It’s not pretty, even if your credentials are impeccable:
John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, says he remembers the morning he spotted a well-known colleague at a gathering of climate experts.
“I walked over and held out my hand to greet him,” Dr. Christy recalled. “He looked me in the eye, and he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Come on, shake hands with me.’ And he said, ‘No.’ ”
It’s fortunate for Dr. Christy that burning at the stake has gone out of style.
And Christy isn’t even technically a climate change denier. He might more rightly be called a climate change minimizer:
Dr. Christy is an outlier on what the vast majority of his colleagues consider to be a matter of consensus: that global warming is both settled science and a dire threat. He regards it as neither. Not that the earth is not heating up. It is, he says, and carbon dioxide spewed from power plants, automobiles and other sources is at least partly responsible.
But in speeches, congressional testimony and peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, he argues that predictions of future warming have been greatly overstated and that humans have weathered warmer stretches without perishing.
One can only imagine how many “deniers” have been socially ostracized, not offered jobs, discouraged from continuing in the profession, and a host of other pressures designed to purge the field of anyone who might dissent in any way. After that’s done, the fact that a huge percentage of scientists have reached “consensus” is touted as all the more reason to be certain that “the science is settled.”
I found this passage in the article to be especially interesting:
Dr. Christy was pointing to a chart comparing seven computer projections of global atmospheric temperatures based on measurements taken by satellites and weather balloons. The projections traced a sharp upward slope; the actual measurements, however, ticked up only slightly.
Such charts — there are others, sometimes less dramatic but more or less accepted by the large majority of climate scientists — are the essence of the divide between that group on one side and Dr. Christy and a handful of other respected scientists on the other.
“Almost anyone would say the temperature rise seen over the last 35 years is less than the latest round of models suggests should have happened,” said Carl Mears, the senior research scientist at Remote Sensing Systems, a California firm that analyzes satellite climate readings.
“Where the disagreement comes is that Dr. Christy says the climate models are worthless and that there must be something wrong with the basic model, whereas there are actually a lot of other possibilities,” Dr. Mears said. Among them, he said, are natural variations in the climate and rising trade winds that have helped funnel atmospheric heat into the ocean.
No doubt there are many possibilities, and we don’t know which is correct—that’s why the science is not settled. And one of those possibilities is exactly what Dr. Christy asserts (an explanation that seems quite reasonable to me), which is that the models being used are grossly inadequate.