That’s where vast PV would come in. And it would green deserts just by being there.
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There is work to place PV panels over the aqueducts in the California central valley. That is space that doesn’t take away from agricultural land while providing electricity and reducing evaporative loss of water from the canals.
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I want them over every parking lot I use, especially in the summer. Michigan is not all that sunny, but it’s sunny enough to turn my car into an oven. Much rather turn that heat into useful electricity.
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Exactly, there are vast, untapped opportunities for clean, free, redundant power - we need post scarcity power, which is why Israel forbids PV in West Bank Palestine - but that requires investment that is bread on the waters, for the common good; capitalism laughs derisively at that. Apparently there is some doubt about the extractability of the vast reserves of the Green River Formation. As in nobody is doing it. Because they can’t.
‘the estimates of recoverable oil has been questioned, back in 2013, by geophysicist Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, who argued that the technology for recovering oil from the Green River oil shale deposit had not been developed and had not been profitably implemented at any significant scale’ wiki
Here’s hoping! Capitalism would then have to go flat out sustainable. About now! To head off peak oil in 15 years. Although, perversely, the hiking price then will drive opening up Green River. : ( Sigh. Still, that will drive sustainable outside America.
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For what it’s worth, I, too, am a physicist with a job, so I think that makes me a working physicist too! 
Let me tell you a story about a physicist who made exactly the same arguments as your “working physicist.”
The Berkeley Earth Story
Once upon a time (2010), there was a physicist named Richard Muller from UC Berkeley. He was skeptical of climate science for the exact reasons you mentioned - Urban Heat Island effects, poor station quality, data homogenization, data selection bias.
Muller confidently declared: “We are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious… We are an independent, non-political, non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we find.”
This attracted funding from the Koch Foundation - yes, those Koch Brothers who have spent over $88 million funding climate change denial since 1997.
The Analysis
Berkeley Earth analyzed over 36,000 weather stations (2-8 times more than other groups, see Berkeley Earth FAQ), specifically to address skeptic concerns.
In Muller’s own words from his 2012 NYT op-ed “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic”:
We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.
The Plot Twist
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
Berkeley Earth found that the urban heat island effect is locally large and real, but does not contribute significantly to the average land temperature rise, as the planet’s urban regions amount to less than 1% of the land area. On their FAQ today, they write: “The Urban Heat Island effect is real. Berkeley’s analysis focused on the question of whether this effect biases the global land average. Our UHI paper analyzing this indicates that the urban heat island effect on our global estimate of land temperatures is indistinguishable from zero.”
When they ran the analysis using only rural stations - same result. Only poor quality stations - same result. Only good quality stations - same result.
Their conclusion: warming of 0.91±0.05 °C over 50 years, and their results mirror those obtained from earlier studies carried out by NOAA, the Hadley Centre, NASA GISS, and CRU.
The Reaction
Michael Mann: “…they get the same result that everyone else has gotten,” and “that said, I think it’s at least useful to see that even a critic like Muller, when he takes an honest look, finds that climate science is robust.”
The Moral
A prominent climate skeptic, funded by fossil fuel money, set out to expose the fraud. He found there wasn’t one. Instead, he confirmed that previous studies were done correctly and humans are causing the warming. Why, on earth, is any physicist making the same disproven claims 10+ years later is beyond me. Not to mention, you can measure temperature anomalies at places far from any urban areas and find the same warming. The first work done by Muller et. al. was in the early 2010s and the warming has only continued since then!
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The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
The original article:
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What explains Bill’s vastly outdated attempt at denial, insulting his intelligence as well as ours, and then when that fails utterly, clinging on to the next bit of flotsam that bobs up, that global warming is a good? And where does he go when that garbage doesn’t float him? It’s such a shame on shame.
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I am working on a statement. In the meantime take a look at this CV from Wiki for John Christy.
Ask yourself why none of his work is featured by BioLogos as opposed to that of Katharine Hayhoe. They both have Ph. D. Degrees from my alma mater. But, Christy has a Master’s degree in Theology and is appointed in a science department. Hayhoe is in a Department of Politics.
I suspect that BioLogos is involved in “de-platforming”. For an organization founded to being together ideas about Young Earth and Old Earth creation is it interesting that they are only willing to address one side of the climate discussion.
