John R. Christy

John R. Christy is a meteorologist at the University of Alabama Huntsville and a climate skeptic; he is closely associated with Roy Spencer with whom he collaborated on the George C. Marshall Institute Roundtable discussion on climate change in April 2006.

Bio
John Christy has an evangelical background, he served four years as a bivocational mission-pastor in Vermillion, South Dakota.

From ExxonSecrets: "PhD University of Illinois, 1987, Atmospheric Science; M.S. University of Illinois, 1984, Atmospheric Science; M.Div. Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, 1978; B.A. California State University, Fresno, 1973, Mathematics"

Climate views
In a 2007 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, Christy wrote: "I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see."

"Christy was a contributing writer to "Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths," published by Competitive Enterprise Institute in 2002. He spoke at a June 1998 briefing for congressional staff and media, which was sponsored by the Cooler Heads Coalition."

The website of the late Dr. Stephen Schneider delivers a potent analysis of Dr. Christy's stances on the distinction between anthropogenic and natural climate change.

2003 AGU statement
It may seem perplexing that Christy was a co-drafter of the 2003 American Geophysical Union position statement on climate change, which concludes that "Human activities are increasingly altering Earth's climate, and... natural influences alone cannot explain the rapid increase in surface temperatures observed during the second half of the 20th century."

But Christy noted that this statement "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]."

Track record - satellite temperature data
"John Christy and Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama published a series of papers starting about 1990 that implied the troposphere was warming at a much slower rate than the surface temperature record and climate models indicated..."; but the discrepancy turned out to be an artifact of their having applied incorrect adjustments to their UAH satellite temperature record data. , . As Ray Pierrehumbert at RealClimate put it: "Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done "

Related SourceWatch articles

 * climate change skeptics
 * global warming
 * Kyoto Protocol
 * Roy Spencer
 * UAH satellite temperature record

External resources

 * Christy Crocks from Skeptical Science; Christy's claims countered

Profiles

 * Staff: John Christy, Alabama University.
 * Fact Sheet: John Christy, Exxon Secrets.org.

External articles

 * John Stossel, Opinion: "Kyoto's advocates are full of hot air," Manchester Union-Leader, July 9, 2006.