You need him.

You can’t just go on and on calling everyone who disagrees with you a nut, especially scientists, and especially climatologists with the stature of John Christy. At some point you are going to have to come to terms with the facts that the AGW hypothesis is weak, the science of climatology is in its infancy, and there is no ‘consensus’. If you don’t, you are going to lose your audience and that is the death knell for a propaganda campaign.

Honesty and principle really do matter, in politics, in everyday life, and in science. Deal with it.

Yes I am dissing the WSJ ed page (duh) and Christy. Christy made so many mistakes in his misguided effort to prove the satellite temperature data did not conform with the ground data that it is hard to take him seriously.

But you should ignore any Denier/Delayer who just keeps trying to confuse the public by ignoring the well-known distinction between weather and climate: “It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.”

This is tiresome. We can’t project accurately at all what the temperature will be in January 15 at 1 pm (weather) but we can project with very high accuracy what the average temperature for the month of January will be (climate).

It is Al Gore who does not deserve to be linked to Christy.

I’m glad you liked my book. If you had read it a bit closer, you would know that such facilities need to be built over 50 years worldwide. They get paid for the way we pay for all power plants — somebody thinks they can make money selling electricity. Obviously, if there is no price for carbon dioxide, you won’t see such levels of construction for zero-carbon power sources.

Are you calling the Wall Street Journal “the funnies” or are you dissing Dr. Christy?

I mentioned the Christy story the other day , but you didn’t reply. I was thinking that maybe it was because it might be a bit tricky for you to call Dr. Christy a nut or a “DDDenier” since he is one of the main authors of the IPCC report and one of the few real scientists involved in that boondoggle. But the fact is he IS a denier of sorts, isn’t he? What do you make of that?

Dr. Christy is a world-renowned climatologist, unlike you, and he doesn’t believe the hype. That is very significant.

From the article Ivan kindly linked -

—–”I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming — around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)

It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.

Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, “Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with ‘At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .’”

I haven’t seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.

Others of us scratch our heads and try to understand the real causes behind what we see. We discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we’ve seen the climate do has happened before.”—–

I have talked about this previously and feel at least somewhat vindicated to hear Dr. Christy saying some very similar things. You never took me seriously before, because like you I’m not a climatologist, but what do you think now that a real climatologist, one of the principal IPCC scientists and Nobel winner, has stated publicly that the AGW hypothesis is greatly overrated?

You have also tried to link global warming to wildfires (and even to the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis!) but what does Christy say?

—–”For instance, hasn’t global warming led to the five-year drought and fires in the U.S. Southwest?

Not necessarily.

There has been a drought, but it would be a stretch to link this drought to carbon dioxide. If you look at the 1,000-year climate record for the western U.S. you will see not five-year but 50-year-long droughts. The 12th and 13th centuries were particularly dry. The inconvenient truth is that the last century has been fairly benign in the American West. A return to the region’s long-term “normal” climate would present huge challenges for urban planners.”—–

Will you now persist in saying that the so-called ‘reality of global warming’ is worse than the predictions of the IPCC? Or will hearing from a real climatologist make you stop and think?

Dr. Christy is ashamed to be linked with Al Gore, it seems, and I don’t blame him. Will you now continue the same sky-is-falling warm mongering?

Also, two more quick questions – In your swell book you you assert that we need to build 1,000,000 wind turbines and 700 new nuclear plants over the next 10 years to combat manmade global warming. Is that just in the U.S. or worldwide? And how the Hell would we pay for them?

How could you miss John Christy’s Nobel Moment into today’s WSJ? After last week’s wildfires & more Santa Anas forecast for this weekend, we desperately need some comic relief here in SoCal, not more denial & delay.