Our next entry from Canary in a Climate World Vol. 3 is the chapter by Dr. John Christy, the recently-retired Professor of Atmospheric Science and head of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. It was in that capacity that he and his longtime coauthor Dr. Roy Spencer published the first atmospheric temperature series based on a satellite monitoring technology, namely microwave emissions in the troposphere and stratosphere as captured by NASA satellites. For this work, which we reference elsewhere this week, they received multiple honors and, for little while, professional adulation. Until people noticed that the satellites weren’t showing the warming predicted by climate models. Then the academic and political atmosphere became decidedly frosty. Christy soldiered on, compiling data from two other sources: weather balloons and so-called “reanalysis data” which is based on outputs of short-term weather forecasting models. Both continue to confirm what his satellite data showed: too much warming has been predicted by models and the growing gap shows that the models are getting something fundamentally wrong. In this chapter he explains what the discrepancy means.

Christy, like Happer, Lindzen and others in this volume, insists correctly that science is not a thing, a collection of facts. It’s a method, a way of getting at the truth, both the facts and their meaning. And key to the method is testing theories, testing them against evidence not against their own predictions disguised as outputs by being run through computers to generate unreal-world data. Climate models, and hence their outputs of projected future data and of reconstructed present or past data, embed theories, or rather theory-driven guesses, about how the atmosphere will respond to rising CO2 levels.

They all predict warming, especially in the troposphere over the tropics, because it’s what the theory says will happen, indeed must. But you can also feed into climate models the actual observed changes over the past 40 years in greenhouse gases, solar energy, ozone and other climate influences, then compare the predicted warming response to the measured warming as shown by the different measurement systems. And as Christy has shown both to academics and policymakers, the predicted warming isn’t showing up. A little warming is happening, but nowhere near what models predict.

So the models are defective. Unless you’re the kind of person who reacts to a mismatch between models and data by declaring the data defective and going and getting new and better data. If, say, you’re Michael Mann. But we’re not and neither is Christy.

So he points out that the IPCC included a chart in the 5th Assessment Report admitting the models were wrong. The format of the chart made it hard to understand what it was showing, and for good measure they interred it in an online appendix without referring to it in the main text. But Christy had served as a reviewer and knew where that particular body was buried. In his chapter he shows the figure and explains that it shows that the only models capable of reproducing the past 40 years of slow tropospheric warming are the ones that assume CO2 has no effect. So you see why they hid the corpse of their theory.

Christy concludes with a call for more openly adversarial research groups, “Red Teams” as they are called in military and business settings, to put climate theories to stringent testing by those not committed to them instead of simply having them amplified by those who were convinced of their accuracy before they were tested in such a way as to promote the worst elements of alarm, the way so much current climate research does.

Next week: William Kininmonth, former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre goes back to basics.