25 Years as Skeptical Scientists and They're Still Right !

It is 25 years since two scientists announced that their satellite data showed the world was not warming as fast as had been thought.



Professor John  Christy

Professor John Christy, Director of the Earth System Science Center from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and Roy Spencer, climatologist and principal research scientist at the
university, discuss their careers with a reporter from the Atlanta
Local Newspaper (AL.com) as sceptics of the theory that man is heating the world catastrophically:

Professor Roy Spencer

Spencer:  It wasn’t too long after [John] came here that we were at a meeting… We were discussing and asking, ''Don’t we have something better than the thermometer data to monitor global temperatures?'' [UAH scientist] Dick McNider said, ‘What about the microwave sounders we have on the weather satellites?...”  And that's how we started to look into the basis and reality of global warming hysteria.

AL.com: How do you respond to the perception that 97 percent of scientists agree on climate change? [The Wall Street Journal in 2013 reported on the ''myth'' of the 97 per cent.

Christy: The impression people make with that statement is that 97 percent of scientists agree with my view of climate change, which typically is one of catastrophic change. So if a Senate hearing or the president or vice president says 97 percent of the scientists agree with me, that’s not true. The American Meteorological Society did their survey and they specifically asked the question, Is man the dominate controller of climate over the last 50 years? Only 52 per cent said ''yes''. That is not a consensus at all in science.

Then when you look at the core of that question, the core is do you believe that man has some influence on the climate. I don’t know anyone who would say no to that… Roy and I have both made the statement that we are in the 97 percent because we believe in some (man-made) effect…
  Spencer: Whoever came up with that, it was very powerful.. It was very misleading, but it was a good idea… Adding CO2 to the atmosphere probably adds some warming. The science on that is pretty solid. But then the devil’s in the details. How much warming does it actually cause?  The extra 100 ppm increase in the last 15 years looks like it actually hasn't had much of an effect except make our planet greener (according to satellite pictures) and with higher crop yields and taller trees.

AL.com: When you hear about the catastrophic effects of climate change, data from reputable organizations such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or NASA is frequently cited. How do you respond to that?

Christy: NASA, NOAA, EPA, DOE, those are agencies. Agency leaders are appointed by the government, by the current administration. They do not represent objective independent scientific organizations. They can’t. They are appointed by the head. They try. People who come out with different views in their organizations are found to be squashed. There is an agenda in those agencies.. There are skeptics in NASA and NOAA, a good number. But they are quiet. They know in this administration, they don’t speak out.

Spencer: I know that they’re not unbiased. Most of them probably really do believe we’re destroying the earth. When I talk to scientists who should be objective over a beer at the end of the day, I will argue with them and their final position will always be, ‘Yeah, but we need to get away from fossil fuels anyway.’

Where did that come from? Are you an expert in alternative energy sources and what they cost? How many poor people are you going to hurt? How many more people are you going to make poor through energy poverty because they are paying five to 10 times as much for their energy?…

Christy: I am for any energy source that is affordable and doesn’t destroy the environment. If carbon dioxide was a poisonous gas, I’d be against it.... The world used to have five times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food. CO2 is not the problem…
There is absolutely no question that carbon energy provides with longer and better lives. There is no question about that… And for the media and the IPCC to suppress this.....to me, is immoral.

AL.com: Why is your research using satellite data a more effective way of measuring climate change than surface temperature? ... Christy: ...Where is the biggest response to greenhouse gases? It’s in the atmosphere, not on the surface. So if you want to measure the response and say that’s the greenhouse gas response, you would look in the atmosphere. That’s precisely where satellites measure it.
 
UPDATE :
Now a “pause” in the Arctic melt, too:

After shrinking 35 per cent over several decades, the low point reached in Arctic ice cover each year appears to have stabilised. This is despite a record low maximum ice extent this winter…

But the “pause” in summer ice melt extent has been widely ­conceded. A paper published in ­Nature by Neil Swart (photo left) from Environment Canada said  ”from 2007-13 there was a near-zero trend in observed Arctic September sea-ice extent, in large part due to a strong uptick of the icepack in 2013 which has continued into 2014”. Climate scientists ­believe the long-term downward trend in Arctic sea ice has been broken, and 2015 looks much the same. Another DUD prediction from Al Gore.

The Swart et al (2015) paper said “cherry-picking” such short periods could be “misleading about longer-term changes, when such trends show either rapid or slow ice loss”. It says claims a pause in Arctic ice loss disproved climate change were not true.

Ed Wawkins, co-author of the Swart paper and a researcher at Britain’s University of Reading, said it was “quite conceivable that the current period of near-zero sea-ice trend could extend for a decade or more, solely due to weather-induced natural varia­bil­­ity hiding the long-term human caused decline”. But David Whitehouse from the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation said similar arguments had initially been used to reject the surface temp­erature hiatus.

 The Way I See It......Australian warmists have had an easy time pushing the Greens idealogy; renewable energy. They are also experts in cherry-picking climate facts and yet the mainstream media have been irresponsible in not pointing these out. Here are three very basic facts that they always fail to mention in defending renewable energy which they are so sure is meant to “save” us from global warming:

1. Our renewable energy target will at the very most, according to an IPCC alarmist, reduce the world's temperature by 0.0038 degrees by 2100, presuming the IPCC hasn’t actually exaggerated CO2 sensitivity.
2. Green power actually costs a fortune. Without change, the renewable energy target (RET) will cost Australian taxpayers another $22 billion in years,  making electricity too expensive for the poor and some businesses. Utterly ridiculous !
3. Again, their lips are sealed in mentioning: The world’s atmosphere has not actually warmed for some 17 + years.   Hypocrites clinging to their Communist-Climate mantra.