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Thursday, February 20, 2014

John Christy climate lies rebutted by John Abraham

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, John Christy wrote an article that was extremely misleading and disingenuous, with a chart purporting to support his contention that the earth has not warmed and therefore we need not try to do anything to prevent climate change impacts.

Readers of this blog will already know that John Christy has a very long-term (decades long) habit of publishing incorrect data and misleading articles (this is the polite way to state that he just plain lies).

John Abraham has written this rebuttal:

In today's WSJ, a point was made the some scientists disagree with the prevailing view that humans are causing significant climate change which will cause large costs to society.  The article was co-written by Dr. John Christy who has done work on climate change for years.  Many statements are misleading at best.  For instance, readers may not be aware that John Christy has  a reputation for making significant errors in his own research. These errors led him to erroneously claim that the atmosphere was cooling when, in fact, it was warming.  He has long complained about climate computer models being wrong but his own measurements have had significant errors. 
 
What happened when he corrected his mistakes approximately a decade ago?  His results fell into agreement with the majority of scientists.  That's right, John Christy's own data shows that the Earth is warming.
 
In the article he showed a plot of mid tropospheric temperatures which appeared flat.  He didn't tell the readers this is because the upper part of the atmosphere will cool as the lower part warms.  This leads to a balance in the middle.  So, his plot is irrelevant to whether humans are causing climate change.
 
Climate change is an important issue and we need accurate information.  Readers of this article will be misinformed; they deserve better.

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Readers, there is also a nice chart that depicts the size of Christy's errors, over time, with regard to temperature anomalies (spoiler alert -- he was only off by about 0.2 C per decade):


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