Dr. John Christy, the University of Alabama-Huntsville scientist and longtime denier who runs the NASA climate satellites with Roy Spencer, released a new paper last week with his other frequent collaborator, Richard T. McNider. Published in the obscure Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, Spencer and McNider have cooked up a new way to measure climate sensitivity. In the paper, they decide that climate models over exaggerate warming and that really, they were right when they said doubling CO2 wouldn’t cause much warming back in 1994.
This is just the latest of Christy’s shoddy science--nothing particularly interesting or new here. What’s much more interesting is that the Daily Mail actually did a decent job covering his latest denial! The headline, in typical screaming Mail fashion, is framed exactly the opposite of what you’d expect from the historically denier-friendly outlet: “Notorious climate skeptic under fire for new paper that 'manipulates actual temperature measurement' to show the effects of CO2 emissions have been overplayed.”
Here we have coverage of scientists who are literally manipulating the data to get a result supposedly confirming what they have said all along. Ironically, the Mail article isn’t a hit piece by David Rose. Remember how Rose was censured by the UK’s press watchdog, and forced to append the lengthy ruling before his story alleging that NOAA’s Tom Karl had improperly manipulated data to prove warming was real?
That biased reporting on Karl’s study, or course, turned out to be fake news. So now the Daily Mail chooses to offer real news, along similar lines, but going in the exact opposite direction. (Though with the same breathless, click-bait tenor.)
Despite its questionable handling of science in past “reporting,” the Mail deserves credit for this piece. It quotes heavily from John Abraham, who does not mince words about how Christy “published a paper in a third-rate journal, possibly because he couldn’t get his results into a more rigorously reviewed journal.” Abraham continues by pointing out that this paper stands in stark contrast with multiple other new studies that show “how unequivocally the earth is warming faster than the models predict.”
Ultimately, the public has a choice, Abraham says, concluding that “you can believe real temperature measurements made with real sensors, or you can believe manipulated temperature inferences made by a research team that has a track record for being wrong.’
Remember, while Christy claims this study validates his decades-old prediction, his work since then has been corrected so many times that it’s the first example in a peer-reviewed paper showing the poor quality of research done by deniers.
But to his credit, in managing to get the Daily Mail to drop denial for climate alarmism, Christy crossed the line from annoyingly incorrect to impressively wrong.
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