John Christy
John Raymond Christy is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville(UAH) whose chief interests are satellite remote sensing of global climate and global climate change. He is best known, jointly with Roy Spencer, for the first successful development of a satellite temperature record, and for his rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change.[1]
Early life and education
A native of Fresno, California, Christy became interested in the weather when he was a child. He became curious why the weather in the San Joaquin Valley was so different from that of the Sierra Mountains. He has recalled that “I built my first climate datasets when I was 12, using a mechanical pencil, graph paper, and long-division (no calculators back then.) I’ve been a climate nerd ever since.”[2] He received a BA in mathematics from California State University, Fresno in 1973, and an MS and PhD in atmospheric sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1984 and 1987.[1] His doctoral thesis was titled, An investigation of the general circulation associated with extreme anomalies in hemispheric mean atmospheric mass.[3]
Prior to his scientific career, Christy taught physics and chemistry as a missionary teacher in Nyeri, Kenya from 1973 to 1975. After earning a Master of Divinity degree from Golden Gate Baptist Seminary in 1978 he served four years as a bivocational mission-pastor in Vermillion, South Dakota, where he also taught college math.[1]
Career
He is the distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).[1] He was appointed Alabama’s state climatologist in 2000. For his development of a global temperature data set from satellites, he was awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and the American Meteorological Society’s “Special Award.”[1] In 2002, Christy was elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.[4]
Satellite temperature record
Main article: UAH satellite temperature dataset
Since 1989 Christy, along with Roy Spencer, has maintained an atmospheric temperature record derived from satellite microwave sounding unit measurements (see: satellite temperature record). This was once quite controversial: From the beginning of the satellite record in late 1978 into 1998 it showed a net global cooling trend, although ground measurements and instruments carried aloft by balloons showed warming in many areas. Part of the cooling trend seen by the satellites can be attributed to several years of cooler than normal temperatures and cooling caused by the eruption of the Mount Pinatubo volcano. Part of the discrepancy between the surface and atmospheric trends was resolved over a period of several years as Christy, Spencer and others identified several factors, including orbital drift and decay, that caused a net cooling bias in the data collected by the satellite instruments.[5][6] Since the data correction of August 1998 (and the major La Niña Pacific Ocean warming event of the same year), data collected by satellite instruments have shown an average global warming trend in the atmosphere. From November 1978 through March 2011, Earth’s atmosphere has warmed at an average rate of about 0.14 C per decade, according to the UAH satellite record.[citation needed]
Christy was a lead author of a section of the 2001 report by the IPCC[7] and the U.S. CCSP report Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere – Understanding and Reconciling Differences.[5] Christy also signed the 2003 American Geophysical Union statement on climate change.[8]
Christy has also performed detailed reconstruction of surface temperature for Central California. He found that recorded temperature changes there were consistent with an altered surface environment caused by increased irrigation for agriculture, which changed “a high-albedo desert into a darker, moister, vegetated plain.”[9]
Views
A devout Baptist, Christy believes that “the use of carbon-based energy” is “needed to lengthen and enhance the quality of human life”, which is the “moral imperative.” He has argued that efforts to limit greenhouse pollution are “trying to control how others live”.[10][11]
In a 2003 interview with National Public Radio about the 2003 American Geophysical Union (AGU) statement, he said he is “a strong critic of scientists who make catastrophic predictions of huge increases in global temperatures and tremendous rises in sea levels”. He added, though, that “it is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into irrigated farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the air, and putting extra greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate has not changed in some way.”[8]
In a 2009 interview with Fortune magazine about signing the 2003 American Geophysical Union (AGU) statement, he said: “As far as the AGU, I thought that was a fine statement because it did not put forth a magnitude of the warming. We just said that human effects have a warming influence, and that’s certainly true. There was nothing about disaster or catastrophe. In fact, I was very upset about the latest AGU statement [in 2007]. It was about alarmist as you can get.”[12]
In a 2007 editorial in The Wall Street Journal, he wrote: “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.”[13]
In a 2009 written testimony to the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, he wrote: “From my analysis, the actions being considered to ‘stop global warming’ will have an imperceptible impact on whatever the climate will do, while making energy more expensive, and thus have a negative impact on the economy as a whole. We have found that climate models and popular surface temperature data sets overstate the changes in the real atmosphere and that actual changes are not alarming.”[14]
In 2025, Christy co-authored “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate”, which is a report written for the U.S. Energy Secretary Christopher Wright.[19]
No.
His data, evidence and arguments might be convincing.
His CV is not.
Added: Except possibly for this part:
…which is convincing me that his opinions aren’t worth listening to.
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BioLogos is about finding agreement between Christianity and consensus science. Climate change is the overwhelming consensus. You can find iconoclasts in every scientific field. Their existence is not an indication that the underlying science is wrong.
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Why on earth would BioLogos be obligated to address “climate deniers”. The group was founded to address “evolution deniers”.
Your objections are out of scope.
To be fair, BioLogos has expanded past evolution and creationism.
In 2019, we expanded our topics to address many areas at the intersection of Christ-centered faith and rigorous science, including creation care and medicine & bioethics. Also that year, we launched our podcast Language of God, engaging our topics with interviews, stories, and on-site experiences. During the COVID-19 pandemic, BioLogos provided the best-available public health information in a fully Christian framework, and hundreds of faith leaders signed our Christian Statement on Science for Pandemic Times. In 2021, we released our Integrate curriculum for high school students, now used in Christian schools and homeschools across the country.
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Has he been blocked? Otherwise, he is free to post in this forum as you are doing. As far as featured Biologos articles are concerned, Ken Ham does not have any either.
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Why would I ask myself this? I haven’t been part of the decision making process at all.
What actual primary information do you have about the process that led to Katherine Hayhoe’s association with BL?
What primary information do you have about Christy’s not being associated with BL? Assuming that he isn’t. I haven’t checked on that myself?
Do you have more to add to this than mere speculation? We don’t need more of that.
This is nothing.
Suspicions lead to conspiracies.
If you don’t have any real information, then suspicion is worthless.
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