius" award for his work identifying the man-made causes of global warming, and who had become an especially harsh critic. Santer said he believes that Christy is more interested in proving his satellite data is correct than getting to the bottom of what is happening with the climate. Most of the scientists I've met in my career have genuine interest in advancing scientific understanding," Santer said in an email. "In my opinion, Prof. John Christy does not."
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30102020/john-christy-alabama-climate-contrarian