Earlier this week, the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee held a hearing entitled “Update on the Latest Climate Change Science and Adaptation Measures.” Testimony by Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama Huntsville is too valuable not to share with the millions (okay, hundreds) of folks who visit this site.
Christy is a data maven. He spends “tedious” weeks and months examining surface observations as well as weather balloon and satellite measurements to build “datasets from scratch to advance our understanding of what the climate is doing and why.” He uses the datasets “to test hypotheses of climate variability and change.” Yes, it’s called the scientific method, but much of what passes for climate science today is, in Christy’s words, ”opinion, arguments from authority, dramatic press releases, and fuzzy notions of consensus generated by a preselected group.”
Increasingly, we hear experts blame global warming for bad weather. Most acknowledge that no single weather event can be attributed to global climate change. However, they contend, the pattern of recent events – the sheer number and severity of heat waves, wild fires, droughts, freak storms — is exactly what climate scientists have predicted and must be due to mankind’s fuelish ways. Such assertions, Christy shows, are not based on real data.
One way to measure trends in extreme weather is to compare the number of state record high and low temperatures by decade. Many more state high temperature records were set in the 1930s than in recent decades. Even more surprising, “since 1960, there have been more all-time cold records set than hot records in each decade.”
