Here is a link to a YouTube story by John Christy. John R. Christy is a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He has served as Alabama’s State Climatologist since 2000 and is best known for developing, along with Roy Spencer, a global temperature dataset from satellite microwave measurements. For this work, Christy and Spencer were awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1991 and a Special Award from the American Meteorological Society in 1996. This was made a year ago. The first headline he discusses is “Helene was made ….stronger by warm water” caused by climate change. Every time a drop of rain falls, it is climate change.
The story can also be found by entering: John Christy: Climate Change is Not a Crisis | Tom Nelson Pod #260
I’d say he is worth watching if you want to see an actual, credentialed climate skeptic that can produce healthy scientific discussion. A lot of what he says about UHI and problems with temperature data is good science. I also agree with him on the benefits fossil fuels have had on the world. I explain that to my students. Also how important cheap energy is for poorer, developing nations in the here and now and how it leads to higher qualities of life. That is undeniable to me. I also grow tired of the ultra-fear. mongering and alarmism where every storm or bad thing that happens is linked to climate change or called a mega-flood or mega-drought when, climactically speaking, its often just a newer example of what has happened in the past as the record shows.
Yet I do think climate change is real. For me, CO2 is a GHG, it has increased tremendously to levels not seen in hundreds of thousands of years due to fossil fuels in a very short period of time, the global temperature is also going up, and there really are no natural forcing that can explain the warming we’ve seen.
But I also think climate change has become big business (as has medicine) and now it is a political talking point (instead of science) and truthfully, halting or stopping it is not realistic. No one I know is out there telling people to not have kids, to stop eating meat, biking to work and not taking hot showers. [Edited to add: also I don’t see a lot of people shying away from AI which uses up a lot of water and energy making some of these bigger companies basically say to hell with climate in favor of AI profit. Good luck with Google or Microsoft being carbon negative.] We need to adapt and if we are thinking long term, be happy we are preventing the world from entering what should be a new ice age, which as bad as global warming can be, I don’t think it can be nearly as bad as an ice sheet a mile thick over my home state.
